The dominant PSA faction has endless narratives to justify what they do and explain their tactics. The NSW ALP government is in a far more powerful position and its machinations are way more finessed. These two factors interact. Like all unions, the PSA is reaping the sterile harvest it helped sow some time ago.

I doubt that Bob’s take on NotoPope is representative of the broader Australian community, it all its marvellous diversity, let alone that of the Catholic community in all its fabulous diversity too. An aesthetic distaste for the half piss-taking condom gift tactic is understandable for people of more serious, mature disposition, but not a convincing reason for dissing it politically. And I doubt many of the “pilgrims” would be offended. Certainly, few young people would have blinked an eye in the 60s or 70s at such playful theatre. It’s comparable to the 1980s gay male Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence act or 70s lesbians dressing as pregnant nuns declaring they have gratefully received God’s steel prick. I quite liked Phillip Adams in his Australian column this week declaring his preferred t-shirt du jour: “I was touched by the Pope down under”.

Criticism of the WYD, the current Pope and the reactionary role of the Catholic Church, on so many political levels, is widely understood and supported, including within the Catholic Church itself. The use of humour and farce to get our feminist and democratic messages across is essential. For some people of privilege these things are not so important because they do not materially impact on their lives as human beings.

The idea that handing out condoms would be counter-productive in relation to the 2008 WYD Sydney pilgrims is about as naively quaint as is their feudal/celebrity worship of a human god father.

And I can’t help but laugh and cry thinking of what Barangaroo, Bennelong’s stroppy, suspicious, curmudgeonly wife, would have made of all the hullabaloo and the constant, mindless invocation of her name this week.

That would be because we agreed with you on your main point.

As far as the Jacobite thing goes: it helps to think of this (long defunct) movement in terms of Ireland rather than Scotland. Bob’s sympathies make a lot more sense then. Of course, the kings of France the Jacobites relied upon were “the Bourbon kings who are said to have learned nothing and forgotten nothing”.

Briefly back to the RSP: a lot of the people in the DSP who I considered friends were part of the group that became the RSP. If I had been a DSP member at the time, it would have been tempting to side with with them.

That said, the RSP’s perspective was dead spot-on wrong. It consisted, in effect, of a combination of an excessively negative appraisal of politics in Australia with an over-emphasis on international “solidarity work”. That combination tends to (but doesn’t inevitably) lead to a half-hearted and sectarian approach to struggles in Australia.

Opportunism and sectarianism are equal and opposite errors. It is possible that the DSP may have stumbled into some opportunist errors, but these are, in my opinion, far less serious in the current environment than the sectarian errors that are so effective at destroying far left groups.

The RSP is a dead end. It takes all the mistakes the DSP has made in its history, and turns them into principles. Hopefully, it won’t recruit anyone.

And yet I’m not keen on attacking them. They are still, in the end, friends.

Off to work.

Alan B

In my view, socialists and Marxists are children of the enlightenment and we fight for issues such as abortion rights, the rights of gay people, for stem cell research, and I don’t resile from any of that.

I also totally oppose the strengthening of the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state in all its forms and I’m pleased that Rachel Evans and her friend won the case in the High Court to partly quash the latest extension of laws to restrict civil liberties.

Nevertheless, I oppose anything that calls itself NoToPope, and I’m against any demonstration attacking any religious festival, including the World Youth Day.

Firstly there’s a tactical consideration. Socialists should challenge the capitalist state in a considered way. I defend anyone’s right to demonstrate, but I will only lend my support to actions that are called with some judgment and common sense. I support large demonstrations against visiting imperialist leaders or business leaders or politicians engaged in acts against the working class. I’ve been involved in many such demonstrations, the most recent being the protests against visiting imperialist leaders for the APEC summit.

Even in that case, I favoured concentrating the fire on the major imperialist leaders and not oppressed Third World countries, whose leaders were present for reasons of diplomacy and trade.

