This is part two of a three-part review of Aidan Beatty's book The Party is always right.
How does a book review turn into a protracted exercise in character assassination and libel? In September of last year the World Socialist Web Site published what was billed as an advanced review of Aidan Beatty’s The Party is Always Right, written by the long-time leader of that organization, David North. Since then the WSWS, in its own version of “flooding the zone”, has featured no less than 10 articles devoted to Beatty’s book, with North’s “official” review[1] as the anchor. To prosecute his campaign against Beatty, North has enlisted the service of more than a dozen loyalists. In addition to the published articles, the WSWS has also featured edited versions of two online discussions of Beatty’s book. [2]
 |
| The WSWS Beatty demonization page |
As we
have shown in our review of The
Party is always right, [3]
Beatty’s book is hardly problem-free. It
is open to criticism on a number of grounds: that it paints a distorted picture
of Trotskyism, of democratic centralism as understood by Trotsky and the
tradition of Trotskyism; that it fails to take into account a discussion of the political debates waged between Trotskyism and Stalinism and within the
Trotskyist movement, etc. It is also
legitimate to ask whether Beatty’s portrayal of Healy and the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) is fair, i.e.
whether it is guilty of a one-sided assessment of both Healy and the WRP that
fails to recognize any positive contributions of either. Finally, it is always legitimate to point to
factual errors that may also have crept into the book.
But for
those who consider themselves the heirs of Healy’s legacy, this kind of
criticism was at best relegated to a minor concern. Their main concern has been to discredit the
author of the book by singling out minor factual errors and lending them great
significance while either ignoring or outright falsifying major events in the
history of Healy, the WRP, and the Workers League that Beatty dwells on.
I have
previously addressed what can be described as ‘collateral damage’ from the WSWS
campaign against Beatty, namely:
v An attempt to discredit the character of dozens of witnesses who agreed to be interviewed by Beatty.
v A special attempt to discredit me by insinuating that I am an FBI informer.
The
response to these slanders emanating from David North can be found in my
article, Agent-baiting:
A hysterical slander from David North. [4]
The result of the WSWS smear campaign is a mélange of false statements. Were one to address every single accusation, one could easily write a separate book. Fortunately, that is not necessary as an examination of just a few samples from this minefield is sufficient to reveal the bad faith behind this campaign. It includes the following elements:
v An
attempt to discredit the author of the book by insinuating that he is acting as
a tool of Zionism.
v Challenges
to factual statements Beatty makes about Healy’s personal life and background.
v Claims
that some descriptions of historical events have been falsified to paint a
negative portrait of Healy.
v A
defense of Healy against charges of physical abuse.
v Silence about Healy’s sexual exploitation of female comrades.
The Charge that Beatty is a Zionist tool
Let’s address the first, the claim that Beatty is a Zionist tool and that his book was written to advance the Zionist agenda. The charge immediately runs up against a problem: while there are a few references to ‘Zionism’ or ‘Zionists’, all in connection with accounts of the politics of the WRP or their political connections, none of these references can be remotely described as pro-Zionist. One reference, for example, expresses sympathy with Vanessa Redgrave at the Oscars awards ceremony after being physically threatened by rightwing Zionists:
In her acceptance speech, Redgrave commended those who refused to be cowed by ‘a bunch of Zionist hoodlums’, a reasonable and quite accurate description of Kahane and the JDL which nonetheless was jeered by the Hollywood crowd. [5]
Nonetheless, David North insisted on portraying Beatty as a Zionist agent in his initial review:
It is hardly unreasonable to conclude that the commissioning of this attack, and the speed that it was moved to publication, is a response to the campaign conducted by the World Socialist Web Site against the genocidal war being conducted by the fascistic Israeli regime. [6]
The implication is that Beatty’s Zionist handlers ordered him to rush his book into print in order to counteract the important political work conducted by the WSWS against the genocide in Gaza following the October 7, 2023, events. It is not necessary to comment on the inflated view North has of the influence of the WSWS in the conspiracy theory he elaborates. But I can personally refute the claim that Beatty’s book was rushed into print as I have an email from Beatty from December 2022, long before the events of October 7, in which he replied to my question of when his book will be published. He wrote to me then that the plan was to publish in "late 2024," which is exactly what happened.
In the final version of his review, perhaps recognizing the stupidity of his earlier claim of the book being rushed into print, North did not repeat that allegation.
