Harry’s Place

How appropriate in the light of the above that LAP’s website appears to date from the Soviet-era. Avoid if you’re prone to migraines. And fascinating - if tragically predictable - that the only two ‘countries’ listed in its bar across the top are Palestine and Lebanon. I suppose it is axiomatic amongst that part of the left that the need for peace is greater there than, say, Congo or Somalia.

If you want to know about traitors in the Labour party look no further than Kate Countryside Alliance Hoey.

Just spotted this on the ‘Palestine’ article at LAP -

“One person’s ‘terrorist’ is another persom’s ‘freedom fighter’.”

Makes you think, eh? Clearly some original thinkers there. I take back all my rude comments.

Hang on, didn’t some contributors to this website formerly support the Soviet Union?

They got better.

Kate Countryside Alliance Hoey.

Yeah, because secretly betraying your country to a country like the USSR, which murdered millions of its own citizens, while torturing and enslaving those it did not kill, is pretty much the same thing as openly advocating chasing foxes on horseback.

Why is the Left so fucked up?

What is particulalrly appalling is that this all happened before Chimpy McHitlerburton turned the whole world against America.

‘Hang on, didn’t some contributors to this website formerly support the Soviet Union?’

Of course, Harry himself was a proud self-described Stalinist.

You’ll find his former comrades here

http://www.network54.com/Forum/393207/message/1219850741/Harry+Slime+hits+the+rocks

Aside from Cynthia Roberts, was/is Walter Wolfgang a spy too? As is usual with these things, its often a case of smear by association. Person A was or is associated with person or group X; X is associated with Y, who did Z, etc. We are asked to join all the dots, but they seem increasingly distant.

Labour Action for Peace is now the new bogey-man, and apparently was a “highly influential anti-nuclear group”, according to the Mail. The game is to associate as many folk with this group as possible etc., and vaguely suggest they were spies or engaged in something untoward.

Moreover, I wish I could say that the Mail on Sunday and Murdoch man Kamm were unbiased sources, but they are not.

As far as I can tell, Labour Action for Peace was significantly the base from which spies and sympathisers with some of the most brutal and oppressive Communist regimes in Europe

You use spies in the plural - I presume you will now name other spies operating in the LAP or the Labour Party.

As I remember it Ms Hoey, when a member of the International Marxist group round my way, would have been quite happy to betray her country to virtually anyone whether they chased foxes or not…

No surprise, then, to see John McDonnell featuring on the LAP website. Once a man has called for honours in recognition of “the bravery of the IRA”, it cannot take much of an ideological effort for him to recognise the “bravery” of Hamas and Hezbollah too.

David, when are you going to start posting serious articles again?

Aside from Cynthia Roberts, was/is Walter Wolfgang a spy too

I don’t know - is he?

You’d have thought that, at some point, members of LAP might have thought:

“Hang on - a lot of our members seem very keen on Stalinism, and appear to spend a lot of their time defending Stalinist regimes, while calling for ‘peace’ and disarmament. I wonder if any of them are… you know… actually working for the USSR”

In fact, when Professor Vic Allen - on the CND council - was exposed as a Stasi spy, what did CND say?

If I recall correctly, they said that they’d known about it all along.

I would like to see exhibitions touring British schools and universities, illustrating the horror of life in a Stalinist state: much in the manner of Holocaust survivors.

Britain deserves credit for having played its role in the defeat of this evil system.

Those who supported it, sometimes as paid agents, should be ashamed of themselves. I don’t feel their shame is sufficiently public.

The thing is, there are people who will always be opposed to CND, groups in the Labour Party, even the whole Labour Party, and will quite happily use the reds under the bed thing to attack them with. This will be done via vague accusations, generalisation, exaggeration, smear, all the usual stuff. That can develop into McCarthyism. That is a separate motivation from a focused concern on genuine traitors and spies. So all that all needs to be separated out.

Benjamin - that is a legitimate point, but then perhaps CND, LAP and other leftie groups could help themselves by not allowing Soviet spies to become leaders of their organisations in the first place.They really don’t do themselves any favours.

“Those who supported it, sometimes as paid agents, should be ashamed of themselves. I don’t feel their shame is sufficiently public.”

I am glafd to hear you say that, though I don’t think you go far eonough. There were also many public apologists for the Soviet Union (which includes anyone who ever publicly asserted that the USA and the USSR were “as bad as each other”) who have never given any kind of public mea culpa or recantation of their views - and there are very many in high positions in public life, including serving in the current Labor government.

There is a very simple test: to those on the left, substitute Nazi for Soviet, and consider whether or not the attitudes were acceptable. For those on the right, the reverse. It is inconceiveable that the joint head (or indeed anybody in a leadership position) of an organization claiming equivalence between Germany and USA during WWII would have been appointed a minister in 1951 - and yet a person with precisely equivalent beliefes, with no recantation was appointed a British government minister in 1997.

There is perhaps (and I’m being generous there) some excuse for having held such views during the cold war, before the Moascow archives were opened, proving as fact what many of us had been ridiculed for asserting for years. There can be no possible excuse for the unrepentant apologists today.

Interestingly, William McKelvey was the man who signed up George Galloway to the Dundee Labour Party, and promoted him within it. Perhaps unsurprisingly they were both involved in the strange financial arrangements surrounding the Dundee Labour Clubs.

Although years later.Galloways grovelling to the Baathists in Bagdhad peruaded even McKelvey that George had gone over the brink.

“Cynthia Roberts is a traitor. She betrayed her party. She betrayed her country.”

how does all of that tally with Caroline Flint and Margaret Beckett’s role in potentially making 10,000s homeless on the whim of a few bureaucrats?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/3416483/Council-house-tenants-to-lose-the-right-to-a-home-for-life.html

in terms of being a traitor, I suspect that 4+ million people (2.8 Council houses) effected by these proposed changes will be more concerned to hang Labour for its attack on the very concept of Social Housing, rather than worry about the red baiting which is a staple fare of the Daily Mail.

Just in case that wasn’t clear, Labour’s proposals on Council housing are more traitorous than some aged tankies alleged activities, and Labour will pay that price at the next general election.

And now Galloway is, quite openly, a paid agent of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

I would like to see exhibitions touring British schools and universities, illustrating the horror of life in a Stalinist state: much in the manner of Holocaust survivors.

I think that just as many people did not fully confront the crimes of the nazis until the TV series of the late seventies (”Holocaust” and “The world at war”) we are only just coming to terms with what both the Soviet archives have belatedly revealed about Stalinism and (even more importantly) what ordinary people have themselves finally revealed about living in a Stalinist state. Sheila Fitzpatrick’s “Everyday Stalinism”

http://www.amazon.com/Everyday-Stalinism-Ordinary-Extraordinary-Soviet/dp/0195050002

should be required reading for everyone whilst (I know some people don’t like his mum) Orlando Figes’ : “The Whisperers” is quite breathtaking.

As for the silly old farts in the west who refused to understand what an evil system Soviet Communism was - well if you ask me their wasted lives were an appropriate punishment.

They haven’t done this secretly. They’ve done it openly, as a matter of policy. That is a very different thing from a Labour party activist and PPC selling her country’s secrets to a tyrannical enemy.

I think that any attempt to throw people, living on the breadline, out of state subsidised housing would result in an electoral disaster. I would find it difficult to vote for any party which proposed such a thing.

However, if Labour were to introduce procedures to ensure that - for example - a person earning £117,000 a year did not also benefit from the open ended right to live in a subsidised £90 per week four bedroom terraced house, I expect that it would prove very popular.

I’m not sure how one can argue against sales of council properties to tenants, while supporting the right to live in such a house for a peanuts, forever.

mod, certainly it is possible to oppose regressive housing policies and to reject kowtowing (and worse) to Stalinist regimes. Reporting on strong evidence that a Labour party activist was an agent for Communist Czechoslovakia is hardly red-baiting.

And now Galloway is, quite openly, a paid agent of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Yes.
A platform (the home of Holocaust deniers, PressTV) he uses to criticise the bias of the BBC.
It will be interesting to see his stance on Ahmadinajads relection campaign.

Of course, in Dundee, it was the old Communists in the Labour party who first spotted that George was not to be trusted around cash.

