TV fictions and AWL reality (Sean Matgamna): “AWL’s adverse reputation in the ostensible left arises from the fact that we try to be consistent democrats and socialists on questions such as Israel-Palestine; from the politically decomposed state the left is in; from the prevalent unreason and displaced emotion on the left on such questions; and from the incomprehension and malice of people who are often at the end of their tether in grasping what is happening in the world. Not we, but those who, to put it at its weakest, have sympathised and sided with religio-political reaction, are the people who have lost the plot.”

A response to critics (Ashok Kumar): “two questions – racism and settler colonialism – form the very heart of the matter in discussion. […] Today humanity finds itself at a crossroads. New anti-racist politic, or more settler colonialism?”

Changing the culture of the left (Sean Matgamna): “Kumar and his co-thinkers do not “back” the real Palestinian people. They “back” “the Palestinians” as an “anti-imperialist”, Arab-nationalist or Islamist cipher, symbol, embodiment, representation. Because he does that and we don’t, for him we have a “racist” indifference or hostility to the Palestinians and see the Hebrew nation as superior and its rights as more important. […] The governing idea here is that being a Palestinian Arab is inherently, genetically, more legitimate than being an Israeli Jew — that the land is inalienably, hereditarily, their land. The delegitimation of the Israeli Jews and their state, the idea that they are genetically an illegitimate people, is central. […] Leftists naturally side with the defeated and champion the rights of the weak and the oppressed. Images of Palestinian refugee camps properly create a bias of sympathy and indignation on their behalf. Yet it is one of the great rules of Marxist socialism and Marxist internationalism that you do not necessarily accept the political program of oppressed people even when you are siding with them.  […] In relation to a people faced with an old-style colonial war of conquest, Marxists would not say: first tell us if you are fit to avoid colonial conquest, then we may oppose your invaders. AWL did not do that when Russia invaded Afghanistan in 1979. We opposed the Russian invaders. But we did not mimic the politics of those fighting the Russians, or pretend that they were not thoroughgoing all-round reactionaries. The measure of the irrationality of the kitsch left is that it has gone in for that mimicry and pretence with the forces of Islamic clerical fascism. Thus, that “left” backs and mimics the politics of Hamas, and rejects the Palestinian Authority policy of two states. That is a political choice. An astonishing choice. The short answer to your question — if AWL are not racists, why is it that so many people on the left denounce us as racists? — is that you can’t answer that question until you examine the nature of that “left”. There is, Mr Kumar, an alternative to your thinking here — that if so many call us racists, then we must be racists. Think things through for yourself. That is what AWL tries to do, and we check ourselves against what critics — to whom we give space in our press — throw against us. The method of going with the crowd, the consensus, the mob, is pitiable and likely to clog your political brain. […] The hard fact, Mr Kumar, is that AWL has been the most consistently anti-imperialist and anti-racist organisation on the left. We have rejected and do reject all species of superior-inferior differentiation as between peoples and nations. […] A characteristic of the pseudo-left in its political dotage is a drive to stereotype language, to lay down in advance the terms and language of description, definition, and discussion. In that culture, discussion of permissible and “impermissible” language has a built-in tendency to displace and block off substantive discussion of politics. Anyone can play. Anyone who knows not much, or anything, of the substance, can scrutinise the language, and doesn’t have to find out about the substance. People who like to sound off can sound off. The self-righteous nincompoop can be a self-righteous nincompoop. This is a characteristic of a would-be left that is too scared of the world around it, and of itself, to think. It is a major trait — both consequence and ongoing cause — in the decadence of the ostensible left. Obviously there are words and terms that are offensive and should not be used, ever — the “n-word”, for a prime example. But a political world in which ideas are ruled out or in depending on how decorous the language is used to express them? That is one in which discussion of language can and frequently does displace discussion of things and ideas. That is a decadent political culture. Take the term “backward”. That can be right or wrong in a given place, but it compares stages of development, and does not necessarily imply any idea that the “backwardness” is rooted in innate characteristics. People who use the term may want to imply that, but not all who use it think that. Take the writer. I came to this country from the west of Ireland in the mid-1950s, at the age of 12. I believed that a priest muttering in Latin could and did change little lozenges of bread into “the body and blood” of Jesus Christ. The bread was not a mere symbol, but had become the real, literal “body and blood”, though by every test of sense and everyday reason it remained just a bit of bread. As an altar boy, a “server” of the priest working his miracle, I believed I had, four, six, seven, or occasionally ten times a week for three years, helped priests work that transformation. Was I “backward”? Surely I was. My father grew up believing that a priest, if you made him angry, “could put a pig’s head on you” — turn your living human head into the living head of a pig. By the time I knew him he mocked such ideas as “phisorogues”, senseless superstitions, but he had believed them. Was he backward then? In relation to science, reason, culture? I wouldn’t have liked to be called “backward” then. Far worse, though, that someone who called me backward would have been someone who told me that my beliefs were fine, just as good as the beliefs of science.”

