Dogs, Fleas, Pigs and… Sean Matgamna

It seems the last couple of days have been a leftie blogger’s heaven. One minute, we have Rees and German resigning from the National Council of the Left Alternative (did they jump, or were they pushed?) and the next minute Sean Matgamna comes out with some more first-class “debate” material.

Following the degeneration of Sean Matgamna’s rants from Israeli apologist tripe to the realm of the bizarre and/or evil, I am often left wondering whether anyone bothers to read what he has to say these days, or whether the confused patriarch is simply left alone to scribble whatever angry thoughts pop into his head. Has the Matgamna cult become so all-encompassing that the rest of the AWL don’t get a little embarrassed at the actions of their erratic leader? I suspect not. Scattered all across the land, there must have been AWLers cringing into their cornflakes this morning as they perused Matgamna’s latest offerings, an attempt at a polemic against Israeli Socialist and HOPI steering member, Moshe Machover, in today’s copy of Solidarity.

For the morbidly-inclined, you too can read what Matgamna has to say right here.

In the interests of those who, intent upon the preservation of their mental health, do not wish to trawl through five pages of bewildered rambling, allow me to present the conclusion, and absolute highlight, for your perusal:

“You and I [Moshe Machover] are trapped on the fifth story of a building that is burning beneath us, flames coming out of the windows on three sides. I look around and suggest; “Let’s tie these two ropes together, put some knots in them for handholds, and climb down. The ropes are not long enough, and we will have to jump the last storey. We may get hurt a bit, or break a leg or two, but we will survive”.

“You say: “No! We’ll most likely rope-burn our hands on the way down. One sort of burn is as bad as another. There is no difference!

“You say: "You have fallen in love with the fire, haven’t you? You want to compromise with fire and smoke and soot by running from it, by accepting its ‘definition’ of you! You are a pyromaniac! A filthy sootist!

““I know what to do. We should grow wings now and fly out of the window, rise and soar above it all, free of the fire and the soot and the filthy contamination with pyromania”.

“I reply: “Moshe, I’d love to grow wings, but genetic engineering hasn’t got that far yet. We simply can’t grow wings in time. The only solution to our dilemma is to climb down. We must move carefully, a step at a time”.

“You reply: “Don’t be silly! I know a great Yiddish song about wings. Let’s sing that. I know the lessons of Jewish history. We must learn to fly. It’s the only thing”. You start to sing: “On a wagon bound for market/ Sat a calf with a mournful eye…’”

Yes, comrades, Matgamna is truly coming out with such gold. As one commenter on the AWL website put it: the AWL really is the gift that keeps on giving. This time, however, his contributions have entered a whole new stage of - how can I put this politely? - absurdity. He reminds me of one of my older relatives, a great uncle, who likes to talk in sayings. Red sky at night, never look a gift horse… All that sort of stuff. Matgamna likes doing this too. Keen to impart some of his own inimitable wisdom, he informs us that “if you lie down with dogs, you get fleas; and if you frolic with pigs, you get splattered with mud.” Wise words, I’m sure. Thanks for the advice, Sean.


The thing with Matgamna is he always has a way with words. At times, he appears like a man who has swallowed a dictionary. At other times, one can only imagine his feverish thought process as he attempts to come up with an accurate analogy that truly expresses his creative urges. Arguing with Moshe, for example, “is like waltzing on ice with an india-rubber man!” Not something most people have tried, I’m afraid. I guess we’ll all have to take Matgamna’s word for it.

Kitsch!

I’m occasionally bewildered by the language employed by the Left. In the past I have commented on SWP’s comrades labelling me as “ultra-leftist”, “petit-bourgeois”, “Hekmatist” and even “Islamophobic”, depending on which way the wind is blowing, or which new term has entered their vocabulary on that particular day. But it’s by no means an isolated phenomenon. Take the AWL, for instance. They throw around their own particular buzz word, “kitsch”, like the word is going to expire in a couple of weeks and until then they should use it as much as possible, just because they can. If I had a pound for every time an AWLer has wantonly labelled HOPI/Stop the War/Troops Out Now/David Broder/not being a Zionist/genuine anti-imperialism “kitsch”, I would be very rich indeed.

Now, according to the Cambridge Dictionary, the meaning of kitsch is this: “art, decorative objects or design considered by many people to be ugly, lacking in style, or false but enjoyed by other people, often because they are funny”. Errrr… Ok. I’m assuming that the objection to anti-imperialism (here defined by the simple formula of not siding with the agents of imperialism against the Iranian working class) is nothing to do with it being ugly, lacking in style or funny; it must be the “false but enjoyed by other people” bit that’s causing the difficulties.

False but enjoyed by other people… Well, writing an article based around the idea that there is no name in which the Left could condemn a pre emptive strike on Iran (it’s called Socialist Internationalism, Matgamna!) seems to me pretty false. Objectively playing into the imperialists’ hands is pretty false too. Falsely propagating the lie that Iran is developing nuclear weapons, contrary to generally accepted opinion, yeah, that’s a pretty false thing to do.

Yes, comrades, I’m going to say it. The AWL, victims of their own terminology, are kitsch. Now let us hear no more of that stupid word.

“Absolute Anti-Zionism”

Self-proclaimed Zionist, Matgamna, goes on to talk about something he sees as really, really bad: “absolute anti-Zionism”. If you were to ask me to name something bad, I could come up with something worse- the news that Israel has just annexed thousands of hectares of land in the West Bank. That’s my idea of bad, as well as dreadful and disgusting. “Absolute anti-Zionism”, on the other hand, is Matgamna’s way of talking about people who aren’t Zionists, people who don’t use their media to spread the lies of the Israeli ruling class (i.e. pretending that Iran, a non-nuclear power, threatens Israel, a power cosy in its possession of a huge store of nuclear arms).

