I felt I had to come back to this because, while I laid out what was a clear anti-socialist position in Socialism - Whats’s Not to Hate, I really gave it a bit of an easy pass. I let those who promote it, and force it on others, off the hook.I don’t care whether you call it leftism, socialism, communism, progressivism or Marxism, it’s all the same to me. I make no distinction, nor is one necessary. It’s a nasty, collective, authoritarian, totalitarian ideology, the aim of which is to create an all-commanding state controlled by a small army of party members and bureaucrats who will be direct every aspect of people’s lives. It would enforce its policies ruthlessly, with draconian measures taken against dissenters. It would brook no opposition - and it would be murderous, as has been demonstrated many times to the misfortune of the poor people around the world who have had to live under such a government.
Previously I cited Sweden as an example of a country which had been ruined by socialism but that’s not quite true. We have to be clear about exactly what socialism means. It means a system of government in which the means of production, distribution and exchange are in the control of the “people”. I put that in quotation marks because in reality it never is the “people” who own anything. It’s the state, run by an army of bureaucrats and commissars under the direction of a small group of the party ‘elites’. By this definition Sweden is not socialist because private companies are still permitted. Rather, it is a social democracy within a mixed economy.
By the same metric, Britain has never been a socialist country either, although we have been taken in that direction by every government since 1945 with a little bit of row-back during the Thatcher years in the 1980s, before the tide turned again in 1997. Let no-one tell you Blair was a closet conservative. He was a revolutionary. Everything the Labour government did between 1997 and 2010 resulted in political power being taken, by sleight of hand, further away from the people and put in the hands of unelected quango-crats who were New Labour poodles. These were the years when the civil service was subverted to the cause of the Labour Party. It has yet to be put to the test by a determinedly conservative government; no such animal has existed in Britain for a very long time. Besides, the subverted Civil Service would obstruct or prevent any genuinely conservative measures that might be launched.
One thing that is truly puzzling is this: Why, when a conservative estimate of the number of people killed by communism worldwide is 150 million, is the idea of socialism/communism still tolerated in Britain? How is it that someone such as the activist Ash Sarkar can go on television and declare to the world with pride, “ I am, literally, a communist!” without censure. How would it play if, instead, the person was a young white man who cried, “I am, literally, a Nazi!” We know it wouldn’t happen, don’t we, and if it did, he would be hooked off so fast his neck would probably be broken.
Since the end of the Second World War and the Nuremburg trials the attitude has been ‘never again’. Never again will we in the West allow a political philosophy such as National Socialism to arise. At the same time, the crimes of the Communist Party in the USSR under Lenin and Stalin were overlooked. And we did know about them. At school our children are endlessly bombarded in history lessons with the evil of the Nazis (who were socialists, let us not forget). On television there are constant programmes about one aspect or other of the Nazis. One such is the BBC’s ‘The Nazis - a Warning from History’ which is endlessly repeated on one BBC channel or another. But, nary a word is said about the crimes committed by communism which make the Nazis look like rank amateurs, even allowing for the fact that they had just 12 years to do their work.
Social surveys and opinion polls indicate fairly consistently that around 67% of 18 to 24-year-olds in Britain favour socialism. People can freely offer opinions such as “Mao did more good than bad” (60 Million dead), as the Labour MP Diane Abbott actually did in the House of Commons, and a Member of the Labour front bench, the Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, could stand up and wave Mao’s Little Red Book in the face of Conservative government ministers. Left wing demonstrations in London are never without the Socialist Workers’ Party placards and posters. Why is this? Why is socialism never a dirty a word unless it has ‘national’ put in front of it?
I think the answer is partly in the modern political influence of women who just want everybody to be nice to each other. Socialism is to them a catch-all term for something warm and fuzzy and caring. It’s everyone just looking after everyone else and sharing what we all hold in common. What they’re thinking about is really social democracy which is not the same thing. The majority of people simply want to do good, to adopt a noble cause. They are motivated by compassion so they are drawn to what they think is the answer. This is especially true of the well-to-do, university-educated middle classes who can get involved and in so doing feel really good about themselves.
There are elements of socialist practice in mixed economies but it’s not truly socialism unless the state owns everything. I think it’s highly likely that the people who favour socialism so much, the middle class young and the female (not all females I hasten to add), just don’t know what it really is. To understand what it is, we need to go back to Marx.