I totally oppose demonstrations against major events of any religion, and I’m most bitterly opposed to demonstrations against Islamic events because of the pressing current issue of Islamophobia.

For similar reasons, I oppose demonstrations directed at this enormous Catholic religious event and I oppose insulting the religious views of Catholics by handing out condoms at religious events, in the same way I oppose handing out condoms at, for instance, Friday prayers at a mosque.

Obviously the current priority is to fight Islamophobia, but you live in a fool’s paradise if you think anti-Catholic prejudice is entirely dead in a country that orginated in British imperialism, such as Australia.

The Catholic working class, and even a section of the Catholic middle class have always been part of the oppressed in Australia. Newer Catholic migrants from countries such as the Philippines, Vietnam and other places are in fact among the most oppressed.

My political outlook is based on the need to unite the working class and the oppressed rather than to divide them on religious lines.

One of my main objections to Cardinal Pell is his tendency from time to time to stir up Islamophobia, and one only has to look at the Fairfax press to see the way it implicitly invokes traditional Anglo animosity to Catholics. Inflaming such divisions is the work of the ruling class, not socialists.

In internal conflicts in the Catholic church I favour progressive Catholics, such as the Josephite nuns, Frank Brennan, Sir William Dean, the current Jesuits, and the Catholic priest at Mt Druitt who quite rightly objected to the massive expenditure on some of the ceremonial regalia for World Youth DAy. He pointed out that the money would be better spent on poor parishes such as Mt Druitt.

I also have great respect for Bishop Manning of Parramatta, who spoke at the rally against electricity privatisation at Parliament House.

Most of these progressive Catholics are involved in one way or another in World Youth Day as a religious event despite their misgivings about the right-wing policies and practices of people and organisations such as the present Pope, Cardinal Pell, Opus Dei and the neo-catechumens.

A wholesale general attack, with abusive overtones, from outside the Catholic church inevitably has crude anti-Catholic overtones, even to progressive Catholics.

I also, as a former Catholic and a person of Irish heritage, have an aesthetic and cultural distaste for kicking Catholics in this way, with all the overtones that it invokes from the reactionary history of Anglo-Australian society.

The Catholic mass was banned in NSW for the first 10 or 15 years of the colony, and Protestant bigots tried to ban St Patrick’s Day in Melbourne during World War I because of Archbishop Mannix’s activities against conscription and in favour of Irish independence.

My reference to Ian Paisley to Wombo in Newtown was quite considered. When the last Pope went to Northern Ireland 20 years ago, Paisley was frothing at the mouth about the Pope being the whore of Babylon. This theme was taken up a few days ago by the Christadelphian church in a quarter page ad in one of the Sydney papers, indicting the Pope and Roman church as the anti-Christ in the Book of Revelation.

A NoToPope coalition, which involves a bloc with the Atheist Society and the Raelians (the people who think there’s a spaceship parked behind the moon waiting to take us all away) is a reactionary, lunatic political stunt.

There’s no mileage for socialists in starting a religious war with anyone. Our business should be to unite the working class and the most oppressed.

I’ve just had a pilgrim in my shop this evening, a young man from Northern Ireland, a rather religious student of theology at the Irish National University, who bought a few books on religion, and a book criticising religion in relation to the theology of the devil.

I asked him about politics and he turned out to be a supporter of Sinn Fein and a great admirer of Martin McGuinness (he lives near Derry).

I went last night to a Socialist Alternative meeting on the trade unions. A bit to my surprise, the approach to trade unionism was quite sensible and the lecturer tried to explain all aspects of the trade union struggle. This caused my to revise my view of Socialist Alternative a bit.

Towards the end of the meeting, when the demonstration against the Catholic religious festival on Saturday was mentioned, one of the rank and file piped up quite stubbornly saying he opposed the whole idea of the demonstration. I agreed with him and said so, and my view was quite well received.

Di Fields, one the Socialist Alternative leaders, also spoke and it seems there has been a fairly vigourous discussion about the matter, because she said activities should be concentrated against the Iemma government and the reactionary anti-protest law, but she opposed politically attacking the pilgrims and the Pope.

