Joking about Mao

Nick Cohen:

It is taking longer than I expected, but the sheer ugliness of the world Corbyn and McDonnell inhabit is slowly dawning on many. God help the Labour Party when it becomes common knowledge.

Understand the far left and you will understand why John McDonnell thought it a terrific idea to make jokes about one of the greatest criminals in human history. McDonnell is an old man. When he was a young activist, he had to cope with knowledge that ‘actually existing socialism’ was hell on earth. Good people on the Left resolved the moral problem by renouncing communism. But McDonnell, like Ken Livingstone, sympathised with the Workers Revolutionary Party, one of the nastiest political cults Britain produced in the 20^th century.

Its leader, Gerry Healy was a petty Stalin and suburban Mao. Healy enchanted Vanessa and Corin Redgrave, who proved, once again, that actors who spend their working lives reading other people’s lines cannot think for themselves when they leave the stage. The Healy the Redgraves, Equity and, for a brief moment in the 1970s, the artistic directors of the National Theatre adored was a monster. He took money from Saddam Hussein and Colonel Gaddafi, and returned the favour by ordering his followers to spy on Iraqi dissidents in London and pass the information to the Iraqi embassy. He demanded that young women show their commitment to the revolution by not complaining when he raped them.

Livingstone stuck with Healy to the end; despite all the scandals about the beatings and rapes Healy administered, Livingstone delivered a glowing tribute to the old brute when he died. If we are to believe McDonnell’s account, he kept his distance. He told the Timesthat he had never met Healy, but it is a matter of record that the Marxist newspaper he ran was printed on presses the Workers Revolutionary Party bought with Gaddafi’s looted cash.

What, I hear you ask, is the point of dragging up this ancient history; these half-forgotten scandals from so long ago?

I wish we could forget. But the past is the present when Corbyn and McDonnell are providing a pitifully inept opposition; an opposition so terrible George Osborne should be hugging himself with delight and Nicola Sturgeon and Nigel Farage should be muttering thanks to whatever gods they believe in before they go to sleep.

The revolutionaries of the late 20^th century who are now in charge of the Labour Party never renounced the Leninism of their youth. Their opponents might use the crimes of communism against them. Traitors to socialism might have their ‘Krondstadt moments‘ and recoil in revulsion at their younger selves. But true socialists suppressed their doubts by turning Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao into jokes....

Far leftists do not laugh to mock communism. They laugh to forget communism. They dismiss the mass murders, and the suppression of every right that makes life worth living with a giggle and a snort, and imply that you are a bit of a prude if you cannot do the same.

Then they throw a copy of Mao’s Little Red Book across the chamber of the House of Commons and look round with utter bemusement when no one gets the gag.

Then there's Seumas Milne, appointed in October by Jeremy Corbyn as executive director of strategy and communications for the Labour Party: 

Has Milne moved on from his youthful dalliances with Stalinism? His Guardian columns suggest otherwise. He has written that “the number of victims of Stalin’s terror has been progressively inflated over recent years” and that “Communism in the Soviet Union, eastern Europe and elsewhere delivered rapid industrialisation, mass education, job security and huge advances in social and gender equality”. 

Milne sees himself as a representative of the anti-imperialist Left — but it is a special interpretation of imperialism, namely that formulated by Lenin in his 1916 pamphlet Imperialism: The Highest stage of Capitalism. In a 2011 speech, Milne declared: “Under modern capitalism, imperialism in essence is the use of force and coercion in all its forms . . . to extort profits above what can be obtained through ordinary commercial exchange.” Imperialism is not Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, which he has repeatedly supported. It is whatever the centre of world capital and its allies — in the Milne worldview, located in the United States, its European allies and Israel — does.

If Seumas Milne is no longer a Stalinist he has certainly not travelled far from Stalinism. What is most worrying is that on Milne’s appointment, Corbyn’s own campaign stated: “Seumas shares Jeremy’s worldview almost to the letter . . . they sing from the same hymn sheet.”

Comments

[Runcie Balspune]

Imperialism is not Russia’s aggression against Ukraine

Imperialism is not the Arab Islamic conquests either, despite the Umayyad Caliphate being one of the largest empires ever seen with over 28% of the world's population under its yoke, conquering territories thousands of miles away and obliterating entire civilizations in the process. The very same empire the barbarians in Syria/Iraq are trying to recreate.