The charge of Beatty being a ‘Zionist tool’ is supposedly justified by an investigation the WSWS commissioned Andrea Peters to conduct. She actually dug up information about all the grants that Beatty had received throughout his academic career and claimed that many of them originated with organizations that had ties to Zionism or to Israel.[7] Typical is Peters’ assertion that the Program of Jewish Studies at the University of Pittsburgh - that provided a grant for Beatty’s book - is a pro-Zionist organization, and that, in her words,
…one can legitimately assume that the opportunity to discredit a left-wing opponent of Zionism is what animated the decision of the Program on Jewish Studies at the University of Pittsburgh to fund Beatty’s anti-Healy diatribe.
The absurdity of labelling this department of academic studies as little more than a pro-Zionist organization is evident when one examines some of the courses the department offers. A typical example is a course on “Israeli and Palestinian Literature”. Here is an excerpt from the course description:
Topics will include: how these writers construct place; the role of religious texts in literature; conflicts and community within each society; how literature helped shape an Israeli national consciousness and a Palestinian national consciousness; how Israeli and Palestinian writers imagine the other; and the role of the Shoah in Israeli literature and the Nakba in Palestinian literature. [8]
Is this pro-Zionist? Elsewhere, Peters decries Beatty for contributing articles to what she claims is a pro-Zionist website called “Jewthink.” Yet one of the articles Beatty contributed to this website was a review of a biography of the Palestinian scholar Edward Said. [9] Beatty’s sympathy with Said and his biographer, Timothy Brennan, comes through in passages like this:
At Columbia, he [Said] kept his Palestinian identity quiet, until rumours spread that he was an Alexandrian Jew. Brennan thus suggests that Said’s early-career interest in Joseph Conrad was an interest in Conrad’s hiding of his identity and his talents for personal reinvention. But by the later ‘60s, Said was feeling increasingly out-of-touch with his New York scene. Jewish writers with otherwise left-wing bona fides developed a pro-Israeli stance after June 1967, an obvious source of alienation for a Palestinian critic. It is not at all a coincidence that his famous friendship with Noam Chomsky dates from this period.
Beatty thus describes how Said, distressed by the growth of uncritical pro-Israeli sentiment, struck up a friendship with Chomsky, a Jew who was equally dismayed. Does this make Beatty a pro-Zionist? Hardly.
As for the question of Beatty’s grants, their origin is beside the point. Anyone who functions in the academic world knows very well that funding for academic research comes from many sources that rely on either powerful corporations, foundations tied to hedge funds, or government agencies, many of which have ties to the defense-intelligence complex. Purity is virtually impossible since much funding comes from questionable sources whose backers are often obscure. I would venture to guess that Ms. Peters funding sources throughout her career have not been pristine either. This entire enterprise of looking into Beatty’s funding sources is just an example of the ‘guilt by association’ trope routinely employed by the WSWS against political enemies.[10] It is yet another one of the unfortunate legacies the WSWS inherited from Gerry Healy.
Battling Beatty on Galway: Much ado about very little
The WSWS brings up two main issues in relation to Beatty’s account of Healy’s personal life and background. The first is his statement that County Galway, where Healy grew up, was relatively quiet during the violence that broke out in Ireland in 1919. Beatty’s characterization of this period can be found in the first chapter of his book and consists of exactly three sentences:
Galway had a tradition of rural agitation and even militancy in the later nineteenth century but had become quieter by the early decades of the twentieth. The political violence that erupted in Ireland from 1919 onwards – posthumously called the Irish War of Independence – was mainly centered in Dublin on the east coast and in the southern province of Munster. Galway and the surrounding western province of Connacht saw less of this.[11]
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| Bombing of Four Courts in Dublin set off the Irish Civil War in 1922 |
This brief description of the relative state of turmoil in Galway compared to other regions of Ireland triggered a major investigation by the WSWS. A WSWS reporter, Thomas Scripps, was dispatched to Ireland to comb through archives and conduct interviews. His conclusion, published in the WSWS under the title, Slander vs. biography: Aidan Beatty’s falsification of Gerry Healy’s family and childhood in a decade of rebellion and civil war, was aimed at discrediting Beatty’s portrait of Healy’s early history as well as the Irish political backdrop. His finding: contrary to Beatty, Galway was indeed a dangerous and violent area during those years. Not being an expert in Irish history I will not attempt to adjudicate this dispute. But I am capable of detecting a straw man argument when I see one. For example, take the following statement by Scripps:
Published studies like Conor McNamara’s War and Revolution in the West of Ireland, William Henry’s Blood for Blood and Fergus Campbell’s Land and Revolution already show up Beatty’s claim that Galway, his native county, was relatively unaffected by the War of Independence, as a lie.