She also referred to a demonstration a few days before on indigenous questions, which turned out to be small, but which was substantially expanded by members of a Jesuit-influence lay Catholic group from about eight countries.

She ended on the note that attacking the pilgrims and the Pope was crazy and we should be trying to win allies among the pilgrims. I agree.

There’s clearly a serious discussion going on in Socialist Alternative circles about the wisdom of endorsing the World Youth Day stunts initiated mainly by the DSP.

Like I said before: I wasn’t accusing Bob Gould of Islamophobia, merely of going silent on the question when the ALP were the culprit. And of bringing in the “No Popery” furphy.

Anyway, I’ve got other things I should be doing and there are political differences which aren’t likely to be resolved here. Bob Gould sees Green Left Weekly and the organisations associated with it as being obsessed with exposing the ALP: we see him as obsessed with providing the ALP cover.

By the way, the spaminator objected to your three links. The WordPress spaminator assumes anything with more than two links is a sales pitch for genital enlargment technology or medication, gambling websites, etc. We have to fish out the important stuff with multiple links.

1. I wasn’t inferring that Bob Gould was a vile racist, I was pointing out (not inferring) that the Islamophobia encapsulated in the vile racist opposition to the Camden school was the face of religious bigotry in Australia today: not the anti-catholicism of the protestant ascendancy that has largely disappeared from Australia. What I was inferring was (i) his bizarre accusation that the Socialist Alliance and Resistance being involved in the NoToPope represented “dredging up from the primitive past the Anglo-Australian ascendancy’s traditional bigoted slogan of no Popery” was drawing a long bow; & (ii) perhaps his reluctance to attack religious bigotry as it actually exists in contemporary Australia may be related to his loyalty to the ALP.

2. The current Green Left Weekly has articles on Ecuador, Britain Switzerland, Malaysia, East Timor, Japan, Peru, Nepal, Korea, amongst others, last week’s on some of these places plus Afghanistan, Columbia, Bolivia, Pakistan, Zimbabwe, India, the US, Burma, Iraq… I could go on but I think its clear that our reporting goes way beyond the four countries you mentioned. Of course the country we report on most is Australia because that’s where we are.

3. I’m glad you agree that WYD “provides not-to-be-missed and important opportunities in a variety of forums and by many means to lambast the Catholic Church’s reactionary position particularly in relation to the crucial questions of women’s right to reproductive control. These are not secondary issues.” That’s exactly what we have been doing, not dredging up slogans of the protestant ascendancy.

Firstly, Bob has been around a long time as Wombo in a surprisingly clumsy and ageist way acknowledged. But to suggest, as you did he, is a religious bigot or Islamophobic is beyond pathetic. If anything, Bob’s writings have made clear that he is much more in the Terry Eagleton camp on the question of religion than that of say, Louis Proyect or all the socialist-cum-Marxist (sic) sects like the DSP - or its Frankenstein offspring, the RSP.

Secondly, Bob can’t comment on everything and Ozleft is not a news outlet. In this context I note that the DSP, the progenitor of its mirror-image, the RSP, seems to think that international politics can be adequately covered by only ever reporting on narrowly focussed developments in Cuba, Venezuela, Palestine, and Indonesia. What you got against the rest of the world!

The Pope’s visit to the WYF provides not-to-be-missed and important opportunities in a variety of forums and by many means to lambast the Catholic Church’s reactionary position particularly in relation to the crucial questions of women’s right to reproductive control. These are not secondary issues.

Captain Swing, I think the fact is that industrial action is not seen by most workers today as something that can be effective. It is not a question of them/us rejecting it as a tactic that could be successful. And like it or not this reality which has complex causes is also a factor that the union bureaucracy cannot ignore. Which is not to say mass industrial action is finished as a tactic. But it is problematic and not necessarily the measure of opposition - today. Work with it.