Micheal O'Riordan. Facing political facts (tags)
Micheal O'Riordan, the leader of the Irish Communist party has just died. He was one of the Irish men who fought in the Spanish civil war against Franco. This gave him a certain aura. In the past ten years he has become a sort of warm and fuzzy symbol for the social democratic left, and the leadership of such outfits as Sinn Fein. The correspondence on Indymedia in Ireland about him is pretty much subservient. What a wonderful and determined man of the left he was; along these lines. In order to bring some balance to the discussion I sent the comments below to Irish Indymedia. I felt that it was necessary to take a stand. It is not acceptable to let the lives of the millions of workers and revolutionaries who were slaughtered by Stalinism to go unmentioned. Nor can it be ignored that Stalinism was a catastrophe in other ways. Its disastrous failure ushered in the new capitalist regimes in the former Stalinist world with all the horrors these are bringing with them.