Wicklow Mountain Language

Now hear this. You are mountain people. You hear me? Your language is dead. It is forbidden. You may only speak the language of the capital.  Can you hear me? I am speaking to you in our own language. Your language is dead. It is forbidden. It is not permitted to speak your mountain language in this place. It is outlawed. You may only speak the language of the capital. You will be badly punished if you attempt to speak your mountain language in this place. This is a military decree. It is the law. Your language is forbidden. It is dead. No one is allowed to speak your language. Your husbands, your sons, your fathers, these men you have been waiting to see, are shithouses. They are enemies of the state. They are shit houses. (Harold Pinter; Mountain Language)

The other day I received an email from the Socialist Party of Great Britain inviting me to take part in a debate that the north east branch of the SPGB were having about fielding a candidate in the 2015 General Election. As someone who is supporter of the SPGB and all companion parties in the World Socialist Movement (http://www.worldsocialism.org/), I was both humbled and gratified to be afforded the opportunity to participate in the only truly democratic political party in this country, especially as I had, to my intense, subsequent regret, stood in the May 2014 council elections for the supposed left of Labour umbrella organisation TUSC.  Initially I had misgivings about this organisation because of the involvement of the SWP, though thankfully that discredited Trot faction is almost moribund these days. What I should have realised is that a leopard never changes its spots after half a century and that Militant, tragically, haven’t tactically changed one scintilla since their heyday. Thankfully, the SPGB haven’t either and I’m glad to note they don’t hold my ideological aberration against me and will probably understand the genuine nature of my profound personal and political regret for allowing myself to be used in the way I was.

My regret, based on my own stupid naiveté, has been caused by the eventual realisation that, despite assurances to the contrary, Militant (or the erroneously titled “Socialist” Party as they have the temerity to refer to themselves as) are still up to what they’ve been doing for the last 50 years; namely operating as a top-down dictatorial Leninist, vanguardista vanity project that has no real interest in revolution, but concerns itself entirely with wielding power, both instrumental and influential, over the weak, the vulnerable and the inadequate who they seek to recruit as unthinking, unbliking followers. Politically, the SPGB have always called it right about Militant’s undemocratic structure; read this link for a far better analysis of their political position that I could ever hope to express http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1990s/1997/no-1110-february-1997/militant-dishonesty  Instead, I will discuss their methodology and tactics. I realise that in doing this, I will probably be putting my personal safety at risk, but it needs to be said. I’m doing this for the sake of good people who have been brainwashed into acting for Militant.

The twin approach of flattery and indulgence, backed up by impossible promises of jam tomorrow, is used to recruit members in a way that is disturbingly redolent of paedophile grooming, not that I suggest for one moment that sex is part of Militant’s artillery, despite their Milipaeds nickname; indeed, if anything they are opposed to physical, human relationships as can be seen by the tactics and conduct towards Clare Daly TD when she began a relationship with my good pal Mick Wallace TD. The conduct of Militant in Ireland, overseen by Bishop Len Taaffe’s great mate Father Ted Higgins, saw the attempted destruction of the United Left Alliance, now restricted as People Before Profit  and the ourselves alone lot in the “Socialist” Party or their Anti Austerity Alliance front organisation, is disturbing and dangerous. So repugnant are the tactics and alliances formed by  Irish Militant in their AAA guise, that the only possible party a Socialist could vote for in the recent Dublin South West bye election were People Before Profit, the ethical Irish offshoot of the SWP, who had no complicity in the covering up of rape allegations in the SWP in Britain. However, Father Ted’s glove puppet and former Strasbourg dauphin “Father Dougal” Murphy managed get himself elected in Dublin South West, with bitter irony on the 30^th anniversary of the Brighton Bombing. While Ireland may have sought sporting vengeance for Mairead Farrell by dismissing Gibraltar 7-0, it is the British State that had the latest, if not the last, laugh with the Fresh Prince of Tallaght taking his seat in the Dail. The last laugh will be the realisation by the Irish working class that they have been duped, presumably necessitating another walk, dig and discovery of a bullet-riddled corpse in the Wicklow hills by An Garda Síochána.

