Mick Hartley

Good stuff from Dominic Lawson in the Sunday Times (£):

I had not fully understood just how callous, or catastrophically ignorant, Corbyn is about the victims of state communism until I watched the Labour leader’s interview on the Andrew Marr show three weeks ago. When Marr taxed this opponent of the market economy with the fact that the Chinese economy and people had prospered so much more since the People’s Republic allowed individuals to get rich through private business, Corbyn countered that its economy had “grown massively . . . since 1949 and . . . the Great Leap Forward”. He then gave that little sniff and satisfied smile that we have grown accustomed to seeing from Corbyn in interviews when he thinks he’s made a good point.

Reader, the Great Leap Forward was Mao Tse-tung’s propagandistic term for the policy of forced collectivisation of agriculture from 1958-62. It caused the deaths of an estimated 45m Chinese (or seven-and-a-half times the number of Jews exterminated over a similar number of years in the Holocaust).

As the most respected historian of that period in Chinese history, Frank Dikötter, wrote: “Between 2m-3m of these victims were tortured to death or summarily executed, often for the slightest infraction. People accused of not working hard enough were hanged and beaten; sometimes they were bound and thrown into ponds. Punishments for the least violations included mutilation and forcing people to eat excrement . . . The term ‘famine’ tends to support the widespread view that the deaths were largely the result of half-baked and poorly executed economic programmes. But the archives show that coercion, terror and violence were the foundation of the Great Leap Forward.” And this is what Jeremy Corbyn offers us as an example of successful economic management under communism.

In the extremely unlikely event that the Labour leader experiences any doubt on this, he has at his side someone with exactly the same world view, and who can give him the necessary ideological reassurance: the former Guardian columnist Seamus Milne. That presumably is why Corbyn, on becoming leader, appointed Milne to be Labour’s “chief strategist”. Milne, when a schoolboy at Winchester, stood in a mock election (in 1974, when the grown-ups went to the polls) as a Maoist candidate. A contemporary at that fine private school was the Conservative MP John Whittingdale, who kept a copy of Milne’s manifesto. Thanks to him, we know the schoolboy Milne pledged: “Under a Maoist government, factories and farms will be run by committees of workers, elected by the workers (as in China, where this has proved to work well.)” As in the Great Leap Forward.

Here I confess that as a prep schoolboy I was intrigued by the People’s Republic of China. In 1968, I think it was, when Maoism was high fashion in the West, I wrote (in red ink, and under the assumed name of George Carter) to the Chinese embassy, asking it to send me a copy of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book. It did, and I still have it. But in the intervening years I discovered — by reading histories, and through encounters with people who lived under these tyrannies — what actually happened in the communist dictatorships. You live and learn.

But not Corbyn or Milne, who remains an apologist for Stalinism. They are remarkable cases, at least in fully functioning adults, of arrested intellectual development. Perhaps moral idiocy as well….