David,

“It is a housing association property, the modern-day equivalent of the council house, although not a typical one.”

do you know the difference? that’s NOT a Council House. Or shall we destroy Social Housing just to get even with Jasper? come on, David, please

and how this even got onto a Green Paper is beyond me, destroying Social Housing in Britain shouldn’t be Labour’s legacy? doing the Tories job for them?

Labour will never get re-elected, it would provide the BNP with an immediate base of 10,000s and that is traitorous

Gene, I appreciate that you might not be familiar with the Daily Mail (”Hurray for Blackshirts”, the 1930s fascists that they backed, etc) but this is standard stuff for them, it is a RAG, a low end newspaper, the Daily Mail is the journalistic equivalent of Limbaugh/Hannity and Savage rolled into one.

“Gene, I appreciate that you might not be familiar with the Daily Mail (”Hurray for Blackshirts”, the 1930s fascists that they backed, etc) but this is standard stuff for them, it is a RAG, a low end newspaper, the Daily Mail is the journalistic equivalent of Limbaugh/Hannity and Savage rolled into one.”

Okay, but was she an agent of a commies spy service, or not?

You’d have thought that, at some point, members of LAP might have thought:

“Hang on - a lot of our members seem very keen on Stalinism, and appear to spend a lot of their time defending Stalinist regimes, while calling for ‘peace’ and disarmament. I wonder if any of them are… you know… actually working for the USSR”

Is this another spoof article, to draw attention to the number of people on the left twisting themselves in knots to defend Iran?

mesquito,

I don’t know, but the Daily Mail/Mail in Sunday are generally as journalistically accurate as the National Enquirer or the National Examiner, along the lines of “Elvis was Stalin’s secret love child”, “Aliens/Little Green Men caused 9/11, and ate my husband”, etc

I think you get the point?

I will betray my country for one grand. Please email me at wardytron@yahoo.co.uk.

The National Enquirer was right about John Edwards, so the
Daily Mail could be right about this according to modernity logic.

“The National Enquirer was right about John Edwards, so the
Daily Mail could be right about this according to modernity logic.”

Well, we should hold our horses until the Daily Mail’s scoop is confirmed by The Guardian.

Is this another spoof article, to draw attention to the number of people on the left twisting themselves in knots to defend Iran?

It might as well be.

Labour will never get re-elected, it would provide the BNP with an immediate base of 10,000s and that is traitorous

Without commenting one way or another on the proposals I’m not altogether sure this is true. In fact the idea that rich professionals are occupying social housing would IMHO be much more likely to drive people into the arms of the BNP. (And I speak as a not very rich professional who occupies social hosuing.)

I will betray my country for one grand.

God you are cheap - what happened to betraying your country for principle?

By all means, mesquito.

Graham,

please investigate the Govt. Green Paper, it is a nasty Tory inspired idea

and I can’t see that REMOVING security of tenancy will make Council Tenants feel happier, particularly in run down areas where that is the ONE thing holding things together

it is a gift to the BNP, a sizable chunk (not all, but a chunk) of Tenants will desert Labour, they won’t vote Tory, they’ll be sucked up by the BNP as it presents itself as “defender of the working class”

see http://modernityblog.wordpress.com/2008/11/12/dont-do-domestics/

Well, we should hold our horses until the Daily Mail’s scoop is confirmed by The Guardian.

Not very likely, I suppose. The problem is, the leftwing press is unlikely to report this sort of thing. Rather like us sometimes having to rely on rightwing sources for reports on non-BNP-type antisemitism.

“Not very likely, I suppose. The problem is, the leftwing press is unlikely to report this sort of thing.”

I remember those lurid, alarming Reader’s Digest articles about the peace movment, the World Council Of Churches, and the KGB. The reactionaries were right!

I remember those lurid, alarming Reader’s Digest articles about the peace movment, the World Council Of Churches, and the KGB. The reactionaries were right!

Susan Sontag, of all people, said that if you compared someone who only read The Reader’s Digest between 1950 and 1970 to someone who only read The Nation over the same period, the Reader’s Digest reader would be better informed about the true nature of Communism.

She must have been rumbled in 1986. She wouldn’t have run to Prague otherwise. Her handlers would have wanted to keep her where she would be most useful, for as long as possible.

We shouldn’t be surprised, she is not the first, and won’t be the last. There may well be others in that organisation, given that many of them define peace as the success of warfare by the other side.

One of the things about traitors that fascinates me the most, is the way they can so easily transfer their allegiance to any new enemy, whenever circumstances change.

The allegation that LAP lagely consists of pacifists and people with naive views of the Soviet Union is hardly news.

The only news in the “Mail” story is an allegation about someone who moved on back in 1997.

DaveW @ 16 November 2008, 5:30 pm

“There were also many public apologists for the Soviet Union (which includes anyone who ever publicly asserted that the USA and the USSR were “as bad as each other”) who have never given any kind of public mea culpa or recantation of their views - and there are very many in high positions in public life, including serving in the current Labor government.”

Exactly who of this character are you alleging is serving in the current Government?
Why do you spell Labor without a u?

Ever since Harold Wilson was the young President of the Board of Trade in the 1940’s it has been prudent to assume that the left wing of the British Labour Party was in close contact with the Czechoslovakian intelligence service. Until proved otherwise, of course.

And where’s your proof? Everyone knows that the Labour Party was as clean as a whistle until the late 50s, the days of Tom Driberg, Will Owen etc.

I recall when Melita Norwood was unmasked, it emerged that the security services had known of her subterfuge for some years but declined to intervene because she was a past-harm old grandmother.

And now Galloway is, quite openly, a paid agent of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Gene and Tim, could you clarify? Agent, in my mind, indicates and individual who is actively working for a named state agency against another. Reasons for Galloway’s expulsion from the Labour Party, I understand, include exhorting British soldiers to disobey orders and endorsing attacks against them, not to mention endorsing opposing candidates in official elections.

Even if he now provides services for an official Iranian government organization, is it sufficient to claim he is working against the British state?

‘Ever since Harold Wilson was the young President of the Board of Trade in the 1940’s it has been prudent to assume that the left wing of the British Labour Party was in close contact with the Czechoslovakian intelligence service.’

Wilson was not a traitor - read the first volume of the Mitrokhin Archives if you have any doubts.

Will Owen was. And the Labour Party did have a handful of MPs (Allaun, Zilliacus, Newens - as noted by Kamm, but also the likes of William Warbey and Renee Short) who tended to sing the praises of Stalinist regimes. Warbey managed to write a biography of Ho Chi Minh without mentioning all the unpleasantness surrounding collectivisation in North Vietnam during the late 1950s (during which the ‘Peoples Army’ - under that great hero Vo Nguyen Giap - massacred thousands of peasants on the grounds that they were class enemies).

Short spent most of her parliamentary career warning of the ‘revanchist’ threat posed by West Germany, while lauding the democratic and socialist virtues of the GDR.

The names may have changed, but the sentiment has not.

If you want an interesting read and happen to be in or near Kew, look up the National Archives files on Will Owen’s 1970 trial at the Old Bailey (CRIM 1/5334). Owen demonstrably lied about how much the Czechs paid him, but he does not seem to have sent to them anything which was really secret. Was he a traitor? It’s questionable; he may have fallen for the line that the Czechs just wanted interesting information about British politics from an insider, and not realised that they considered it spying. Owen’s only access to important secret information came through his membership of the Estimates Select Committee and that was what the prosecution was founded on.

If one accepts that the documents found by David Blair in the Iraqi Foreign Ministry in 2003 are genuine, then he was in receipt of payment in respect of political services from a foreign government in some very dubious circumstances.

Sorry, ‘he’ in second para above refers to George Galloway.

Who cares whether some little old lady in Prague was once a spy? She is the least of anyone’s worries.

Old Communists, Trostkyists and fellow-travellers created New Labour, and in such persons as Peter Mandelson they are now well and truly back at the heart of it. For that matter, in such persons as Charlie Whelan, they never left that heart.

So much for the party of Attlee, Bevin, Morrison, Bevan and Gaitskell.

So much for “Labour has come home to you, come home to Labour”.

The Trots have also surrounded George Bush from start to finish. Eastern Europe’s Stalinist nomenklatura is as ensconced as ever, having been consciously and deliberately kept on by the West. A Portuguese Maoist runs the EU, key source of the apparatchiki’s new wealth, and key part of the Trots’ global vision. And so on, and on, and on.

