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[THREAD] Great speech (1985, excerpts) by the late Marxist activist and historian C. Desmond Greaves on the importance for socialists to embrace national sovereignty and oppose the EU (then the EEC):
1/ Democracy is the key to progress. And as James Connolly put it, the principle of democracy must function nationally before it can function internationally.
2/ It is not surprising therefore that the opponents of democracy have for the past thirty odd years concentrated their attacks on the principle of national sovereignty. Whereas before the war children were taught nationalism was a good thing, now they are taught that it is bad.
3/ Professor Herbert I Schiller has exposed the role of the news and advertising agencies run from the USA. “National sovereignty” he said “is the dirtiest expression in the American language”.
4/ A certain professor has published articles denigrating every national struggle the Irish ever engaged in. [There are books] debunking Pearse, watering down James Connolly, describing 1916 as a terrible mistake and claiming opposition to imperialism is based on psychopathology.
5/ Within the labour movement there are sections that decry the national independence struggle as a diversion from the task of getting socialism. They really mean talking about socialism.
6/ For there is scarcely one progressive step decided on by a Labour Party conference that would not involve the defiance of the EEC and flouting its rules. Tremendous pressures would be applied.
7/ It is time that the labour movement declared national sovereignty to be one of the fundamental elements of democracy. The British people have a fight for sovereignty on their hands.
8/ Sovereignty for the Welsh and the Scots (if they want it, and it is up to them) stands in no sort of opposition to this. And as for the Irish, they will go on fighting for it, until the majority of the Irish people rule the whole of their country. END