But Beatty never claimed that Galway was “unaffected” during the years of turmoil, merely that the level of violence was less than in the urban centers of Ireland. He notes – quite correctly – that the conflict
…was mainly centered in Dublin on the east coast and in the southern province of Munster. Galway and the surrounding western province of Connacht saw less of this.
The list
of casualties during the War of Independence confirms that while Galway
certainly had its share of fatalities, these were dwarfed by the number of
fatalities in the urban centers of Ireland such as Dublin and Cork.[12] One can find a similar pattern in the list of
fatalities during the Irish Civil War.[13]
Obviously a comparison of one statistic
is very far from providing the full picture. I will leave that investigation to
specialists in this area of Irish history.
My only point is that that some people are working overtime to try to
discredit someone’s professional reputation based on straw man arguments about
a topic Beatty only mentions in passing.
 |
| Map of fatalities during Ireland's War of Independence |
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| Map of Irish Civil War fatalities |
Now it may be a legitimate criticism of Beatty to state that he did not explore this topic sufficiently or that he understated the level of violence in Galway, but Scripps’ over-the-top fulminations against statements Beatty never made, in effect that Galway was a peaceful area during the years of turmoil, are unwarranted. It is a case of dishonest journalism run amok. Even more bizarre is that this brief and very minor discussion in Beatty’s book is deemed important enough to trigger an all-hands-on-deck investigation. No doubt most readers will come away with the thought that all this ink spilled on challenging a very broad-brush treatment of an episode in Irish history consisting of three sentences is a case of much ado about very little. [14]
A case of defamation
Whatever shred of credibility Scripps’ account of Irish history and Healy’s early life may have had is shattered when one comes upon the final paragraph of his piece where he injects the following defamatory statement:
The Zionist and pro-Israel foundations from whom Beatty solicited financial support for this project provided him with money with the understanding that he would produce a lie-filled diatribe against a Marxist-Trotskyist defender of the struggle of the oppressed against imperialism. And the unscrupulous Aidan Beatty has given them their money’s worth.
As if that was not enough Scripps followed up his article by writing an open letter to members of the American Conference for Irish Studies suggesting that Beatty was only recently appointed president of that organization because intelligence services were pulling strings for him.
So much for any pretense of objectivity or “the search for historical truth” on the part of the WSWS authors.
Would Healy deliberately tell lies about himself?
The misstatements go on. The second avenue of attack concerns Beatty’s claim that Healy manufactured a fictitious tale of the murder of his father by the Black and Tans. Beatty’s research indicates that Healy’s father died years after the supposed incident occurred so the story cannot be true. The question, however, remains whether Healy was responsible for spreading this mythical account of his early childhood.
It’s an important issue because it concerns Healy’s honesty and reliability. An article by WSWS regular Tom Mackaman purports to vindicate him on this issue, insisting that Healy never spoke about his father’s death at all. But all that Mackaman’s article demonstrates is that none of the published references to this story cite convincing evidence that Healy made such a representation, which hardly proves that he didn’t. But the article then goes further by indicting those who said they heard Healy tell this story. All such sources are, according to Mackaman, political enemies of Healy conspiring to destroy his reputation. According to Mackaman, it is they and not Healy who manufactured a fictitious historical narrative. That the alleged slanderers whom Mackaman’s article cites -- John McIlroy, Bob Pitt, and Sean Matgamna, as well as Beatty himself -- are political enemies of Healy is true enough. But Mackaman produces no evidence of conspiracy of any sort. A mere assertion in his book seems to be enough. Such overblown claims are typical of the WSWS version of “journalism.”[15]
Part of Mackaman’s argument is the implicit assumption that Healy was not the type of person who would deceive others. He writes:
Beatty’s distortion and misuse of evidence from this period is aimed at portraying Healy as a liar willing to say anything, even about his childhood.
Healy a liar? Impossible. Yet given what we know about Healy’s sexual exploitation of young female comrades, Mackaman’s efforts to paint Healy as an icon of revolutionary morality are absurd.
In her memoir, for example, Clare Cowen provides the following account of the web of deception Healy employed to conceal his sexual exploitation of young female comrades. She recreates a conversation she had with Aileen Jennings, Gerry Healy’s long-time personal secretary who was also one of his victims:
[Aileen]‘He
has sex with every woman he can.’
[Clare]…‘What
do you mean “everyone”?’
[Aileen]
‘Every woman he can possibly get. He views all the young women at the Centre as
potential sexual partners. He’s done it for years.’
She
must be mistaken. It couldn’t be true.