Who won the Cold War? That is a very good question.

Isn’t LAP today (like, for example, “Labour CND”) little more than a front group for Socialist Action and their fellow travellers (i.e. those who hang around Livingstone’s back passage)?

Who cares whether some little old lady in Prague was once a spy? She is the least of anyone’s worries.

Old Communists, Trostkyists and fellow-travellers created New Labour, and in such persons as Peter Mandelson they are now well and truly back at the heart of it. For that matter, in such persons as Charlie Whelan, they never left that heart.

So much for the party of Attlee, Bevin, Morrison, Bevan and Gaitskell.

So much for “Labour has come home to you, come home to Labour”.

The Trots have also surrounded George Bush from start to finish. Eastern Europe’s Stalinist nomenklatura is as ensconced as ever, having been consciously and deliberately kept on by the West. A Portuguese Maoist runs the EU, key source of the apparatchiki’s new wealth, and key part of the Trots’ global vision. And so on, and on, and on.

Who won the Cold War? That is a very good question

“Exactly who of this character are you alleging is serving in the current Government?”

Ruddock, to name one very clear and obvious example.

“Why do you spell Labor without a u?”

Habit; I haven’t lived in the UK this century, and don’t always remember to translate “back” into UK english.

“Exactly who of this character are you alleging is serving in the current Government?”

As well as Ruddock, there are a bunch of old NUS hacks from my student days in the government, and equating the USA with the USSR was part of the standard surrender pitch from NOLS in those days. However, as I can’t specifically remember which of them said what, I can’t confidently accuse any particular one of them.

The point is that soviet apologism was so mainstream in the Labour party in the 80s that it would be amazing if a sizable chunk of the hadn’t at least adhered to those beliefs in the 80s. There is a difference between that (”youthful mistakes”) and advancing it from a leadership position - but if we go back to the Nazi-Soviet equivalence test, I find it hard to imagine that youthful Nazi apologism would ignored in the same way.

Ruddock, to name one very clear and obvious example.

Well the problem with this naming and shaming of people for belonging to certain organisations is that it encourages a very illiberal culture of fear and retribution, and is very one dimensional. I wonder where it all ends? In a total lack of dialogue and openness, and also oppression, secrecy, and paranoia.

Joan Ruddock has led a legitimate and democratic political career whether one agrees with her or not.

I am a member of CND, and I also happen to be an anti-communist, and I don’t generally recognise the people in CND as a bunch of communists and spies; many are simply concerned, liberal, sometimes Christian individuals with very heartfelt views on nuclear weapons. You can agree or disagree with those views. But to many, this focus is what counts, not this political trainspotting (at best), or McCarthyism (at worst).

Then you can ask me why I belong to an organisation with some communists in it. It’s a good question, but the answer is because CND is not a monolithic political party, it never has been, it never will be. It has a diverse range of views in it; it is a pressure group focused on particular issues of concern, not a political party.

I am generally uncomfortable with the notion of excommunicating folk. If communists join CND, that is there right, and we will do battle with them here. I knew a Tory who was a member of CND too - it’s not the end of the world, you know! :-)

Benjamin - I accept that there were many honerable members of CND; I’m believe to accept that you were one of them. But to have asserted throughout the 1980s, from a leadership position, as Rudduck did, the the USA and the USSR “were both as bad as each other” is unequivocal apologism for the crimes of the Soviet Union, which are completely equivalent with those of Nazi Germany.

That she (and you) were wrong is not the issue here. What is the issue is the lack of a heartfelt public rejection of having so misrepresented one of the greaty tyranies of human history. Indeed, I can find no subsequent public admission whatsoever that her statements of the 80s were in any way misguided.

With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, can you honestly say that an equivalent attitude to Nazism would or should have been treated in the same way ?

Dave W, you’re being vague with your efforts to be specific.

I have a memory of the first time I met Joan Ruddock. She was on the other side of an argument some of us attached importance to, nothing to do with the arms race, and long over with.

I also have a memory of a Tory Minister speaking about an enquiry into Citizens Advice Bureaux. The Tory MP who had defeated Joan Ruddock at least twice was very quick to distance himself from rumours that it was to do with her employment, saying he had many disagreements with her but she was good at her CAB work and her integrity was in no doubt.

So if you’re accusing her of saying the USA and the USSR “were both as bad as each other” my first thought would be that she was talking specifically about the arms race, rather than “unequivocal apologism for the crimes of the Soviet Union”.

Kindly supply some dates, times, quotes and other evidence for your blanket accusation.

CND is run by Kate Hudson, of the North Korea supporting CPB.

Would you join an organisation run by a Nazi?

Alan Ji

The problem is this. When I joined Labour, in 1988, I would often be told that my party was filled with supporters of the USSR, some of them paid agents.

This was a disgusting and damaging calumny against a party whose defence policies were - at worst - silly and irresponsible: but which also contained doughty anti-Communists and Atlanticists.

Nevertheless, it wasn’t a charge that was entirely without foundation, was it. Which is why it should have been Labour’s No 1 priority to chase these fanatics and spies out of the party, and keep them out.

Would you join an organisation run by a Nazi?

No. However, let’s step back a bit, chaps. Kate Hudson may be a communist, but CND is not a communist organisation; it is a pressure group focused on issues of nuclear disarmament, with many folk of differing views working in it within a democratic structure. As an anti-communist I am satisfied that CND is not a communist organisation, and I am happy to support it because its a way I can express my concern over nuclear weaponry.

But to have asserted throughout the 1980s, from a leadership position, as Rudduck did, the the USA and the USSR “were both as bad as each other” is unequivocal apologism for the crimes of the Soviet Union, which are completely equivalent with those of Nazi Germany.

Well, if that’s what she said, I do not agree with that view - either now, or back in the 1980s.

My own view of the States is that it certainly has faults, but the country is not equivalent to the Soviet Union. However, like I said, CND is not a monolithic organisation and there are various views. It is not a political party. I went on marches in the UK, and support the organisation, because I am concerned about nuclear weapons, and ways to deal with them (and there are various views on that).

You’re not a very convincing anti communist, Benji. You’ve spent years defending the far left.

It’s people like yourself that use the smear of McCarthyism to protect these people that have the political bias.

David Boothroyd - I’ll read the file next time I’m down at Kew. Obviously, HMG could not prove that Owen had passed on papers from the Estimates Committee to the StB (which obviously saved him jail time), but I personally doubt very much that the Czechoslovak service were paying the man they privately dubbed ‘Greedy Bastard’ for the kind of chickenfeed they could have got from Hansard.

Oh, and fuck off Benji.

It will teach you to think a little bit more before you sign up to the latest trendy ‘good liberal’ cause.

I also see that David Lindsay’s misplaced his meds.

It’s people like yourself that use the smear of McCarthyism to protect these people that have the political bias.

Oh noes, not the political bias!!!1!

Re Joan Ruddock
I had the pleasure of meeting Joan Ruddock in her CND days. Far from being pro Communist she was one of the few CND leaders who distanced herself from the likes of John Cox (never as staunch a CPer as his dad Idris, but still a CPer at heart) or the born again tankies of the NCP. Everything she did, right down to her non government career path, was the opposite of what the archetypal CPer would have done. So for someone to slander her in this thread is cheap, and utterly lacking in evidence.

Calm down, Gareth - nobody is being serious. David T resposted a silly season article from the Mail as if it was Serious News, and everyone is playing along with the joke. DaveW’s posts were priceless.

Oh noes, not the political bias!!!1!

Yes it’s a strange term that Benji uses. Rather than deal with the issue, he instead attacks the people who brought the issue to him, accusing them of political bias and thus this somehow meaning the issue is void. Peculiar fellow.

I think this excellent post is one of his ‘bad liberal’ subjects that nobody is allowed to talk about in case they commit the ultimate sin - McCarythism!

Thankfully David T had already made the counter argument to this drivel in the post, leaving Benji looking like a prize tit when he tried it on.

“I had the pleasure of meeting Joan Ruddock in her CND days.”

Gee, wow, you met her, you must know all here inner thoughts then. I met Thatcher, Heseltine and half the cabinet at the time, but I am realistic enough not to believe that this gave me any special insight into their thinking.

“Far from being pro Communist ….”

