& Iain McKay's Misplaced Critique!

BELOW Iain McKay addresses an e-mail to me in which he gives me

too much credit.  I can only assume that has responded in

such haste that he has failed to notice that I am not the author

of the critique on which he exercises so much passion. 

The author of all the critiques about 'Who Killed Freedom'

is clearly Christopher Draper who lives in Llandudno, and

though Mr. Draper writes for Northern Voices he is, as any one who

knows him will realise, very much his own man.  Iain ought to

understand that the words Northern Voices is in the plural, and

 is not one of those smelly little orthodoxies in which everyone speaks in chorus.

Dear Brian,

I'm sick and tired of your petty insults and smearing good comrades -- I also don't appreciate you twisting of my words.
Here is what I actually wrote:
'And what of "Total Liberty"  ?  If this analysis were accurate then that should have gone from strength to strength.  If I remember correctly, it became 'Anarchist Voices' -- does that still exist? I can find issues up to 2010 on-line.  It looks like it "lost its way" long before Freedom did...' compare that to Brian's 'Flaunting his ignorance, McKay celebrates the demise of the magazine "Anarchist Voices", which "lost its way long before FREEDOM did" but I can reassure Iain that it’s alive and well...'


The bad faith and dishonesty is clear. ' Flaunting my ignorance'... oh hum.  I guess that my going through the 'Freedom' archives from the 1880s to the 1960s to produce a Peter Kropotkin anthology amount to nothing... as does my reading of the paper from the late-1980s -- so I have 'flick[ed] through copies of FREEDOM before 2001.  Rest assured, the Freedom of the 1880s to 1930s was class-struggle focused, was communist-anarchist -- even if it opened its columns to others (and why not, if the articles are of sufficient interest and quality).   It is interesting to note that a single quote from 1919 apparently overturns the self-proclaimed communist-anarchist position 'Freedom' had from 1886.  Its recreation in the 1930s was also on this basis.  This did not exclude other anarchists writing for it -- as did other anarchists after 2001.  Something I have noted many times but which Brian fails to acknowledge.


So, all in all, I'm not sure why you are doing this Brian -- all you seem to be achieving is alienating people. Your insults on Richard Griffin are disgraceful (he is no 'useful idiot' and to suggest so shows you do not know him).   I'm not sure what you are trying to achieve by these poisonous emails -- given what you have written about me all I can say is that I would suggest that your readers take everything you write with a very large pinch of salt.   All in all, I really do have better things to do that reply to obvious distortions and insults. 


If you want to help build the anarchist movement in the UK, well, that would be good but, to be honest, it does not look like you want to do that -- if you did, you would not be writing such nonsense.   For the other people cc-ed into these bile-filled emails, if you want to do something constructive then please consider getting involved with Black Flag -- like the 'Freedom' Kropotkin helped create, it is a communist-anarchist journal. If that is not your version of anarchism, get involved with something more suitable for you (apparently 'Anarchist Voices' is still going).

Iain (McKay)