‘Surely
someone would have guessed?’
‘Oh, he’s very clever. He manages to hide it from everyone.’[16]
Was Healy above misrepresenting his personal history? Not according to real time witnesses Clare Cowen and Aileen Jennings as well as many others. Clare Cowen’s memoir provides further insight into this question. She recounts another conversation in which Aileen Jennings debunks one of the stories floating around about Healy’s early years, this one about his activities as a Communist organizer working undercover inside Nazi Germany:
One
night, in his flat, he [Healy] had told me:
‘I was a seaman before the war. I saw Hitler coming to power.’
‘You were in Germany?’
‘I saw it, I was there.’ His inscrutable expression had suggested superior
wisdom.
But Aileen [Jennings] had dismissed this account.
‘Nonsense, it’s a fantasy. He’s taken it from a book written by someone else.’ [17]
Beatty suggests that the “someone else” from whom Healy borrowed his story was Jock Haston, an early British Trotskyist.[18] Whether or not this is conclusive proof, the testimony of numerous people who knew Healy for decades and worked closely with him in both a political and personal relationship provides a reasonable basis for believing that he was in the habit of spinning tall tales about himself and others. I especially value the testimony of Aileen Jennings as she was someone I knew and for whom I had a great deal of respect. No one could match her in her dedication to the revolution and her willingness to work 20 hours a day and sacrifice all her personal interests for the cause. I would trust Aileen Jennings’s judgment about Healy more than I would Tom Mackaman’s – who never knew Healy personally - and would have to conclude that Healy was indeed the kind of person who was “a liar willing to say anything, even about his childhood.”
Did Healy and others in the WRP engage in physical violence?
Moving on to another area in contention, there is the not-insignificant matter of North defending Healy against charges of violence against both political opponents and trusted comrades. Here is what North had to say, based on a verbatim transcript, at a panel devoted to a discussion of Beatty’s book sponsored by the Institute for Historical research on Dec 2, 2024.[19]
You
claim repeatedly that Healy employed violence but, like your claim about Healy
having lied about his father's death,
these statements are based entirely on discredited statements of political enemies or dubious stories
published after Healy's death. I'm going to give two examples. You cite the Tate
Affair of 1966 and only now [my emphasis, following North’s intonations
at this point] you acknowledge that the
two newspapers which reported the
allegation of Ernest Tate, a political opponent of Healy, retracted their
reports and issued a public apology.
Here North makes a blatant misstatement in his account of Beatty’s treatment of the Tate Affair when he accuses Beatty of “only now” acknowledging the apology following the libel suit. Had North bothered to take a look at page 35, he would have discovered that Beatty refers to the libel suit and its settlement in his book, not ‘only now’ as North demagogically insists. Beatty writes:
This incident was well known among the left, though Healy threatened libel action against both Peace News and The Socialist Leader, which published articles about the assault; rather than fight this out in the courts, both papers printed apologies and each paid 10 guineas (10 pounds 10 shillings) to Healy.[20]
North is also being disingenuous in representing the apology from those publications as vindications of Healy’s version of the Tate Affair. Any politically literate person on the left should know that contesting a claim of libel in the UK is much more difficult and much more expensive than in the U.S. and that it is common practice to agree to a nominal settlement rather than fight it out in court. Most of the time it is the Right that employs the libel suit as a weapon against left wing publications.
 |
| The late Ernest Tate (middle) at an anti-nuclear bomb demonstration in 1963 |
I don’t have any personal insight into the Tate Affair as it happened several years before I joined the Workers League. But from everything I have learned in the years since about how the WRP and Healy operated, I tend to believe the late Ernest Tate rather than Healy’s latter-day apologists. The only thing that was unusual about the Tate Affair was that an external political opponent of Healy was beaten in public since it was much more common for trusted political collaborators to suffer such abuse in private. In this regard, let us examine another statement North made in the Dec 2 panel:
In your
account of another example of Healy's violence, you write on page 55 and again
on page 93 that Healy broke a chair over the back of his secretary Aileen Jennings, and you did not interview Aileen Jenings, the source of the
story. And she's on this program, as is Clare Cowen, who claimed in her 2019 memoirs that she was told of this incident by
Jennings in 1984, that is some 35 years earlier. Moreover, what Cowen actually
wrote in her memoir was that Healy struck Jennings with a broomstick. Please
explain how the broomstick became transformed into a chair over Jennings back. You make the statement twice. Is this a case
of poetic license on your part?