I never said pro-communist; I said apologist. Those who claimed equivalence between the USA and USSR were apologists - there is no other word for minimizing the evil of Soviet communism at the point at which it presented it’s greatest threat to the liberty enjoyed in the West.

“Kindly supply some dates, times, quotes and other evidence for your blanket accusation.”

You know full well that from the pre-internet days such a request is unrealsistic. I heard here debate at least half a dozen teime, and remember saying this on several occasions. It was all part of the “why we shouldn’t defend ourselves against one of world histories great tyrranies” - to argue that firstly that the (now proven) allegations against the Soviet Union were unproven/exagerated/rumor/etc, and that in any case the USA actions in Vietnam, Central America, etc were equivalent.

It was the mainstream left who protested so loudly about the Lennin/Hitler “2 faces, one ideology” posters - as being offensive to their beliefs.

Ruddock led a movement opposed to the steadfastness that defeated the USSR. Had her movement prevailed, there is a very real chance Soviet tyrrany would today still plague the world. That she shows no sign whatsoever of remorse for such a calamitous history is pretty clear evidence of either a complete lack of conscience, or that she to this day does not view the Soviet Union in those terms.

DavidW,

Get a grip on yourself lad. Barking mad neocons might argue that the arms race killed the Soviet Union, but it’s just a touch more complicated than that; the USSR would have collapsed under the weight of its internal contradictions even if they’d turned all their guns into butter, or their swords into ploughshares. (In fact, if Russia had disarmed it probably would have collapsed even faster, but that’s just speculation).

Yes, the USSR operated a vile, tyrannical regime, but don’t fall into the trap of arguing that morality and quantity go hand in hand; it is as much a sin to kill one Nicaraguan child in pursuit of your government’s sick foreign policy, as it is to kill one hundred Afghan children (or vice versa). You have to believe that otherwise you leave the door open for the disciples of small wars on morally dubious grounds who would argue that it’s ok to kill only fifty people needlessly, but not OK to kill fifty thousand needlessly.
The idea that disarming Britain would have prolonged the life of the Soviet Union is, bluntly, bizarre. The best argument CND had in the 1980s about Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent was that it wasn’t independent and nobody was deterred by it.

The notion that by saying ‘a plague on both your houses’ you’re apologising for one side or the other is just bizarre. Are you really arguing that if I say I don’t support either Manchester United or Manchester City, I’m secretly being an apologist for Manchester United because they’re more repugnant than Man City? That might work if your world is one of binary oppositions, but in the real world it’s, frankly, barking.

Well, I am glad to see that I have annoyed the right people. There is also the matter of David Cameron’s plan to ennoble Geoff Mulgan in order to bring him formally into government. America is about to be rid of this kind, but Britain is going to remain subject to it regardless of who wins in 2010. Roll on primaries in Britain, say I.

Anyway, hurrah for Gareth and some sense about what brought about the fall of the Soviet Union. John Paul II speeded it along a bit (though probably not a lot), but it would have happened anyway. Otherwise, whom would you wish to lionise? Margaret Thatcher? Ronald Reagan?

The Campaign for Democratic Socialism, which campaigned for Gaitskell at the Labour grass roots and was largely run by Bill Rodgers, explicitly supported the unilateral renunciation of Britain’s nuclear weapons, and the document Policy for Peace, on which Gaitskell eventually won his battle at the 1961 Labour Conference, stated: “Britain should cease the attempt to remain an independent nuclear power, since that neither strengthens the alliance, nor is it now a sensible use of our limited resources.”

Unilateral nuclear disarmament did not cause the secession of the SDP, since it did not become Labour Party policy until two years and a General Election after that direct intervention in the British electoral process by a President of the European Commission as such, a true betrayal of Gaitskell, Bevan, Bevin, Attlee, the lot.

For that matter, numerous Tories with relevant experience – Anthony Head, Peter Thorneycroft, Nigel Birch, Aubrey Jones – were sceptical about, or downright hostile towards, British nuclear weapons in the Fifties and Sixties. In March 1964, while First Lord of the Admiralty and thus responsible for Polaris, George Jellicoe suggested that Britain might pool her nuclear deterrent with the rest of NATO. Enoch Powell (another pointer out that the USSR would eventually collapse under the weight of its own contradictions) denounced the whole thing as not just anything but independent in practice, but also immoral in principle.

So it was.

And so it is.

Gareth is quite right of course about the USSR.

Joan Ruddock is my local MP and whilst I am always willing to moan about her getting a safe seat as a gift from Kinnock (and this being one reason I won’t join Labour) etc I have several times heard her debate (for instance) Socialist party candidates and take them on (for instance) on the economics of their programmes. Never once has she sounded to the left of Roy Hattersley.

Gareth, Graham,

Do you agree that the crimes of the Soviet Communism can reasonably be equated with those of National Socialism ?

Do you disagree that this was denied across sections of the mainstream British left in the 1980s ?

Can you explain why any Democratic Socialist would have found anything to object to in the the “2 faces, 1 ideaology” poster ?

Soviet communism only collaspsed under it’s own weight because it couldn’t afford the arms race. Thise was preciusely the calculation of the Reagan-era Pentagon, and precisely what Ruddock and CND opposed. Several former politbureau members are on record as stating that it was the SDI that cauised the Soviet leadership to realize that they couldn’t keep the balls in the air.

This thread is a perfect illustration of one angle of what DavidT was talking about. Much of the British left remembers its shameful surrenderist CND days fondly, rather than with embarassment. CND was at best (and I’m being generous here) an appeasement movement; appeasement of the Soviet Union is treated very differnetly today from the way that Nazi appeasers were rightly regarded both then and now.

Do you agree that the crimes of the Soviet Communism can reasonably be equated with those of National Socialism ?

That’s a big question to start with Dave! Gareth has I think already given the answer and I can’t say I ever heard anyone in the eighties arguing that Leninism and Hitlerism were the same thing - if I had I would have felt that I needed to point out the differences between the systems (not least on the grounds of “soft v hard” totalitarianisms that were were talking about the other day.) I would (as a democratic socialist - though never a member of CND) have opposed the “2 faces 1 ideology” poster on the grounds that chucking more ignorance at a situation never helped matters. Even if the crimes of the Soviets can be equated with those of Hitler that does not mean that the ideologies were the same.

I’m quite happy to state that at various times in its (long) history the USSR was as cynical and evil in its treatment of human beings as Nazi Germany by the way.

btw, Zilliacus was accused during the anti-semitic Slansky-trial in 1952 to be a spy of the British secret service and to be a “titoist”

That’s a big question to start with Dave!

Not really. I think if someone claimed that Hitler wasn’t all bad because he built the autobahns and achieved full employment there would be little doubt that they were a Nazi apologist and sympathizer.

David W,
I didn’t realise that when I debated with tankies in the 80s, and pointed out what was wrong with the USSR, I was appeasing them. I didn’t realise I could be that subtle, to tell people that the country they praised and supported was vile and tyrannical when really I was appeasing them. I must have a greater breadth of talent than I imagined.

I love the idea that opposing weapons that you can’t use without wiping yourself out is surrenderist. That’s a work of genius. The constant refrain in your rants is that there were two poles in the 1980s, either the Atlantic bloc or the USSR, and you had to be in one or the other. Guess what Dave? The world isn’t like that. Some of us were arguing against power bloc politics and about building connections that were intended to change the shape of international politics.

Let me say something about this ‘two faces one ideology’ poster you seem unreasonably obsessed with. How do you explain that to a Chilean democrat, or an Argentinian democrat, or a Nicaraguan, or a refugee from Vietnam? What use is it in terms of having an informed and intelligent debate about how you build democracies for the future? All your questions and your rhetoric suggest you live in a blinkered and confined world where you can’t see beyond the parameters of a limited and dangerous set of assumptions.

Here’s one example though which I think sums up what’s wrong with your argument. You think that what broke the USSR was the cost of military competition. It’s just as easy to argue that what broke the USSR and its satellites was the weight of its contradictions; it took a generation, and the movement was sporadic and unpredictable, but once the secret speech had been made, the end was inevitable. There was an uprising every 12 - 13 years in the Soviet Union’s satellites (Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland - the most prosperous of the satellites) and there was nothing the CPSU could do to stop them. Unless you’re going to argue that Reagan was undermining the USSR and its satellites in the 50s and 60s by sending out subliminal messages via Bedtime With Bonzo you’re left with an astonishingly narrow and counter-factual version of history.

