Radicals

I gather from Press reports that the Victoria University Socialist Club (so called) is disseminating misinformation in Wellington on Auckland events, in order to support one of its partners in the Radical Activists Conference political coalition, the Progressive Youth Movement. Demonstrations in Auckland, so far from centering around some alleged general persecution of the left, rather improbably starting with the Progressive Youth Movement (which claims not to be a left-wing group), have been simply directed against individual instances of excessive use of force by police in making arrests at demonstrations. Demonstrations, in other words, have been for civil liberties, rather than in defence of the Progressive Youth Movement.

I gather individual members of the Socialist Club, particularly George Fyson, have made what they have claimed to be attacks on the tactics of the Progressive Youth Movement. Such "attacks" have not prevented Mr. Fyson and his associates from arranging an Easter Conference with this group among others, and he has now gone out of his way to show his solidarity with PYM by organising a demonstration to support it. As he very well knows it is from the publications of this group on the 1968 French Revolution that the Progressive Youth Movement derives its theories that simply by engineering confrontations with the police they can make a revolution Why do Mr. Fyson and his associates in the Socialist Club, not admit that they are taking every step possible to provide theories and organise demonstrations in favour of the only New Zealand political group whose effective political programme consists entirely of provocation of the police?

(P.S.—If police attacks on PYM are a prelude to anything else, it it to an attack on Other groups which provoke the police, such as the "Hell's Angels", —O. G.)