Mick Hartley

On Corbyn and this Czechoslovak spy business – Stephen Daisley:

Whether you believe the more lurid claims about Corbyn or you reckon, as I do, that he was an occasionally useful idiot, you won’t have failed to notice the lacklustre reception given these headlines. That the man who could be Britain’s next prime minister may, at the very least, have sympathised with totalitarianism ought to be on every set of lips in the land. It ought to disqualify Corbyn from public office and polite society. 

It does not because we do not view communism with the horror accorded to other types of tyranny. History may be written by the victors but they often leave it up to their academics, and in this the evil empire has benefited from a sensitive burial by friends and warm acquaintances. An overeducated generation, born on communism’s death watch, is largely ignorant about events only a few decades gone. A 2016 study commissioned by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation discovered that 42 per cent of millennials were unfamiliar with Mao Zedong, one-third thought more people were killed under George W Bush than Stalin, and 80 per cent underestimated communism’s death toll.   […]

Is ignorance paving the way for a revival of communism? As a political programme, no. The populist mush which has displaced pragmatic, reforming social democracy in some centre-left political parties does not represent communism in any meaningful sense. (Or, for that matter, socialism.) What accompanies it, though, is an attitudinal communism that expresses its leftism in denunciations of dissent, purges of internal rivals, violence and threats of violence, dehumanising language, and attacks on ‘liberals’ and ‘Zionists’. Allied to this is Lolshevism, a semi-ironic affectation in which the speaker breezily extols communism or adopts its rhetoric or symbols. The tone is glib, allowing a plea of humour should they be confronted, but there is an underlying solemnity. This trivialisation did not begin with millennials, many of whom would struggle to identify the beret-sporting mass murderer on their parents’ favourite undergrad T-shirts. It is, nonetheless, a cold and base form of politics.