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Can SA afford the ANC? | Global
"Guardians" convene | Who was there | Trevor Huddleston | Publisher's Letter |
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TREVOR HUDDLESTON |
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AN Australian subscriber has faxed me, saying he is "amazed" that I have made no comment on the death of my old adversary, Archbishop Trevor Huddleston. "Somebody," he says, "should put the record right." Agreed. It was a conscious decision I took last month not to write about Huddleston’s departure. I had little good to say about this monomaniacal opportunist when he was alive: and little better to say of him dead. But, considering the acres of newspaper space accorded his passing, the many maudlin tributes, particularly in the SA press - "a true saint," "God’s agitator," "a brave SA warrior" - maybe a dissenting voice is necessary. I should make my position on Huddleston immediately clear. Once this obsessed cleric had attached himself so blatantly to the cause of the ANC/SA Communist Party, and even more so when he publicly advocated armed conflict as the solution to SA’s problems, for me he ceased to be a priest and became just another dangerous, far left political activist. RACIST SA WINE My first personal brush with Huddleston came in the mid-1970s. I had been in London for sometime, working on something else. On several occasions I had come up against the activists of his British Anti-Apartheid Movement, then at the peak of its destructive power. Across Britain, AAM stalwarts were rushing into supermarkets, snatching politically incorrect Outspan oranges from the hands of bewildered old ladies. Other idiots joyously posed for the tabloids, obligingly smashing bottles of our fiendishly racist SA wine. Still more were holding perpetual and very noisy pickets in front of SA House in Trafalgar Square. It was not a wonderful time to be a South African in London. I was already nursing a substantial dislike for the AAM. One day a friend, then with Reuters, rang and asked me to have dinner with him. "Why?" I asked, suspiciously. "I have something that I think will interest you." He duly handed me a slender file, saying: "I can’t get any of this published. Now you try." For me, it was dynamite: precisely what many of us had long suspected. And that was: that the AAM was almost certainly a KGB front, one of that organisation’s most successful "active measures." Though he is credited with forming AAM in 1959/60, to boycott SA goods, I now had evidence that the movement was essentially the brainchild, not of Huddleston, but of two Moscow-aligned communist fronts: Liberation and the Movement for Colonial Freedom. |
Liberation, formerly the League Against Imperialism, was established by the Communist International (the Comintern) in 1927. Its national headquarters were originally in Germany, with Willi Muenzenberg, a celebrated German communist, its initial organiser. In 1933, the LAI was expelled from Germany. As with so many communist fronts of that time, it found refuge in London. Sometime in the early post WW2 years, Liberation linked up with the ANC and especially the SA Communist Party, all groups dedicated to the overthrow of the SA dispensation and the establishment of a socialist SA state, as envisaged by Stalin in 1928. AAM’s future chairman, SA-born Labour MP and member of the Soviet-front World Peace Council, Bob Hughes, was at one time vice-chairman of Liberation. AAM’s founders included a number of well-known SA communists, notably the late Sam Khan, SA’s first communist MP, and Rosalynd Ainslie. According to the Sunday Telegraph, 12.4.64, Ainslie was a correspondent for an East German news agency, a member of the CPGB (Communist Party, Great Britain) and of Christian Action. She later denied all three claims, but the Telegraph refused to backtrack. Other communists and ANC activists prominent in the Huddleston movement included Hilda Bernstein, one of the most successful of the SACP/ANC propagandists; Brian Bunting, a member of a well-known SA communist family; the late Joe Slovo; Albie Sachs; Yusuf Dadoo, late chairman, SACP; Alan Brooks and Harold Wolpe, at the time said to be the "brains" behind the ANC. BRITISH COMMUNISTS Other interesting names associated with AAM included Fred Carneson, an exiled South African and former political prisoner, who chaired the movement’s trade union committee; Brian Filing, one-time chairman of the Scottish AAM and a leading Stalinist member of the CPGB; Anthony O’Dowd, AAM treasurer and SACP member exiled from SA in 1965 and John Spack, exiled White SA student leader and an active member of the CPGB. British communists who took part in creating the AAM and helped run it in the early years included Idris Cox, Secretary of the International Department of the CPGB and Jack Woddis, who had been on the staff of yet another Soviet front, the World Federation of Trade Unions. Not insignificantly, simultaneously with the founding of the AAM came the launch of the SACP mouthpiece, The African Communist. |
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