I have no shame about my involvement in CND, or in the wider peace movement. It’s an argument we lost. That’s a feature of a democracy, that you get into a debate, you lose, and you decide whether to keep banging the same drum or to move on and try and find other ways of achieving the same ends. The objective, of getting away from a binary world where nuclear stalemate threatened mutually assured destruction, has in part been achieved but now we have some new challenges. Some of us have moved on. You appear, to quote St Bono, to be stuck in a moment that you can’t get out of.

Not really. I think if someone claimed that Hitler wasn’t all bad because he built the autobahns and achieved full employment there would be little doubt that they were a Nazi apologist and sympathizer.

Not really; as Martin E Lee points out in “the beast re-awakens” - most Germans felt this to be true even in the sixties and you would have to be pretty ruthless to call them all nazi sympathisers. If they had said that the holocaust was a reasonable price to pay for “the aryan race” (whatever that is) triumphing in a “thousand year reich” then I think the term “nazi sympathiser” would be warranted but the The “Hitler as saviour of the unemployed” etc myth was surprisingly long-lived and relates more to memories of Weimar’s economic failings than the death camps. In the same way many Russians still feel attached to Stalinism as it gave them some pride. But this is also a pride born of ignorance and the “big question” is when such ignorance can be said to be being held onto in the face of all evidence. In terms of the subject of history I would contend that asking for a simple measure of the two systems is very much still “a big question.”

David T @ 17 November 2008, 9:55 am

” When I joined Labour, in 1988, I would often be told that my party was filled with supporters of the USSR, some of them paid agents.”

And you live in Stoke Newington? I can’t wait to learn what you thought of Ernie Roberts!

I should point out of course that one of the first people who tried to sell the simplistic trope that there was very little difference between Nazism and Stalinsim was none other than Leon Trotsky himself. But to move the discussion along I saw that Alec was mentioning Zizek earlier so what do you think of his take on the matter?

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n06/zize01_.html

“There is perhaps (and I’m being generous there) some excuse for having held such views during the cold war, before the Moascow archives were opened, proving as fact what many of us had been ridiculed for asserting for years. There can be no possible excuse for the unrepentant apologists today”

The day the excuses should have ended was the day that Conquest published The Great Terror in 1968, but the predictable response of the far left was to label the author a fascist. Haven’t heard many people apologising to Conquest either.

How’s the BPA going, David? You seem less keen to talk about it’s electoral progress than you once were.

Gareth - could you have justified taking the same line wrt Nazi Germany as with Soviet Communism ? It’s a simple test.

But to move the discussion along I saw that Alec was mentioning Zizek earlier so what do you think of his take on the matter?

Rather akin to someone arguing that Myra Hindley would make a better babysitter than Ian Brady. Sadly you seem to be caught up in the same dilemma, judging by your reluctance to plainly state that there was absolutely no merit whatsoever in the Soviet Union, at any stage in its history: neither the means it chose to achieve its ideological goals, nor the goals themselves.

Rather akin to someone arguing that Myra Hindley would make a better babysitter than Ian Brady.

I don’t think you quite got the subtleties of Zizek’s argument did you? Not surprising when you can come out with this bullshit:

Sadly you seem to be caught up in the same dilemma, judging by your reluctance to plainly state…blah blah gabble gabble 4th -rate McCarthyite authoritarianism…

after I have plainly stated that:

I’m quite happy to state that at various times in its (long) history the USSR was as cynical and evil in its treatment of human beings as Nazi Germany by the way.

Now then, as Zizek says, the problem is clearly that anyone rationally examining the two totalitarianisms would have to conclude that because of the very length of time it existed, the strength of its control over the people and the number of people it killed that the Soviet Union was worse than Nazi Germany. But that would be an absurd conclusion wouldn’t it? Wasn’t the irrational hatred of the Nazis a much worse thing?

Now then, as Zizek says, the problem is clearly that anyone rationally examining the two totalitarianisms would have to conclude that because of the very length of time it existed, the strength of its control over the people and the number of people it killed that the Soviet Union was worse than Nazi Germany. But that would be an absurd conclusion wouldn’t it?

No, that would be a most sensible conclusion arrived at by considering the most pertinent criteria for judging the matter.

Wasn’t the irrational hatred of the Nazis a much worse thing?

I don’t think you’ve quite grasped the article: Zizek says that Communist repression was more arbitrary and irrational than that of the Nazis. I’m not sure why you seem to believe that Communist slaughter of the kulaks and bourgeoisie was any less irrational or reprehensible than the Nazi slaughter of Jews, homosexuals and trade unionists. Unless it’s that you sympathize with their goal of building world socialism, even if you genuinely oppose their methods …

I don’t think you have even read the article!

Zizek says that class antagonisms are a natural thing (like it or not) and that the nazis replaced class antagonism with an irrational hatred of Jews.

I’m not sure why you seem to believe that Communist slaughter of the kulaks and bourgeoisie was any less irrational or reprehensible than the Nazi slaughter of Jews, homosexuals and trade unionists.

I don’t - as stated clearly above! However as Zizek clearly recognises (and you don’t - which is why you are pushing the Trotskyite equivalence) the revolution in Russia was “a thwarted attempt at liberation” whilst the Nazi terror was pure, irrational evil.

Unless it’s that you sympathize with their goal of building world socialism, even if you genuinely oppose their methods …

Depends what you mean by socialism - Leninism would not to me be “socialism” in any way shape or form and since I have no love for the Marxist tradition I am not wedded to any idea that I should be pushing for “world socialism.” Over to you Mr McCarthy.

Rather akin to someone arguing that Myra Hindley would make a better babysitter than Ian Brady.

Quite simply if that was the only possible choice then Hindley would have been a better babysitter than Brady.

“The judge described Brady as “wicked beyond belief” and “beyond hope of redemption”, suggesting that he should never be released. However, the judge also stated his belief that this was not necessarily true of Hindley — and that, with the removal of Brady’s presence and his influence over her, she might indeed be capable of a measure of rehabilitation at some point in the future.”

revolution in Russia was “a thwarted attempt at liberation”

No it wasn’t, and believing so makes you a Communist apologist. The February Revolution was a thwarted attempt at liberation, not that of October.

Why do you hate our liberal democracy?

No it wasn’t, and believing so makes you a Communist apologist.

Don’t be an ignorant tit Mr McCarthy - the February revolution was not even undertaken by the communists and even the October one soon showed itself to be not for the workers!

But both were still a thwarted attempt at liberation in the way Nazism wasn’t.

Why do you hate our liberal democracy?

I’m quite happy with it thanks Mr McCarthy!

revolution in Russia was “a thwarted attempt at liberation”

No it wasn’t, and believing so makes you a Communist apologist.

So when Robert Conquest says it was an attempt to liberate Russia from the backward world of the Tsars that makes him a communist apologist as well in your whacky world?

I have no shame about my involvement in CND, or in the wider peace movement. It’s an argument we lost. That’s a feature of a democracy, that you get into a debate, you lose, and you decide whether to keep banging the same drum or to move on and try and find other ways of achieving the same ends. The objective, of getting away from a binary world where nuclear stalemate threatened mutually assured destruction, has in part been achieved but now we have some new challenges. Some of us have moved on.

You make an eloquent and compelling point, Gareth. And I, for one, certainly don’t expect or believe you should have any shame about your involvement in CND back then.

Having said that, CND’s platform back in the 80’s that “Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent wasn’t independent and nobody was deterred by it” was neither a good argument nor an honest one.

CND campaigned for total unilateral disarmament including any and all cooperation with US/NATO nuclear programs. THis wasn’t just about Britain - it was about rejecting the alliances and assumptions of the Cold War itself.

It was a rejection of perceived American hegemony with absolutely no thought or acknowledgement of the threat this American “hegemony” was there to counter in the first place.

If nothing else, the post 89 gratitude and esteem with which newly liberated Eastern block nations and their people held “America” - or the idea of “America”; the hope which was instilled in the Polish and Czech and Hungarian people that the United States was a bulwark against Soviet tyranny and stood for freedom and democracy etc etc…

If nothing else this should have given all 70/80’s “peace campaigners” pause for thought in the 90’s. A moment of reflection to ask why these peoples associate America with their dreams and hopes for freedom - rather than warmongering and imperialism.