Had
North done the intensive investigation he claimed to have done, he would have
discovered that the version of the story of Jenning’s being struck on the back
by Healy with a chair comes not from Beatty’s imagination but from Norman
Harding’s memoir. On the same page where
Harding describes Healy’s assault on Jenning’s, he also, incidentally, provides
a graphic description of an attack on another loyal comrade, Dot Gibson:
Whenever
things did not appear as Healy thought they should, it would put him into a
complete panic and rage. On one of these occasions Comrade Dot was on the
receiving end of one of his worst physical attacks. He kicked her so viciously
on her legs that ulcers developed on her shins. I had to take her to the
hospital to receive treatment over a period of weeks. Dot insisted — and
others, including me, agreed — that Healy should not be told of the damage he
had done because it would upset him. He had to be protected from this kind
of pressure. We had to sneak out secretly to make the trips to the hospital. On
another occasion he caused permanent damage when he struck Aileen over the back
with a chair. He constantly physically abused comrades and, as I found out
later, there were other forms of abuse going on. I will deal with this in a later
chapter. [21]
The
version of this incident found in Cowen’s memoirs, does indeed say that the
assault took place with a broomstick.
Without the testimony of Aileen Jennings, it is impossible to say which
version is the correct one. But whether
with a chair or broomstick, it should be clear that Aileen Jennings suffered a
serious assault at the hands of Healy, an assault that left her with permanent
injuries to her spine.
North,
in his role as Healy’s defense attorney, raised another issue during the Dec 2
panel:
A
related question: why did you fail to inform your readers that Cowen
acknowledges that she, despite working at the party center for more than a
decade, never personally witnessed Healy committing an act of violence? She
writes in her memoir, “I've never actually seen him hit anyone.”
This
statement contradicts your claim that Healy constantly employed violence
against party members. How do you explain this contradiction?
Here
North is cherry-picking a fragment out of Clare Cowen’s memoir to discredit the
gist of her testimony. An examination of the full context in which those
words were spoken, again in a conversation Cowen had with Aileen Jennings,
lends an entirely different significance to them.
[Clare]
‘Gerry’s violence – why doesn’t anyone intervene?’
[Aileen] ‘Violence has been the hallmark of Gerry’s leadership for years. Lots
of political differences have been settled by beating someone up, or
threatening to.’
[Clare] ‘I’ve never actually seen him hit anyone. I know about Dot’s pierced
eardrum, the lacerations to her leg and the hospital’s incomprehension that she
wasn’t going to press charges against the perpetrator. And you wore huge dark
glasses for two weeks.’
[Aileen] ‘Gerry gave me an enormous black eye. And he seriously injured my back
when he struck me with a broomstick. That’s why I regularly have to see an
osteopath.’
I already
knew this but I still found it shocking.
[Aileen] ‘He throws plates of food at me if he’s in a tantrum, but I’ve learned
ways to protect myself when he’s like that.’ [22]
It is in
this section of Cowen’s memoir that she relates the story Aileen Jennings told
her of Healy’s injuring her back with a broomstick. Jennings also relates
that Healy gave her a black eye, and threw plates of food at her. Cowen relates
that Healy seriously injured Dot Gibson on more than one occasion. All
three women, Cowen, Jennings and Gibson, were also sexually abused by Healy.
This abuse went on continuously for twenty years in the case of Jennings.
Given
that North enlists Cowen to buttress his case that Healy never assaulted
anyone, it is only fair to quote a few other excerpts from her memoir.
We heard Gerry shouting. Dot went back and forth to his
office. Then he stormed in.
‘Where’s
Mrs. Gibson?’
‘In the
toilet.’
He
banged her desk and kicked the door.
‘These
are impossible problems. I have to deal with such backward comrades.’ He kicked
the desk. ‘I can’t work like this. I’m supposed to lead this movement and this
is what I have to deal with.’
This was
one of the worst rages I’d seen. He came over to kick my desk, picked up some
books and brought them straight down on my head. It didn’t really hurt but I
was incensed.
‘You
can’t do that. You know I had a fractured skull in the car accident,’ I cried,
glaring at him. He turned away, kicking Dot’s desk again.
‘You’re
so backward, you made me do it.’ [23]
 |
| Dot Gibson, manager of the WRP finances |
Here is
one instance in which Healy assaulted Cowen. Did Cowen exclude herself when she
said she “never actually saw him hit anyone”? Is it possible that Cowen did not
consider Healy’s tossing books on her head as an assault because “it didn’t
really hurt”? If a manager in a modern American workplace expressed his
displeasure in that way, he would not only be fired but would be liable for
criminal charges.