Karl Marx had two hypotheses he taught as fact:
One, the cause of all ills is private property and states are constructed to protect private property and the power flowing from it. It corrupted people’s minds. The only people with moral purity were the working classes.
Two, History is proceeding towards an inevitable end, through a constant series of conflicts, the final one of which would be the property owners versus the proletariat.
The workers would win and establish a Dictatorship of the Proletariat after a bloody rising - he made no bones about the bloodshed involved - and the workers would own the means of production, distribution and exchange. Once that happens, socialism would be established then everything would slowly morph into a condition where the state withers away and perfect communism is arrived at. Utopia. By chance, it seems.
Socialism is merely the first part of the process and that is what existed in the USSR under the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Socialism is communism in action and it is presented as the people owning everything whereas, in reality, it is the state which owns everything and the people own nothing (Now, where have we heard that recently?). In Marxian socialism in the USSR not even small private businesses were permitted. There was no private property. The peasants’ land was taken by the state and there was no freedom of movement. But, land ownership and freedom of movement are fundamental requirements for economic activity. They are the means of production so it is hardly surprising there were shortages and queues.
If the state did own, ‘on behalf of the people’, the means of production, distribution and exchange, it would be running a total command economy with central planning and resources allocated, including “Human Resources”, as the central planners saw fit. There could be no room for dissent, no freedom of the press and therefore no free speech. If a state is going to run a total command economy there can be no opposition. Young people wouldn’t choose what they wanted to do with their lives. They would have to do what the state required in any given five-year plan. You want to be a doctor? Sorry, the quota is filled for the next two years. You can be a bus driver or a worker in a tractor factory. You couldn’t choose where to live either. We have enough bus drivers in Leningrad; it’s Arkhangelsk for you. Argue and it’s the Gulag.
Most people don’t understand what a bullet we in Britain dodged when Jeremy Corbyn was leader of the Labour Party and it didn’t win the General Election in 2017. He and his sidekick, John McDonnell, and those close around them are hard-core Marxists, many of them leaving the Communist party of Great Britain to join Labour. McDonnell used to cite as his inspiration Lenin, Trotsky and Mao but he realised that this wouldn’t go down well with the voters so he started citing one G D H Cole instead, no doubt thinking that Cole was a suitably obscure and moderate figure who wouldn’t frighten the horses. Well, here’s Cole, a member of the Fabian Society.
“I would much sooner see the Soviet Union, even with its policy unchanged, dominant over all Europe, including Great Britain, than see an attempt to restore the pre-war States to their futile and uncreative independence and their petty economic nationalism under capitalist domination. Much better be ruled by Stalin than by the destructive and monopolistic cliques which dominate Western capitalism. We must never ever return to limpid social democracy. We would be far better to be ruled by Stalin, even with all the barbarities”.
Cole was perfectly in tune with many of the other prominent Fabians of the inter-war years. He was an Oxford don and among his students were Hugh Gaitskell and Harold Wilson, future leaders of the Labour Party and, in Wilson’s case, Prime Minister.
Around Corbyn and McDonnell were people such as Seamus Milne and Andrew Murray. The striking thing about Milne and Murray is that, like so many leftists, they are children of wealth and privilege. Guardian journalist Milne, the son of a former BBC Director-General Alasdair Milne, was educated at Winchester College and Balliol College, Oxford (PPE, of course) while Andrew Philip Drummond-Murray, to give him his full name, is a scion of an aristocratic Scottish family, a son of a stock-broker and banker, who didn’t study beyond 'O’ levels at school and became a trades union official.
Milne and Murray are not unusual. In fact, they are the norm. Revolutionary ideas don’t emanate from the very top of hierarchies and certainly not from the bottom; why would they? They tend to come from a dissatisfied middle tier. From where do these thinkers, philosophers and writers arise if not from among those with the leisure time to think, philosophise and scribble unfettered by the necessity to toil to ensure that there are roofs over heads, clothes on backs and food on tables?
So it was with Karl Marx. Apart from being a thinker, philosophiser, writer, drunkard and an odorous, indigent sponger who didn’t take baths, Karl was the son of Heinrich Marx, a lawyer and owner of several vineyards, and Henriette Pressburg from a prosperous family in Nijmegen in the Netherlands. The Marxes had a very comfortable upper middle-class life in Trier in the Moselle valley and were able to send their son to study law and philosophy in Bonn and Berlin. Despite being Jewish, Marx had been brought up a Christian. His father had converted to help in his profession. At university Marx lost his faith and started writing Satanic poetry. He flirted with the occult and out of this came a hatred of God. He believed in taking down the Christian nations long before he came to the idea of communism.