I know why DaveW pisses you off, but you should also remember why people can get pissed off about CND. It wasn’t that CND lost the argument - it was that CND was wrong. About almost everything. And often they were wrong for the worst possible reasons. BEcause their leadership was politically biased and their base haplessly naive.

Just as they are today viz Iran.

Snag @ 17 November 2008, 8:27 pm

“The day the excuses should have ended was the day that Conquest published The Great Terror in 1968″

I think you’ll find that Kruschev’s “Secret Speech” of 1956 and “Let History Judge” by Roy Medvedev were available in English earlier than 1968.

Phomesy
I think you’re rather making the mistake many in CND made in the early 80s, of believing there was something coherent (or even comprehensible) about the motives of its supporters or their beliefs.
I left CND after a bitter argument with friends about Nye Bevan’s Brighton speech; it was a mistake for him to have spoken in the way he did, and yet he hit the nail on the head when he described support for disarmament as an ‘emotional spasm’. To dismiss people who care about their world, their country, their community and their family as ’surrenderists’ and the like, or to try and jam their concerns between the covers of a dry as dust textbook on international politics, full of talk of this commitment or that treaty, is as daft as to try and argue that the two million people on the anti war marches were SWP supporters or preferred Sadaam Hussein to Tony Blair. People don’t work that way.
I campaigned alongside Quakers and tankies, socialists and liberals and every flavour of political exotica. The only way to make those sorts of single issue campaign work is to set aside rules about external allegiances in favour of a code of conduct within the campaign - six months at a vegetarian peace camp plagued by incessant debates about whether it’s acceptable to nip off site for a bacon butty can be terribly instructive.

I have no doubt in my mind that CND was wrong; that’s why we lost the argument, and, unless you’re some kind of mad Trot, that usually is why you lose the argument! But under that headline grabbing leadership elite within CND there were an awful lot of us who wanted to hear more from the USA about opportunity and freedom and less about Star Wars and overwhelming force. The point about people from Eastern Europe viewing the USA differently to how we see it is well made and yet naive; objectively you can argue that a dissident Pole closing his mind to the reality of the USA’s interventions in EL Salvador or Nicaragua in the early 80s is no different to a British dissident closing his mind to the reality of life in Soviet Russia while pinning on his hammer and sickle badge and selling the Morning Star.

As to your point about having pause for thought in the early 90s, I think that’s a pretty good description of what I did. In fact, I think that’s a pretty good description of what gave birth to what we can probably call the interventionist left; looking round, assessing the world we live in and understanding the contradictions implicit in, say, the left criticising the government for not intervening in Abyssinia or Spain but arguing that nothing should be done about dictators like Hussein.

However, there’s a lurking subtext to your post that needs to be addressed as well. Here on HP there’s a kind of unspoken belief that the end of the USSR was also the end of any hope for non market solutions to the problems of inequality in our society. Is it really ten years since Francis Fukuyama hailed the end of history and the triumph of free market capitalism? I’ll bet those ideas are selling well in Reykjavik right now. It seems to me that there is still a good argument to be made for a democratic socialism that is not perverted by Leninism and its cult of the vanguard, and which rejects capitalisms tendency (just like Stalinism) to blind itself to the plight of the minority for the sake of the greatest good for the greatest number.

On the subject of facing up to past support for appalling regimes.

objectively you can argue that a dissident Pole closing his mind to the reality of the USA’s interventions in EL Salvador or Nicaragua in the early 80s is no different to a British dissident closing his mind to the reality of life in Soviet Russia while pinning on his hammer and sickle badge and selling the Morning Star.

The differences between ’soft’ and ‘hard’ totalitarianism have been discussed, but not squishy totalitarianism. Rest assured, had I been politically cognizant in the early 1980s, I would have objected to policy towards those (and other) countries. Yet the tactic of mitigating association with those who marched under the flag of North Vietnam or hard-line Marxists in the Santinistas - or even the Strasserite thugs in the R.A.F. - because of designated actions by the U.S.A. is precisely that which you believe her archetypal supporters used.

Furthermore, unless you can cite specific dissident Poles who rolled up their sleeves and delved into the mire of Central America, it will be difficult to equate them with the C.P.G.B. which backed a military-industrial complex far more effective that anything the U.S.A. managed (or was inclined to). There were Maya and other displaced individuals *in* the U.S.A., either working or protesting the situation back home. Any Afghans in Warsaw Pact countries?

This Pole would have come from a repressive society in which every aspect of behaviour was tightly controlled/monitored, while the C.P.G.B. bod would be lamenting a political system from within its more than relative freedoms and benefits. Again, it strikes as an attempt to make the thoroughly repugnant behaviour of the latter look less worse in comparison.

and which rejects capitalisms tendency (just like Stalinism) to blind itself to the plight of the minority for the sake of the greatest good for the greatest number.

Am I misreading? Are you seriously telling us that Stalinism was not a perverted form of democratic socialism? Apart from the capitalist tendencies which did persist in the Gulag system, closing one’s minds to this is of a somewhat different order to closing one’s mind to El Salvador.

Is it really ten years since Francis Fukuyama hailed the end of history and the triumph of free market capitalism? I’ll bet those ideas are selling well in Reykjavik right now.

Having spoken informally to Icelanders (so, no easily digestible Internet links, sorry), my reading is that they wish to party to still be going on, but blaming others for bringing it down. So, in a way, you’re right: they wish for something other than free-market capitalism.

Gareth,

Fair enough.

Are you seriously telling us that Stalinism was not a perverted form of democratic socialism?

I’m finding it hard to understand what Stalin took from the labour party Alec.

That’s reasonable, Graham (that he merely hitched a ride, if that’s what you mean) yet you also argued that even the October Revolution was a thwarted attempted at liberation, so a bit of license can exist.

Yet, even after going back over Gareth’s comment, I’m still wondering if he were saying there was anything of merit in Stalinism. Am I missing something?

That’s reasonable, Graham (that he merely hitched a ride, if that’s what you mean)

How did Stalin “hitch a ride” on democratic socialism? I could also argue that the Cable Street conspiracy was ” a thwarted attempt at liberation” but it would neither mean that I supported the idea of blowing up governments nor that the conspirators were the ancestors of “democratic socialism.”

As for whether there was anything of merit in Stalinism the answer is undoubtedly that there was (Russia would never have industrialised as fast without him to use the most obvious example) but as with Mussolini’s trains running on time and Hitler’s autobahns surely most would say that it was done at too much of a human cost.

Are you trying to sell us some kind of Cliffite “State-capitalism” theory of Stalinism by the way?

I think Gareth has said quite clearly by the way that he found the tankies objectionable and told them so.

Scratch “Cable Street” above and replace it with “Cato Street” and then carry on just as if the commissar didn’t vanish if you will.

Alec,
Forgive me if I say I am struggling to get your point. I’m going to point you at a post by my mate ghost over on a blog I sometimes write for; (http://dogstarscribe.wordpress.com/2008/11/18/labour-spies/). Ghost (it’s short for Bob Elliott’s Ghost, incidentally, says) “for socialists it’s most important to understand the difference between apologists for the Soviet Union and apologists for Nazism. You can’t be a Nazi, or a Nazi supporter, unless you believe in inequality, cruelty and unfairness, and that’s inherent in the ideology. It’s not an accidental consequence, or something unforeseen, it’s the objective of the project. To claim to be a Nazi supporter and not to understand that the fate of the Jews, the gypsies, the gays and the communists, the slavs and the disabled is an inherent part of the project is, in the old meaning of the word, incredible. But it was possible, for a while, to believe that the wickedness of Soviet Russia was not inevitable, and understanding the difference is significant. Why? Well, because many people comforted themselves, even after the secret speech (or sometimes even because of it) that the Soviet Union was still somehow pursuing the greatest good for the greatest number. ”

Objectively, it’s impossible to distinguish between the wickedness of Nazi Germany and the wickedness of Stalin’s USSR. No-one should ever have had to experience either. But to claim that apologists for either regime are the same is, frankly, daft. It’s worse than daft, it’s counter factual. The idea that I’m somehow morally defective for having campaigned for the same thing as some CPGB members or their acolytes is as daft as suggesting that I’m to blame for the American economic crisis because, like George Bush, I wanted democracy for the people of Iraq.