Here is
another excerpt from Cowen’s memoir:
[Healy]
‘You’re just a petty-bourgeois.’ His voice was louder and his tone sneering. He
walked round to the other side of the counter and looked up into T’s face. ‘You
just can’t make it, can you?’ he taunted, and punched T lightly on his left
cheek. ‘You can’t, can you?’ He punched the right cheek, then his left, again.
I was horrified. Gerry had stopped Larry leaving to ensure he was safe to
provoke T to the utmost. But T held his nerve and remained still. After a long
minute Gerry stepped away. [24]
And here
is yet another conversation with Aileen Jennings as related by Cowen,
‘Dot
lives in constant fear it will all fall to pieces,’ I commented.
[Jennings] ‘Well, it could. Gerry’s primitive business ideas have controlled
the finances for too long. Whenever Dot tried to tell him differently there was
a violent explosion. He’s hit her plenty of times. Any changes have been
achieved by a careful strategy to make Gerry think it was his idea.’ [25]
You can
also find this gut-wrenching account of an event Cowen herself witnessed where
Healy beat someone who dared differ with him in front of the entire WRP Central
Committee:
The Central Committee meeting on 27th April underlined the hopelessness of a political challenge to Gerry. Mike Banda’s opening report, evaluating the political situation after the miners’ strike, set the scene for Gerry to attack Sheila as a ‘subjective idealist’. Tensions between him and Sheila had been building up for weeks, apparently over arrangements for the jailed miners’ march but in reality over deeper, never-expressed issues. He moved her suspension from the Party on spurious charges, which was ridiculous. She was one of the most important members of the leadership and she fought back. Then Stuart Carter, a young Central Committee member from Manchester, spoke.
‘I don’t agree that Comrade Sheila is damaging the Party. She’s been organising the march arrangements very efficiently.’
Uproar
broke out. The usual people rallied to the attack: Mike Banda, Corin,
newly-back-in-the-fold Alex. But Stuart stood his ground, even when Sheila
accepted she might have committed some procedural error. I wondered where his
courage came from to oppose Gerry’s ludicrous allegations. I listened to the
barrage of pseudo-analysis of his political position with stifled fury coupled
with admiration for his principled stand. As the bellowing continued, Gerry
stood up and punched Stuart in the face. No one objected. I noticed the
expressionless profiles of Aileen and Dot in the rows in front of me; Dave [David
Bruce] was to my right further along the row. I dared not look at him. [26]
In a
final piece of evidence taken from Cowen’s memoir, she relates the historic
Central Committee meeting in which charges were read against Healy, one of which
concerned violence against party members. Cowen writes:
Four
charges against Gerry had been drafted overnight: sexual abuse of female Party
members; continual use of physical violence; violating his retirement
agreement; and slander of an international comrade. [the last charge refers to
Healy slandering David North as a ‘CIA agent’. A.S.]
For the
charge of physical violence four comrades had been selected as indicative of
the problem. Committee members muttered angrily as they heard about Gerry’s
violent blows against Aileen and Dot. Next cited was Tom Scott-Robson, in
charge of the film department.
‘Comrade
Tom was disabled as a result of childhood polio,’ explained the comrade from
the drafting panel. ‘He can barely walk upstairs and is often in considerable
pain. During a discussion about the department Comrade Healy struck him quite
forcefully.’ An angry murmur ran through the meeting. ‘There were several
witnesses.’ Had Vanessa been present? The film department was her domain.
The
fourth victim selected, to my surprise, was Charlie.
‘Until
his recent expulsion, Comrade Charlie had been a dedicated staff member at the
Centre for seven years, in overall charge of security, on duty almost round the
clock. On several occasions Comrade Healy kicked him in the shins, punched his
head, hit his face, broke his glasses. He had to stand there, trying to block
the blows, unable to retaliate because of Comrade Healy’s authority.’ [27]
 |
| Clare Cowen |
Cowen’s
memoir is only one of many accounts chronicling Healy’s routine turn to
violence against party members.
I heard a firsthand account of one such incident from Cyril
Smith, a former leading member of the WRP with whom I established a
friendship several years before he died. Smith told me that Healy personally
beat him on more than one occasion. The first time it happened was when
he was in the youth movement of the Trotskyist organization led by Healy.
