Life among the communists. (Letters).

SIR: In his criticism (Letters, April 2002) of my article in the January-February issue, Barry York believes me "morally no better than those who attack the dead of September 11" because I criticised the inconsistencies and political double standards of the recently deceased communist activist Dave Rubin. I'll leave it up to your readers to judge my questionable morality. I would not have taken up the pen regarding Rubin if his Age obituarist, David Langsam, had not penned such a one-sided and sanitised panegyric about Rubin's political career.

York writes that it's "about time" I remembered my own past as a communist. How could I forget two decades of delusion, defending the regimes of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot? He obviously has not been reading Quadrant for long. Since 1987 I have had several letters published in these pages where I drew on my experiences as a communist in an attempt to warn against the mindset that leads to the "totalitarian temptation". I have "recanted'. I am "on record" as an anticommunist ex-communist. And when I die, whoever can be bothered may say what they like about my twenty years of Marxist-Leninist lunacy, or my renunciation of it.

But nowhere in my article did I disparage "opposition to fascism", support for "Aboriginal rights" or "the right of workers to take industrial action". You can--and this was my point--support all of these struggles without calling for the violent overthrow of the capitalist system and the imposition of a communist regime. I did point out, however, that communists in the 1960s and 1970s supported these struggles--as Barry York must remember from our mutual membership ...