Workers' Liberty 33, July 1996

By Jim Higgins It is always a pleasure to see Sean Matgamna in full spate and my enjoyment of his piece, “Paul Foot, philo-semite” (WL 32), was abated only by the fear that the might do himself a serious mischief, carrying that immense weight of heavy irony. What a spiffing wheeze, Sean must have though, to belabour Footie with Hilaire Belloc, because one thing is sure, whatever Foot’s prejudices may happen to be, Belloc was a brass-bound and copper-bottomed anti-semite, the author of the lines: “How odd of God, to choose the Jews.” Now I have not read, and I hope I do not have to do so, the...

By Sean Matgamna In the recently made Disney cartoon version of the “Hunchback of Notre Dame” — so I’ve read somewhere — Quasimodo — “Quassi” — is not seriously deformed, and he is not cripplingly deaf; the villain is no longer a priest; the chirpy, friendly characters sing to each other in American accents; and, for all I know, it ends with Esmerelda and Quasimodo — “Essie and Quassi” — going off together hand in hand into the sunset. It explains quite a lot, though it does, I admit, surprise me, that Jim Higgins operates with a - darker-toned - Disneyfied version of history. When I read Jim...

James D Young (Workers' Liberty 32) is too starry-eyed about C L R James. James wrote a few good books - The Black Jacobins, World Revolution, and, so people who might know tell me, Beyond A Boundary, the one about cricket. But as a political thinker or activists there is - aside perhaps from his working organising sharecroppers in the American Deep South: or is that story a myth, like so much else? - not much to be said for him and a lot to be said against him. It is forgotten now, but in the 40s James and his faction - the so-called Johnson-Forest tendency, then part of the Shachtmanite...