This article was originally published as a thread on Twitter/X here.
Jacobin, the main pseudo-left journal of the pro-genocide Democratic Party, has interviewed DSA member Aidan J. Beatty. He repeats his slanderous biography’s claim that Gerry Healy and the British Trotskyists employed violence against political opponents and party members.
Beatty cites the so-called “Tate Affair” of November 1966, which was a provocation staged by opponents of the Socialist Labour League. Seeking to frame SLL leader Healy as violent, the Pabloites claimed that he had led a physical assault on one of their members, Ernie Tate.
Beatty states in the Jacobin interview that “Healy was present for this and essentially supervised the assault.” Having conducted no independent investigation into this notorious incident, Beatty simply repeats the libelous allegations of Healy’s political enemies.
“Libelous” is the appropriate word. Healy and the Socialist Labour League went to court to demand that two publications that had printed the allegations—Socialist Leader and Peace News—retract the story and issue a public apology to Gerry Healy.
Without any credible witnesses or credible evidence that supported Tate’s lying allegations, both Socialist Leader and Peace News issued retractions and public apologies.
Here is the statement issued by Socialist Leader on December 10, 1966.
This is the statement issued by Peace News on December 9, 1966.
A conscientious historian, adhering to the appropriate standards of scholarship, would have carefully researched all available sources in order to uncover what actually occurred in 1966. But Beatty is not a principled scholar. His book is anti-Trotskyist hack work.
At the height of his powers, Gerry Healy inspired workers and youth with confidence in the historical role of Trotskyism and power of the working class. This is an excerpt from his speech celebrating the launching of the daily Workers Press in September 1969.
Healy’s immense contribution to the fight for Trotskyism against the betrayals of the counter-revolutionary Stalinist and Social Democracy, spanning 40 years, is a matter of the historical record. It is not erased by his political degeneration in the 1970s and 1980s.
My comprehensive review of Beatty’s book can be accessed here.