As for the suggestion that there’s some kind of connection between democratic socialism and Stalinism, when I’ve stopped laughing, I’ll think about that one. And start laughing again, probably.

Yet the tactic of mitigating association with those who marched under the flag of North Vietnam or hard-line Marxists in the Santinistas - or even the Strasserite thugs in the R.A.F. - because of designated actions by the U.S.A. is precisely that which you believe her archetypal supporters used.

Or rather the actions of the Sandinistas do not mitigate support for the US in backing a band of vile fascist thugs attempting to overthrow the legitimate government of Nicaragua.

‘“The day the excuses should have ended was the day that Conquest published The Great Terror in 1968″

I think you’ll find that Kruschev’s “Secret Speech” of 1956 and “Let History Judge” by Roy Medvedev were available in English earlier than 1968.’

However, Conquest brought evidence from hundreds of sources including contemporary Soviet sources as irrefutable evidence that at best something went very wrong in the U.S.S.R. For what it’s worth- quite a lot, given his knowledge of both, I’d say- Conquest thinks the nazis even worse than the Soxiet C.P.

‘Zizek says that class antagonisms are a natural thing (like it or not) and that the nazis replaced class antagonism with an irrational hatred of Jews.’
Vasily Grossman in [i]Life and Fate[/i] has a Soviet soldier express similar views. The nazis are wrong, he says, but wrong about just what are the “natural” antagonisms. Their fault is one of ctaegorisation, not an absolute fault, like that of liberals.

As for equivalence between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R., it was a common claim in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, particularly with regard to foreign policy. Given what the U.S.A. got up to in Southa America, Africa and Asia, it was a pretty accurate claim, unfortunately. In fact, U.S. foreign policy probably killed more people than Soviet. The important difference was that internal shame and pressure could force the U.S.A. to change its policies eventually, but it took a lot of deaths before that happened.

No doubt Gareth will respond, Graham, but your points:

How did Stalin “hitch a ride” on democratic socialism?

In the sense that parasitic street-thugs do - step into the void left by the departure of the previous system (the Tsars, Lenin, whatever) - and either through guile, of claiming to have a common enemy, or sheer brute force, subvert the genuine democratic socialists who aren’t as brutal or violent enough.

I used it in the sense of a freeloader.

I think Gareth has said quite clearly by the way that he found the tankies objectionable and told them so.

Yes he did, which is why the wording of the excerpt I highlighted is what I am querying.

As for whether there was anything of merit in Stalinism the answer is undoubtedly that there was (Russia would never have industrialised as fast without him to use the most obvious example) but as with Mussolini’s trains running on time and Hitler’s autobahns surely most would say that it was done at too much of a human cost.

Surely this is the omelette argument? Both the German and, even, the Italian transport systems had the practical advantages of working.

Scratch “Cable Street” above and replace it with “Cato Street” and then carry on just as if the commissar didn’t vanish if you will.

He was such a lovely boy.

Are you trying to sell us some kind of Cliffite “State-capitalism” theory of Stalinism by the way?

Nope. Where is SPGB Gray?

Oh, I see Gareth did respond as I was composing. I think I responded to his salient points.

Or rather the actions of the Sandinistas do not mitigate support for the US in backing a band of vile fascist thugs

HASTUR

Indeed. Now go back and read what I wrote.

attempting to overthrow the legitimate government of Nicaragua.

The Sandinistas actually succeeded in this aim.

In fact, U.S. foreign policy probably killed more people than Soviet.

Not wanting to engage in some ghoulish counting of body-bags, Roger, but is this true? The Soviet/Cuban tally in Angola, Mozambique and Ethiopia may well match that of the U.S. in Vietnam (unless we take any deaths in a conflict involving the U.S. to be her doing, even when carried out by opposing forces). Add Afghanistan to the brew.

Then there’s the small matter of Soviet domestic policy.

Surely this is the omelette argument? Both the German and, even, the Italian transport systems had the practical advantages of working.

You know I don’t think this is exactly true. One argument used (I think by Alan Bullock in “parallel lives” amongst others) is that whilst Stalinism was a terrible system, badly run and wasteful, it did (and could) actually carry on until its eventual collapse in the eighties. Nazism by contrast was parasitic on industry - everything was done to please Hitler’s irrationalities and to a lesser extent Himmlers mad schemes. Apart from the great “show projects” such as the VW (autobahns were actually a pre-Hitler thing) and armaments the infrastructure of industry was not uprgraded and that even as early as the late thirties Hitler realised that only war could cover up the economic failings of his regime. Nothing more coldy illustrates the difference between the regimes than your example (from Applebaum I presume) of Kulaks being put to work on private wood-cutting projects in the gulag as against the mad, irrational lunacy (even from the nazis own point of view) of their killing millions of people who could have helped the war effort. If that is too horrible to contemplate then contrast how the British mobilised women to help in virtually every area of war bar fighting as against the Nazis determination to keep females as baby and home makers.

I can’t see how the Tsars or Lenin were “democratic socialists” Alec.

Lenin had actually had most of Russia’s democratic socialists shot or exiled before Stalin even came to power.

Stalinists in the Labour Party(where it must be said despite Alec’s efforts they don’t belong) mostly left with Scargill - and good fucking riddance if you ask me!

http://www.socialequality.org.uk/iw/242/7a242.shtml

So (going back to the first point as I missed a bit off the end) no omelette actually got made by either system - though at least the Soviet one had some eggs and chickens which continued to lay for them.

And nobody is sure that Adolf Hitler wanted an omelette anyway…

Well, the Old Fellow was only a vegetarian, Graham.

Apart from the great “show projects” such as the VW (autobahns were actually a pre-Hitler thing) [...]

Although I was making the most narrow of comparisons; explicitly a response to those you gave. But fair enough about the inception of the autobahns.

Nothing more coldy illustrates the difference between the regimes than your example (from Applebaum I presume)

Yup. To Morgoth’s doubtless chagrin, well-done to the public library system.

I can’t see how the Tsars or Lenin were “democratic socialists” Alec.

For crying out loud, I wasn’t saying that! What have I ever said which could possibly be taken to be so? They should have been replaced by democratic socialism, but they weren’t. What I did say was that Gareth appeared to have been saying there was a hint of it in Stalinism. Because everything else he *had* said ran contrary to this, I asked for clarification.

This is like talking to Sonic!

Stalinists in the Labour Party(where it must be said despite Alec’s efforts they don’t belong)

What the fuck are you talking about, Grandfather Lenin?

Also, following the link to Zizek, and his speaking of the lack of a Goodbye Hitler film, may I once more recommend The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas? For those who don’t mind having their lungs ripped out at the end.

Fortunately, the presence of an utterly sadistic young Nazi officer reminded us of the monstrosity of what was going on the “farm” where the inhabitants wore blue pyjamas. The fatherly humour and guidance offered by the Commandant was heart-breaking.

“The Soviet/Cuban tally in Angola, Mozambique and Ethiopia may well match that of the U.S. in Vietnam (unless we take any deaths in a conflict involving the U.S. to be her doing, even when carried out by opposing forces). Add Afghanistan to the brew.”
Whch aspects of Afghanistan? Soviet-supported forces or U.S.?
I was actually thinking of deaths as a result of direct actions by U.S. forces rather than U.S-supported forces, Alec

“Then there’s the small matter of Soviet domestic policy.”
The difference between U.S. and Soviet domestic policies and the responsiveness of the U.S.A. to domestic pressure- and the opennes that made such pressure possible- was precisely the difference I emphasised.

Well, the Old Fellow was only a vegetarian, Graham.

Not really - even his medications included animal products and his vegetarianism was connected to some madly irrational Wagnerian idea that it would re-energise the German race…

They should have been replaced by democratic socialism, but they weren’t.

I don’t see how this follows - surely they should have been replaced by a liberal democracy involving everyone from the Social Revolutionaries to the Kadets no? I see however where your thinking has led to all this present confusion.

This is like talking to Sonic!

Sometimes there is a need to show how irrational thinking works rather than telling it!

What the fuck are you talking about, Grandfather Lenin?

Oh come now, Lenin was an aristocrat who purged the workers opposition - I’m just a mere yob who annoys middle-class people online.

the revolution in Russia was “a thwarted attempt at liberation”

So a coup against a liberal democracy, launched by a Communist clique, is an “attempt at liberation”?

the October one soon showed itself to be not for the workers!