Rather more disturbing even than Militant’s recruitment policies, is their closed ranks, cultish rejection of the notion that there may be a shred of validity of any criticism made of them. In the 80s, for instance, anyone advocating gay rights in the macho, butch world of the RSL would be told that homosexuality was a “middle class” deviancy, as ideologically suspect as skiing or lacrosse. Though the indulgence of prejudicial attitudes as part of Militant’s slavish devotion to workerism, a stance acknowledge and apologised for by some and vehemently denied by others in “the organisation,” has passed, even if they do repugnantly make eyes at EDL members, claiming they are “misguided” rather than bonehead fascist filth, what has stayed at the very core of Militant’s ideology is the savagery with which they respond to criticism. The violence with which Militant functionaries react to those on the left offering other opinions, with the catch-all excuse of “dialectics” can be equated to a pack of rabid Rottweilers savaging a baby in a pushchair.   They are au fait with modern technology though, as often their scorn is visited on infidels by employing endless attacks via social media, backed up by on line threats and a whispering campaign of the utmost ferocity, directed at anyone who deviates from their inflexible screed of accepted opinions or strays from the flock. I know, because I’ve endured it.

The Militant world is one where vile ad hominem abuse is dressed up by the judicious employment of phrases such as the oft-repeated, meaningless “undialectical,” as an explanation for all thinking that is not bang on the party line. Militant functionaries demonstrate that Militant’s brand of dynastic, democratic centralism and Leninist tactics, involving an embarrassing, obsessive veneration of the city of Liverpool,  are not about revolution at all, but about control; emotional and financial. Their twin tactics are the suppression of dissent and the oppression of dissenters. So effective is the cult style tactic of brainwashing that Militant devotees are simply unable to recognise what they have become. For their sake, to save them on a personal level, as well as for the sake of the working class, we must declare immediate ideological war on Militant.

In Mountain Language Pinter portrays both the mindless banality of oppression and the hidebound, mechanistic approach adopted by oppressors in a way that could have been based on the tactics of Militant; the Walton Wehrmacht have their trained functionaries who are endlessly schooled and drilled in their ideology, then given their instructions and their modus operandi; nothing will distract them from their work or from their unshakeable conviction that what they are doing is right, because they intuitively KNOW they are right. Recruit the weak; crush the independent. Consequently what may be assumed to be "dissent" by the “ideologically unsound” towards the oppressors may not actually "dissent" at all, but "variance" from a rigorously adhered to ideological screed that may actually be either unconscious in its provenance or conscious for reasons of either conscience and belief or a lack of knowledge, by "dissenters," many of whom are shocked or intimidated by the obloquy their ideological "impurity" enacts in the response by oppressors. For Militant operatives “debate” equals “dissent” and must be eradicated if the dynastic, democratic centralist hierarchy declare this to be the case. 

The deepest irony is that in Militant and their front organisations TUSC in the UK and AAA in Ireland, these tactics of state oppression are forcefully utilised by those whose apparent aim is to supplant the current ruling elite, where endless abuse and scorn is visited down on those who deviate one scintilla from the rigidly inflexible ideology that "oppressors" seek to promulgate, with the incessant restating that those who do not accept unquestioningly the programme of the "oppressors" are ideologically suspect. Any political post on social media that does not slavishly parrot the What We Stand For mantra is countermanded by a dozen abrupt, abusive, insulting personal attacks; one wonders whether the Kim-il-Sungist style Liverpudlian Leninist autodidacts monitor social media for all such dissent, issuing instructions to functionaries to obliterate discussion, or whether highly trained functionaries respond in a Pavlovian manner to anything that would not be approved by the Taaffigensia.   It seems clear that such oppressive tactics are not adopted to persuade the "dissenter" of the veracity of the "oppressors'" ideology, but to destabilise the "dissenter." The effect of Militant tactics on the “dissenter” is a kind of ruthless psychological warfare designed to destroy articulate opposition, while at the same time, the weak, vulnerable and intellectually immature are courted, flattered and given privileged insights, as the "oppressors" seek to control those who are easily manipulated, emotionally and financially. In that sense they most closely resemble the Reverend Jim Jones and his followers in Guyana, with messianic, Liverpudlian Leninist autodidact Peter Taaffe adopting  what appears to me to be the role of sinister absolute monarch.

The inescapable conclusion to be drawn is that, in sharp contrast to their rhetoric, it is not a question of political ideology at all for these “oppressors;” their  actual motivation is a veneration of power and a desire for total control of the weak, the vulnerable and the intellectually immature, with the consequent adjunct that absolute intolerance of any form of opposition, conscious or unconscious, must manifest itself in the ruthless public denigration of all “dissenters,” regardless of the effect that such ad hominem abuse has on the persecuted victims. Consequently, I will also be giving my full support and efforts to the SPGB’s candidate in Easington at the 2015 General Election, as well as maintaining ideological war against Militant, for the sake of those trapped inside the body of that horrible machine.