Matgamna goes on to write: “You denounce the existing Israel for not being the opposite of what it actually is.” Errrrrr, I’m sorry- what?!? Can we have that again in plain English? “You denounce the existing Israel for not being the opposite of what it actually is.” Nope, no clearer second time round. But anyway, one thing we can understand is the accusation that Machover is working in tandem with the very forces that support “Islamist clerical-fascism”. Who do you reckon that is supposed to refer to? HOPI? I must have missed the part of our founding statement where we pledge allegiance to Islamist clerical-fascism. Or perhaps it means the CPGB, in which case I’m most interested to find out that I’ve spent the last year in a relationship with someone who supports clerical fascists. It’s funny how little you can know about the person you live with.

But what is clerical-fascism, anyway? It’s a bogus term, something the AWL appear to have inherited from none other than Tony Cliff! What it does show is a blatant lack of understanding of what exactly fascism is, and more importantly, what fascism means to a Marxist. Fascism is this: the creation of a mass populist movement, designed to be the "shock troops" of the most reactionary sections of the ruling class against the organised workers' movement, mobilising these forces through an illusory "socialism" that bears no resemblance to the real thing. Let’s not soften the meaning of genuine fascism, by attaching the word to whichever reactionary religious force Matgamna points his finger at.

Nuclear Proliferation and Annihilation

Matgamna, Matgamna, Matgamna… Where can you possibly go now? You have already decided that when HOPI proposed standing in solidarity with radical secular movements against the Iranian regime, what it actually meant 'was support the theocracy unreservedly'. Likewise, in an admirable leap of logic (well, not exactly admirable… or logic for that matter…) Matgamna infers that when HOPI raises the demand for a regional nuclear-free zone, “it cannot but soften specific opposition to the Iranian regime acquiring nuclear weapons, which would, at best, mean the emergence of a nuclear balance of terror in the region”. Ok… So calling for a nuclear-free Middle East is actually a method of glossing over the nuclear arms programme that Iran doesn’t have. I see.

I’ll tell you what, with each day the AWL are becoming more and more like spokespersons for Israel and the US. In fact, the imperialists should pay them for all the hard work they’re putting in.

Stalin, Stalinists and Stalinism

One thing that really jumped out at me from Matgamna’s article is this: Stalinism. It pops up a gob smacking nineteen times in fact. This is Stalinist. That is Stalinist. Everything is Stalinist. Everything except the AWL that is; they are the enlightened few. So yes, there are nineteen mentions of Stalin, Stalinists and Stalinism, exactly zero of which are the product of rational analysis or even the most basic understanding of what the term means. In fact, Sean Matgamna calling other left groups Stalinist is a bit like Nick Griffin calling John Rees a fascist… It just doesn’t work.

Something which always puzzles me about Matgamna’s works - aside from the ridiculous hyperbole, usage of a lot of long words (does he think that if he only confuses people enough, they might not realise he’s talking crap?) and the tendency, highlighted above, to chuck into the mix a few sayings/proverbs/wives’ tales - is his utter hypocrisy. This time, Matgamna denounces Machover for the religious overtones he uses by talking about evil. Hmmmm. I never knew that the believers owned a monopoly on good and evil. Enlightening stuff. However, in lunging for Mashover’s throat, Matgamna conveniently forgets that in his original article he, rather strangely I thought, said that Ahmadinejad should be sent to Hell…

Shooting fish in a barrel

Sometimes, I get a little bit tired of attacking the AWL. But then, just when I think I could be going a little over the top, I remember something. When it comes to the ruling class of one country versus the working class of another, you can’t claim to be a Socialist and then pick the ruling class. That’s what Sean Matgamna’s original “discussion article” did. This isn’t me being misleading; it’s plain fact. If you call yourself a Socialist and then can’t come up with a single reason why a no doubt imminent (and deadly) attack on Iran should be condemned, you aren’t a Socialist. You are siding with the imperialists against the same Iranian workers, women, students, trade unionists and socialists that you talk so much about defending. What use is the AWL’s idea of solidarity to Iranian people who might soon be dead in the ground?

In a complicated world, some things are very simple. Does Iran have nukes? No. Does Israel have nukes? Yes. So who poses the real threat to who?

‘Serious socialists tell the story about both sides,’ Matgamna writes, referring to the imperialists on the one hand and Iran on the other. In fact, telling both sides is something a lot of Socialists don’t have any trouble doing. I do it. I imagine most people reading this are perfectly capable of doing the same. Not Matgamna, however. Not the AWL. They tell the story of an Israeli ruling class looking to attack Iran. They tell the story of Israeli imperialists pretending that Iran is a terrifying threat on the horizon. They don’t tell the story of an Iran that, according to general consensus, is not developing nuclear weapons. They don’t tell the story of an Iranian working class that doesn’t want to be slaughtered, thank you very much.

To add insult to injury, at their National Committee the AWL decided to drop the phrase “oppose an attack” on Iran… They now “don’t take responsibility for it”; they are, in their own half-hearted way, “against it”. But that’s it.

By propagating the myths of the imperialists and failing to stand with Iranian comrades, the AWL has jumped into bed with imperialism. Let’s hope the love affair ends soon.