Smith did not provide further details, but if one extrapolates the date of this
incident from an account of his life included in an obituary,[28] then
it occurred sometime in the 1950’s, perhaps even in the early 1950’s. If that
chronology is correct, then it means that Healy was assaulting party members
for at least three decades and that this streak did not end until he was
expelled from the WRP in 1985. And Beatty correctly notes that there was
an intimate connection between the physical abuse that was only incurred on
certain individuals, and the more general forms of abuse that all party members
endured:
And as
with the SLL, violence against party members existed in an intimate
relationship with the expectation that party members should go to extreme
lengths in their work for the WRP. Both were forms of abuse. When Cliff
Slaughter took time away from party work to devote to his sick wife, he was
reprimanded (and had to make a contrite apology) for ‘bourgeois character’ as
well as for not leaving his wife for the party. [29]
Silence
on Sexual Abuse
Finally,
let us confront the elephant in the room. For all their articles and
investigations seeking to reclaim Healy’s legacy, the WSWS has remained
conspicuously silent on the not-insignificant issue of the sexual abuse that
Healy inflicted on female comrades for more than two decades. This is not a
small matter. It speaks to the level of hypocrisy and bad faith involved in North’s
fanatical attempt to discredit Beatty by focusing attention on relatively minor
questions such as whether the 1974 meeting in which Wohlforth was removed took
place in Montreal or in a town 60 miles to the north. Or whether I was present at
that meeting. In fact, contrary to what
North maintains, I was present at that meeting, but the reader can be forgiven
if he or she does not think that this question is of world historical
importance. [30]
Believe it or not, North devotes more
ink to these burning issues than anything about Healy’s sexual abuse of female
comrades! [31]
In the
concluding chapter of his book Beatty examines the contemporary heirs of Healy’s
legacy, the Socialist Equality Party. He notes that the SEP, and its publication,
the World Socialist Web Site, “…have a general contempt for the debates over
sexual harassment that followed the various #MeToo revelations.”[32]
Beatty is not wrong in detecting more than a whiff of misogyny in North’s SEP. One doesn’t have to agree with Beatty’s
somewhat uncritical attitude toward the #MeToo movement to note the SEP’s lack
of sensitivity to the abuse of women. The connection to their silence about Healy’s
abuse of female comrades could not be more evident.[33]
Conclusion
Although
I am far away from Beatty politically, I find it unconscionable that the WSWS has
embarked on a campaign to destroy his professional reputation because he has
written honestly about Healy and his legacy. This is not to say that Beatty does not
interject his politics and his point of view into his examination of
Healy. But an honest critic should be
able to disentangle those elements of his biography from the historical account
he provides. As I already indicated, it is perfectly legitimate to contest
Beatty’s book - whether it be on the historical account he provides or in his
exegesis of theoretical issues. I did just that in my review of his book. It is
quite another thing however to manufacture a conspiracy theory painting Beatty
as a paid agent of Zionism who was hired to discredit the “world historic”
political work of the WSWS by portraying their mentor Healy as a “monster”. Those
who embrace such beliefs without evidence are no longer in the orbit of
rational discourse.
In the
course of this piece I have exposed over a dozen instances where WSWS authors,
in their campaign to discredit Beatty, made statements that were at the very least
grossly misleading or, as in the case of David North, outright lies that can be
easily refuted. In a follow-up article I will explore the real legacy of
Gerry Healy and the WRP.
[1]
David North, Sept. 17, 2024, Biography as
demonology: Aidan Beatty’s The Party is Always Right: The Untold Story of
Gerry Healy and British Trotskyism - World Socialist Web Site
[2] The WSWS posted an edited version of an online panel from Nov 23, 2024 at https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/11/26/mkne-n26.html. I posted the complete version of that panel at
http://forum.permanent-revolution.org/2024/11/panel-on-aidan-beattys-book-party-is.html
The WSWS also posted an edited version on an online
webinar hosted by the Institute of Historical Research on Dec. 2, 2024 at https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/12/04/bplu-d04.html The WSWS sound recording only includes
contributions from WSWS partisans. I
have a complete transcript of those proceedings that has not been published.
[3] Alex Steiner, March 22, 2025, Review: The Party is always right ~ Permanent Revolution
[4] Alex Steiner, Sept. 23, 2024, Agent-baiting:
a hysterical slander from David North ~ Permanent Revolution
[5] Aidan Beatty, The Party is Always Right: The Untold Story of Gerry Healy and British Trotskyism, Pluto Press, London, 2024, p. 52.