National rights and the decolonial gaze (Ashok Kumar): “Settlized bodies negotiate betwixt and between the interstitial, spatial, temporally and indeed tempurally subjectivated affects bequeathed by colonial narrata. Mad Hatter-like looking glasses distort and distend these narrata through the colonial gaze. As one proverb in my own ancestral homeland teaches us: “the poor man looks at his reflection in the water; the average man looks at his reflection in the glass; the wise man looks at his reflection in the eyes of his sons”. Islam and its view of desires, the body – the subject, and her sons – have long held sway in the land I call home. Long into humanity’s future, the historian of racialized (and conversely, racializing) bodies will wonder if his, her or, indeed, their contemplation of the phenomenology of systemic, institutional and epistemic racisms took proper account of this racism’s manifold violences. […] Of course, it is racist to demonise the colonised as backward and violent. Of course, it is racist to suggest that settlers have a national right that can usurp the rights of those they replace. Sean’s narrative sets one set of bodies at the expense of smothering the decolonial gaze.”

Should we reverse history? (Sean Matgamna): “Now if I were writing a satire on what Kumar and people like him say of Israel-Palestine, reducto ad absurdum stuff, I would write something like what he writes here, have him propose that these and other such countries be turned over to the descendants of the displaced peoples. What is he saying, or proposing? For Canada and “its so-called peoples”? He wants to drive out the descendants of British and French colonists? If he doesn’t, what is he on about? And Australia, Chile, New Zealand? “Arming the Aboriginal peoples, of these countries is in this sense, nothing but a prerequisite for an equality of national freedoms.” What in the name of sense is he talking about? We should want an uprising of the Aboriginals of Australia? We want the Amerindians to assert themselves in arms? In Chile? In New Zealand we want the Māori people to rise up? In the colonial settler state of Argentina, which he neglects to mention, we want the surviving two percent or so of the original population to rise in arms? To do what? Drive out the rest? I repeat what on earth is the man talking about? Does he want a great movement across the world to reverse the ethnic transfers of the last five hundred years? Socialists are concerned with vengeance for the displaced, massacred, vastly-depleted peoples of history? The displacements and massacres of the earlier peoples in these countries is of course a terrible story. It happens that I am rereading Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, an account of the Nazi-like massacres of the Amerindians. These stories arouse anger, indignation, pity, regret. But history — terrible, savage, merciless — is what this is. We can only alleviate some of the consequences of what has been and what was done. In the present, socialists advocate working-class unity across the divides that still exist, for the creation of a socialist society on the basis of what history has so far created. I said that the charge of racism was frequently employed as a form of ideological terrorism to forbid thought and proper discussion of difficult questions. He responds that I make “a ‘colour-blind’ effort to see all peoples on an equal footing; [he] confuses cause for effect, in suggesting that even our words in rebellion against colonialism are to be painted in the language of terrorism and its policing. Or perhaps counter-insurgency?” Again, what is he talking about? Where colonialism exists Marxists support uprisings of the colonised against the imperial power. But colonialism is more or less a historical category. What do we advocate after it has ceased to exist? Marxists advocate a workers’ revolution against capitalism — the unity of all workers against capitalism, native and foreign. We advocate “black and white unite”.”