'Dear Editor,
Having read the article in the Galway Advertiser about
Kevin Higgins, we wish to address his quote from “Socialist Worker” concerning
Darfur. We are sorry that an “acclaimed” Galway poet would use a quote out of
context.
The Darfur war was being
depicted as genocidal “Arabs” slaughtering “black Africans” –this bore little
relationship to facts. However, the depiction fitted the Islamophobic view of
Arabs as violent aggressors and the portrayal of Africans as “ever the
victims”.
It was problematic to label the conflict “genocide” in as
much as such a term did not convey the complexity of tensions, political
overspills, civil war, shifting alliances.
Creating ‘Arab’ versus
‘African’ was bogus, but powerful – in whose interests? We are alarmed that
Higgins would disingenuously use a quote – for his own interests.
“Socialist Worker” aims to
give readers a greater understanding of world politics than the controlled
mainstream media. Socialists deplore war — the senseless killing, suffering and
waste — and the agendas hiding behind military interventions.
Is Higgins a self-professed
socialist, just like an Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, if he thinks that, “the society
we have is far preferable to anything the comrades would bring”. So, children
living in poverty denied adequate housing and education, people dying from
curable diseases or on hospital waiting lists, and millions of innocents being
slaughtered in resource wars, are acceptable?
Maybe Higgins had an unhappy
childhood in Militant, or maybe he would have been better off if he had found
masturbation. He definitely didn’t find the socialism that many on the far left
in Galway envisage and work towards: true democracy, peace and equality,
whether one lives in Ireland or elsewhere. Thankfully, he doesn’t take himself
too seriously.
Yours Socialist Workers Party
Galway Branch'
As you read the above quoted letter the word 'measured' is perhaps not the first that floated to mind. But trust me, other responses to my comments in that interview were altogether less mild, as was recently alluded to in David Wheatley's quite detailed examination of my favourite subject.
But I digress, the good news is that the poem which so vexed the hard arsed revolutionaries of Galway SWP is on its way to achieving- if I might be so immodest as to type the word - immortality.
Said vexacious verse is included in the anthology The Hundred Years' War - Modern War Poems, Edited by Neil Astley.
