advantages of coordinating activity in many areas, me most oovious exampie being chila • organising a general campaign and providing support and assistance to lesbian mobbers who have to move abroad to keep their They thought that lesbian groups would be strengthened through international association. However, apart from making use of system of communication organising for and administration which the IGA has developed, areas, such as education, where it would be to the best adyantage for the women and men to work At the present time the women in ILGA are the lesbian meeting Barcelona conference next Easter. They are writing to lesbian groups throughout the world address. lesbian groups Amsterdam.
Council of Europe committees.
The Rights.. NIGRA The of Ulster MPs. reaction.
countries should be preparing for it now.
Women's Voice MOSS SIDE Women's Voice was set up in July, myorving supporters ol the International Marxist Group, Socialist Workers Party, Workers' Action and several members of the Labour Party. We were all confident that in an area like Moss Side there was real potential for building a healthy branch. After two organisational meetings and one public meeting, SWP supporters informed the rest of us that we could not join Women's Voice on the basis that we did not support the politics of the SWP.
This was the first we had heard of although our political affiliations had been known from the start. In fact the SWP supporters were initially keen to start working with us (it was our initiative to start the branch in the first place), although they soon began to manoeuvre against us when their political domination was threatened.
Astonishing arguments were given for excluding us. Firstly, those of us include reformist working class women, many of whom could organise militantly around a broad programme of "fighting for women's rights and socialism', and that revolutionary women should fight for their politics within the organisation. We maintain that unless Women's Voice becomes a genuinely democratic, broad-based organisation it will be unable to take the struggle for a working class women's movement any further.
We have since been informed by the SWP supporters that they could not confirm our exclusion from membership and that this was now a national Women's Voice decision. Although after three weeks this national decision is still not forthcoming they are persisting in excluding us from their activities. It is likely that this whole matter will be. debated at the coming Women's Voice conference. Weask women to pass resolutions at their Women's Voice branches calling for such democratic rights as the provision of a regular internal newsletter, 'guaranteed poltica rights tor tendencies, and for the magazine to express ditterent political viewpoints.
Similar letters have been sent to Workers' Action, Socialist Worker and Women's Voice. For further information contact Anna, 39 Mallowdale Close, Hulme, Manchester 15.
Vicki Anderson ASTMS, IMG). Rachel Wolstenholme [APEX, Moss Side CLP, Workers' Action supporter], Louise O'Connel [NALGO Moss Side CLP], Frances O'Grady [Moss Side CLP), Anna Twentyman [NUPE, Moss Side CLP, Workers' Action supporter] NIGEL Hamilton's little article on neither fish JOHN Pilger stated in the Daily Mirror that the Pol Pot regime was a Turnbull argued in Socialist Challenge last week that Pol Pot was different ways both are correct. The question that arises, however, is the regime, the subsequent invasion by Vietnam, and what exists today.
Trotskyist movement that the class character of a state can be easily ascertained. It is either a capitalist course, this is correct. But history can, on occasion, be cruel.
Exceptions, albeit of a limited and temporary duration, can exist. Children in Kampuchea — waiting for aid that doesn't come taken away product of imperialist savagery. Clive the product also of Stalinism. In their went down himself.
It is widely accepted within the state or a workers state. In general, of with Clive that It wasn't a case of substituting politically for the working class as the bureaucracy normally does. It was something completely different, which defies characterisation in terms normally used on the left. It is easy to sit back and say that it would have been infinitely better if Pol Pot had been overthrown by the Kampuchean masses. It would have been However, there is a danger that Pol Pot would have exterminated what was left of the population before he So we should admit that the Pol Pot regime was neither fish nor fowl. And as such it was characterised by an barbarism. Its overthrow. was a tiny step forward for the Kampucheans who are still alive. And one can agree pressure should be built up in the labour movement to press for all forms of aid.
TARIQ ALI, North London Holland should quote Lewis Carol or Peter Pan as a little angels wil in contrast to the 'savage attact: on children's sexuality taking place outside the playhouse. Both J.M Barrie and Carroll were paedophiks, and tolerated as such as the medium by which the Victorian middle class cameto termis with the existence of, and their cravings for, sexual children. Under age sexuality was recognised and wrapped up in a cloying innocence. Embedded in Peter Pan is the image of the paedophile as an immature adult, 'the person who never grew up', and that image embodies many deep felt - be denied — fantasies that adults have for children.
Paedophiles are adults who love children. The number of adults who love children is immense. But the number of paedophiles...?
Well, just stop for a moment and muse over parent/child relationships. Pretty mundane, you might say. But if 1 were to turn up on your doorstef dear (adult) reader, and strike up a similar relationship with 'your' child how long would it be before I was being carted off to the local nick with perhaps ten years (or much more) inside after the court case!
And what if dear 'little x' decide to go to Paris with me for a dirty weekend? Or forever? So much for biological parenthood. (This paragraph constitures a Conspiray to Corrupt Public Morals, so please regard it in a hypothetical light... until it happens.)
Show me an adult who is Doc a paedophile. Then l'll join Mar! Whitehouse and betiere in immorality. Ser with children is wonderful and can be biett recommended te all SCreates. (Oops! Anorber Consper aT 10 Corrupi.) Cribtrez are soadets a they should not be subjected to zay kind of guilt trip of legal shit abo their bodies and their serman. Is theirs, and robout che's.
TIM BROWN. Le
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Dylan dead for years