As we learn that Jeremy Corbyn likes the idea of restoring Clause IV and Labour's commitment to "common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange" - Russia yesterday, as it were - Anne Applebaum, in the Sunday Times (£), looks at the man's enthusiasm for Russia Today:
The trajectory of [Robert] Conquest’s career is worth remembering right now, particularly as the Russian government returns, once again, to the time-honoured practice of banning books. Not long ago, the school district of Yekaterinburg decided to take a stand against “Nazism”. In order to do so, the authorities instructed school libraries to ban not the works of Hitler or Joseph Goebbels, but the works of Antony Beevor and John Keegan. Both are British military historians who have written objectively, and not always flatteringly, about the Red Army and especially the campaign of rape and terror that it carried out during the conquest of Berlin.
And just now, as Russia is gearing up its propaganda machine, which is far more sophisticated than the Soviet version ever was, to attack the “Nazis” in Ukraine and the threat from a “Nazi revival” in the West, anything that contains too many facts about what actually happened during the Second World War is going to be suspect.
If Russia’s urge to reshape its history is back, so is the old-fashioned western admiration for brutal regimes, and on all sides of the political spectrum. Just as some on the far left once sought to excuse and explain Stalinism, a range of people on both the modern far left and far right now seek not only to excuse and explain Putinism, but to support the official Russian state version of its own history, as well as the history of recent events in Ukraine.
Jeremy Corbyn, would-be leader of the Labour party, is the latest in a long line of useful idiots. Corbyn has recommended that his Twitter followers watch the Russian propaganda channel, Russia Today, which he has described as “more objective” than other channels. Never mind that Russia Today interviews actors who claim to be “witnesses” and invents stories — for example, that a Russian-speaking child was crucified by a Ukrainian.
Corbyn is also one of many on the European far left as well as the far right who appears to have swallowed wholesale Russia’s lie that war in Ukraine has been created by Nato, rather than by the “separatists” who have invaded eastern Ukraine and are paid, trained and organised by Russia itself. Or maybe they have pretended to swallow the lie because it suits their own anti-American or anti-democratic agendas.
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