[6] The initial review is no longer available on the WSWS but you can find It through the WayBack Machine at:
https://web.archive.org/web/20240916103714/https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/08/13/dxgf-a13.html
[7] Andrea Peters, Nov. 18, 2024,
Aidan Beatty’s
hackwork: The Israel-Zionist connection - World Socialist Web Site
[8] University of Pittsburgh Course Catalog, Course Catalog
[9] Aidan Beatty, The Jewishness of a very Palestinian Intellectual, April 20, 2021, https://www.jewthink.org/2021/04/20/the-jewishness-of-a-very-palestinian-intellectual/
[10] See Chapter I of Downward Spiral, https://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/downward_spiral_ch01.pdf,
where I respond to the ‘guilt by association’ smear campaign North launched against me, For instance,
North attempts to discredit
our work with guilt by association. He names various intellectual trends and persons, some of which we have discussed in
our polemics, and claims that we base our work on their ideas and that they
share a common outlook, one that is alien to Marxism. (p.13)
[11] Beatty, The Party is always right, op. cit., p. 1.
[12] See the report and map of fatalities from the Irish military history website:
https://brigade-activities.militaryarchives.ie/war-of-independence/fatalities
[13] See the report of fatalities collected by University College of Cork:
https://www.ucc.ie/en/theirishrevolution/irish-civil-war-fatalities-project/research-findings
[14] A subordinate element of Scripps narrative is to challenge Beatty’s depiction of Healy’s childhood as one of relative comfort. Scripp’s maintains that it was a childhood immersed in poverty and hardship. Scripps accuses Beatty of deliberately distorting Healy’s childhood to paint Healy as a fabulist who lied about his childhood to gain sympathy. Yet even Scripps concedes that a big question mark remains as to the actual circumstances of Healy’s childhood. While arguing that Healy must have faced hardships in his childhood, he also states that, “Michael’s [Healy’s father] fate and the specifics of Gerry’s early years remain unclear.”
[15] David North, in his review of Beatty’s book indicts every single one of the dozens of people who were interviewed:
The testimony upon which
Beatty’s oral history is based consists exclusively of allegations made by
Healy’s political enemies, and whose subjective hatred of Healy is embedded in
their repudiation of revolutionary politics decades ago.
I previously deconstructed North’s review here. Even though my own contribution to Beatty’s “oral history” was very minor compared to some of the other interviewees, North reserves special venom for me, writing that I am a “dishonest witness” and am
…a political renegade who abandon[ed] and betray[ed] the ideals of …[my] youth” and I “developed a pathological hatred of ...[my] former comrades.
To make sense of such a passage it is important to
understand the blinkered outlook of WSWS journalists. To them anyone who was
once associated with their organization but subsequently left is by definition
a “renegade”. If such people dare to
publicly criticize their former party or any of its members then they must be
“consumed by a pathological hatred” which leads them to engage in dishonest and
destructive actions against their former comrades.
[16] Clare Cowen, My search for revolution and how we brought down an abusive leader, Troubador Publishing Ltd., 2019, P. 212.
[17] Ibid., p. 216
[18] Beatty, op. cit., p. 6.
[19] The WSWS published an edited audio consisting solely of their own member’s remarks at this online seminar. None of Beatty’s remarks nor those of other contributors were included in the WSWS recording. See https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/12/04/bplu-d04.html
[20] Beatty, op. cit. , p. 35.
[21] Norman Harding, Staying Red: Why I Remain a Socialist, Index Books, 2005, p. 219-220, https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/harding/staying-red.pdf
[22] Cowen, op. cit., p. 200.
[23] Ibid., p 168.
[24] Ibid., p. 71.
[25] Ibid., p. 199.
[26] Ibid., p. 224.
[27] Cowen, op. cit., p. 300.
[28] Marking the death of Cyril Smith,
Obituary by John Plant, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-cyril/obituary.htm
[29] Beatty, op. cit., p. 60.
[30] North introduces an entire section of his review of Beatty’s book with the headline: Alex Steiner: A Dishonest Witness. I refuted North’s falsifications in Agent-baiting: a hysterical slander from David North ~ Permanent Revolution
[31] David North, Biography as demonology: Aidan Beatty’s The Party is Always Right: The Untold Story of Gerry Healy and British Trotskyism - World Socialist Web Site
North writes,
First, a minor point, the
summer school was not held in Montreal, but in Sainte-Agathe, which is about 60
miles north of the city. Far more important, neither Wohlforth nor Nancy Fields
were expelled from the Workers League. One month after his removal from the
post of national secretary, Wohlforth sent a letter to the Political Committee
of the Workers League, dated September 29, 1974, announcing his resignation
from the Workers League.
[32] Beatty, op. cit., p. 137.
[33] We have previously commented on the misogyny of the Socialist Equality Party. See for instance, Frank Brenner, May 19, 2018, A postscript: The Sexual Inequality Party - Permanent Revolution