At what point did that revelation occur? When the Provisional Government was arrested? When the Constituent Assembly was shut down? When the Cheka was formed and the mass graves dug?

Someone who believes that the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat is an “attempt at liberation” is not a democratic socialist but a Communist, Graham. You are a Marxist, whatever your blather about rejecting Lenin or respecting liberal democracy. You even admit in a later post that you believe the class struggle is “natural” (a notion lifted from the opening paragraphs of the Communist Manifesto, as you well know)

Question: given that you find merit with the Bolsheviks all the way up to the 1917 coup and beyond, until they showed themselves as “not for the workers” (presumably by not being socialist enough), would you support another attempt at working class revolution and the realisation of the Marxist project?

In fact, U.S. foreign policy probably killed more people than Soviet. .

Well that raised an eyebrow… Surely there must be a qualifying factor?

Ah… Yes…

I was actually thinking of deaths as a result of direct actions by U.S. forces rather than U.S-supported forces, Alec

Of course you were. Because this is the only way you can factor out the devastating effect of the Soviet Union’s foreign policy of destabilisation and use of nations as proxies to fight internatoinal conflicts while the Red Army was busy crushing Hungarian or Czech or Polish dissent, not to mention overseeing the forced migration of entire populations within the Caucasus proper…

So a coup against a liberal democracy, launched by a Communist clique, is an “attempt at liberation”?

I didn’t actually say which revolution I was talking about though did I?

Someone who believes that the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat is an “attempt at liberation” is not a democratic socialist but a Communist, Graham.

Or (as pointed out above) - a historian. Taken together, both revolutions can be seen as an attempt at liberation which was thwarted by Leninism. Very few of the people who took part in even the October revolution realised that lenin wished to create a dictatorship - not of the proletariat but of a small clique of professional revolutionaries.

You are a Marxist, whatever your blather about rejecting Lenin or respecting liberal democracy.
You see this is just childish bullshit and equivalent to me saying “John Little you are a nazi etc etc..” You can find no evidence of me supporting any Marxist policy so you blather like a spoilt child - very disapointing!

You even admit in a later post that you believe the class struggle is “natural” (a notion lifted from the opening paragraphs of the Communist Manifesto, as you well know)

Good God! I was taking it from the Zizek article as YOU well know - do you ever type anything without a lie appearing on the page in front of you? The context we are talking about (despite your childish and frankly McCarthyite attempts to escape it) is Nazism v Lenin/Stalinism. Zizek says that class struggle is “natural” (as you well know) Although you would be hard pushed to find a pride of lions where the dominant class had not been overthrown by the up and coming class for millenia (perhaps you could find us one where the male lion had been deposed on grounds of his race or religion?)

Question: given that you find merit with the Bolsheviks all the way up to the 1917 coup and beyond

Where is this “given”? I find no merit at all in any Leninist party and have been arguing against it on here for years - give it up before you make yourself look even more stupid!

But I can’t resist:

would you support another attempt at working class revolution and the realisation of the Marxist project?

Would I support trying to immanentize the eschaton of a philosopher whose work was done getting on for 200 years ago? The short answer is no. Would you support chucking lots of screenwriters out of work on the basis of your own semi-ignorant and limited understanding of socialism?

Well, Phomesy, how do you attribute the blame for- say- deaths in Nicaragua, Guatamela, Angola, Congo, Ethiopia, Afghanistan? What percentage goes to the U.S.S.R. for supporting opponents of dictators or colonial powers and what percentage to the U.S.A. for supporting murderous dictators or colonial powers because they weren’t communists, whatever else they were? Compare the number of deaths in Eastern Europe under Soviet-supported rulers with the number in South and Central America killed by U.S.-backed dictators.
The Soviet Union did not only ensure “the forced migration of entire populations within the Caucasus” but elsewhere too- you’ve heard of the Crimean Taratars, for example, not to mention large numbers of Balts, Poles, Ukrainians and Russians- however, comparing their foreign policies alone then unfortunately there was something close to equivalence in the behaviour of the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A., especially in the third world.

“So a coup against a liberal democracy, launched by a Communist clique, is an ‘attempt at liberation’?”

I didn’t actually say which revolution I was talking about though did I?

Yes, you did:

“… the February revolution was not even undertaken by the communists and even the October one soon showed itself to be not for the workers! But both were still a thwarted attempt at liberation in the way Nazism wasn’t.”

It’s clear you are saying that the October revolution was an “attempt at liberation”.

Very few of the people who took part in even the October revolution realised that lenin wished to create a dictatorship - not of the proletariat but of a small clique of professional revolutionaries.

Nonsense. Trotsky accused Lenin of exactly that in the days when he was a Menshevik, some ten years earlier.

But why should anyone care how some Bolsheviks naifs deluded themselves over what their party was intending? The totalitarian consequences of Marxist socialism were spelt out in the Communist Manifesto, written in 1848. You didn’t need to wait until October 1917 and see how it played out, to decide whether to oppose the Communists or not.

however, comparing their foreign policies alone then unfortunately there was something close to equivalence in the behaviour of the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A., especially in the third world.

Ah… you see this statement I wouldn’t object to. There’s no doubt that the Cold war use of proxies in the 3rd world by both Superpowers was shameful and destructive.

I suppose the thing is that the statement: “U.S. foreign policy probably killed more people than Soviet” implies that US foreign policy was more aggressive, dangerous and imperialist than Soviet foreign policy.

It’s true that if US foreign policy hadn’t responded to the Soviet Union’s promotion of armed revolutionary communism across the world less people would have died in those conflcits. But that doesn’t mean a response wasn’t required or necessary.

But yes… there is some equivalence…

It’s clear you are saying that the October revolution was an “attempt at liberation”.

it is clear from the context of what we are talking about that I am saying that the Russian revolution(s) as a whole were a thwarted attempt at liberation whilst nazi Germany was not (whistles)

Nonsense. Trotsky accused Lenin of exactly that in the days when he was a Menshevik, some ten years earlier.

Are you suggesting that Trotsky was “most Russians?”

The totalitarian consequences of Marxist socialism were spelt out in the Communist Manifesto, written in 1848.

This is a fair enough comment but to come back to the context which you have been trying so desperately hard to escape in order to make like a right-wing troll Marx’s Manifesto was still an attempt (grounded in enlightenment thinking) to liberate a class which (in his day) really were suffering the consequences of an industrialism that had happened far too quickly for the infrastructure of cities to keep up. Nazism by contrast was one geezer with some whacky disconnected ideas about how the Jews were to blame for everything and the Aryans were destined for great things.

The above (by the way) does not recommend either nazism or Marxism.

It is just a dispassionate observation of the facts.

“I suppose the thing is that the statement: “U.S. foreign policy probably killed more people than Soviet” implies that US foreign policy was more aggressive, dangerous and imperialist than Soviet foreign policy. ”
No, it’s an assessment as to the number who died as a direct result. If you were to compare the munber of indirect deaths you’d get a different result- “Marxism” or “Marxist-Leninism” rather than “Soviet Foreign policy” and you’d have a different result.
!It’s true that if US foreign policy hadn’t responded to the Soviet Union’s promotion of armed revolutionary communism across the world less people would have died in those conflcits. But that doesn’t mean a response wasn’t required or necessary. ”

Except that the U.S.A. responded pre-emptively by supporting murderous dictators, no matter how vile, as long as they weren’t communists, so that the only effective enemies they had were armed revolutionary communists.

“into UK english” – DaveW

That would be English then? Get this into your thick heads. English is the language of the English. It is not a ‘kind’ of English. Unless you are not English, when it is.

I am saying that the Russian revolution(s) as a whole were a thwarted attempt at liberation

Sure, if by that you mean that the February Revolution was an attempt at liberation that was thwarted by the October Revolution. Which I’m sure you do, not being a commie an’all.

I think to the majority of the Russian people the whole revolution (including the 1905 one) was an attempt at liberation which was eventually thwarted by the Bolsheviks don’t you?

The interesting area of investigation is exactly how much Hitler owed to Lenin - I expect a lot more on this to emerge in the next couple of years so it would be a pity to go shooting Marxist elephants.

Plus (of course) what is the connection with these cats:

http://www.flixya.com/photo/12250/Cats_that_look_like_Hitler,_Stalin_and_Lenin