FOR FORTY YEARS Since April of last year, the Workers Revolutionary Party headed by Gerry Healy has devoted a great deal of its time and apparently abundan! financial resources to a campaign purporting to deal with 'Security and the Fourth International'. Altogether 26 articles on this subject appeared in the late Workers Press. Now arrival in this country of Harold Robins, one of Trotsky's guards in Mexico, and George Vereeken from Belgium.
Nineteen of the articles which appeared in Workers Press between 14 August and 9 September have been re-published in a luxury paperback under the title How the GPU murdered Trotsky - Security and the Fourth International. At £3 per copy, the 1% million unemployed workers of this country must be making a bee-line for the bookshops to purchase this masterpiece of nes ane innuendoes hardy anyone today doubts Inal ITOIsKy was murdered on the orders of Stalin, and that 'Jacques Mornard" (Mercader) was a GPU agent. So the purpose of this campaura is not to prove ine gult or une arcmul masters. What then lies behind this prodigious expenditure of time, effort and moncy? The real reason is to launch a terocious alack on une rown memnanona and Is leadership. BY CHARLES VAN GELDEREN; TROTSKYIST ACTIVIST aruce was written in the american rainer than the British idiom. Careless editing left in words like 'railroad' instead of trailways', "labour' was spelt in the American way without the 'u', and so on. It therefore came as no great surprise when John Lawrence (at the time a member of the Political Committee and a staunch supporter of Healy) informed me that the article was, in fact, written by George Novack, and that Healy himself had proposed that it should be published under his name.
Perhaps there should be a Commission set up to enquire how many of Healy's articles were written by him, or ghosted by comrades whom he now accuses of being GPU accomplices?
It is precisely because Healy was so close to comrades hansen ana vovack inat ne never forgave them for "deserting' him and his International Committee, which is why he is carrying on this vile campaign rar irom running away irom healy s charges, Hansen has met them head-on, and replied to them point-by-point in a number of articles in Intercontinental Press. Comrades of the WRP who are really interested in getting at the truth should not accept the garbled 'quotations' appearing in News Line but should read for themselves what Hansen and Novack have written. We HEALY - present-day exponent of Stalin's technique of the big lie and frame-up commend to their attention especially Intercontinental Press of 24 November 1975 I wach mansen answers te key aucgat ions; the article by George Novack in the Intercontinental Press of December 1975 -"Healy's frame-up against Joseph Hansen'; and, above all, the full-length repudiation or Healy's tacts in the issue or y August Healy Caught in the Big Lie, 1970WHICIC Hansen completely demolishes Healy's fabrications.
In his frenzied to destroy Fourth International, Healy has himself some strange ales. them George Vereeken Belgium, described in News Line of 16 organisation prior to the Founding Conference. The WIL preferred to pursue its own sectarian path and linked itself with Veree ken, the Molinier group in France, and other sectarians who considered themselves more Trotskyist than Trotsky. These organisations published a Draft Resolution for an International Conference' (La Verité, August 1939, No. 2) [1] which contained the following:
The organisations condemn the bureau cratic system by means of which Trotsky [my emphasis —CvG] through the agency of the International Secretariat manoeuvre: the B-L Groups, renewing the system of the first years of the Cl, a system which favoured the triumph of the bureaucracy over the Left Opposition. [2] The same EC which rejected Vereeken also considered an application for 'sympathetic affiliation' from the WIL. The EC declared itself as not opposed to sympathetic affiliation 'in cases where an organisation is moving towards us. but in this case the WIL has shown by its actions that it is moving away from us....
In an interview in News Line (19 August, 1976), Vereeken states: "My respect for him Trotsky increases as years Trotsky's clear-sightedness about social poltical and scientine development was unmatched.' What a pity that he should have spent so many years, while Trotsky was alive and trving to build the Fourth International, opposing Trotsky on nearly every important issue; and that now, once again, we find him in the camp of those who are trying to destroy Trotsky's InterTALONE Vereeken also bemoans the fact that Trotsky was 'misled' about him by agents of the GPU. This probably refers to the rumour, which was rife at the time, that Vereeken had implicated Trotsky's son Sedov, in the assassination by the GPU of Ignace Reiss. Who were these GPU agents who sc easily pulled the wool over Trotsky's eyes?