A quick roll-call of subsequent revolutionaries reveals that Vladimir Lenin was upper middle class and a lawyer, Mao Zedong was the son of a wealthy farmer, Fidel Castro a lawyer and also the son of a wealthy farmer, Che Guevara was a medical doctor from an upper-class Argentine family. Pol Pot came from a prosperous Cambodian agrarian family, rich enough to send him to study at the Sorbonne where he cooked up the ideas that would lead to the Killing Fields of Cambodia. These were not the occupations and paths of progress generally open to the peasantry.
Marxism reached a crisis point at the end of the 1980s when people in the USSR’s European client states decided that they would in future Live Not by Lies or exchange any more New Lies for Old. Capitalism had not collapsed as predicted; instead, it had done quite well in raising people’s standard of living across the Western world. Francis Fukuyama rather foolishly declared the End of History while those who were committed Marxists decided on the next move in their war against freedom and capitalism.
Revolutions are top-down, not bottom-up. They are started by groups of thinkers, philosophers and writers who are convinced they have the answer to the miserable existence of the great bulk of humanity if only the great bulk of humanity would defer to their greater knowledge and wisdom and let them make all the decisions. All that is expected of the masses is blind obedience. And, of course, a goodly number of useful idiots to do the fighting and dying. That the workers hadn’t risen to the Marxists’ commands to take control of industries meant that they would have to be abandoned.
We know where they went next - Environmentalism. All aboard the Climate Change bandwagon. Marxists are nothing if not inventive. Anything goes in their desire to overthrow capitalism, wipe out the family and eradicate Christianity and therefore nations. So, we have environmental (climate) Marxism. We also have:
- Race Marxism (includes migration Marxism) in Critical Race Theory
- Feminist Marxism
- Sex (gender/transgender) Marxism in Gender Theory
- Health Marxism (the NHS which is neither national nor about health)
To get there though, they first had to have their ‘Long March’ and the place they chose to start was in education . It had to be taken away from the home and the family. Marx, Lenin and later Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfurt School all emphasised this. Marcuse and his comrades such as Theodor Adorno targeted middle-class young intellectuals, and racial minorities. This really got going in 1968 when Marcuse would visit the Sorbonne in Paris and lecture to audiences of thousands. His message was “do not take down the universities, take them over”. They had to move into the schools and universities and capture the minds of the young.
One of Marcuse’s students was Angela Davis, winner of the Lenin Peace Prize (no hint of irony) from whom there is a direct line to Black Lives Matter (BLM). BLM announced its presence in the wake of the riots following the death while being arrested by the Minneapolis Police of drug-addled career-criminal George Floyd. They descibed themselves as “trained Marxists” without having the gumption to realise that it painted them as little better than Pavlov’s dogs, reacting thoughtlessly to stimuli.
Professor Paulo Friere, a Brazilian Marxist, wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed in 1968 which posited a theory of teaching which has become standard at Western colleges of education. His aim was to get at least 100 students into tenured academic positions. Each one would have hundreds or thousands of students through their classes during their careers from among whom they could persuade many to remain in the universities as academics. The result? Decolonising of curricula, BLM, transgenderism et cetera. It even occurs in private schools, although most of the teachers pushing the corruption are little more than useful idiots.
Another branch of useful idiocy is the concept of Christian socialism. Tom Holland in his book ‘Dominion’ claims that socialism is the progeny of Christianity. However, Christianity is broad. There are many sects and cults who hold beliefs not found in the Bible. They may simply be conveniently labelled as Christian without actually being Christian. Would Jesus Christ have been a socialist? No, simply because socialism, true socialism, requires coercion and violence. Once you ask a Christian socialist if he would be comfortable with that and point out that revolution is inseparable from violence it cannot stand. Socialism intends to wipe out Christianity, so the very idea of a Christian socialist is an absurdity. Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky all said it. In 1906 Lenin wrote:
“We should not hide it from anyone that we will not achieve our aim without a bloody war of extermination”.
He was as good as his word and 14 million died while he was at the helm of the nascent USSR. There was a level of hatred behind this, almost certainly because his brother, who had attempted to assassinate the Tsar had been hanged.
But it all starts with so-called intellectuals in universities. Books have been written on the subject, the most well known and most readable being ‘The Intellectuals and The Masses - Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939’ by John Carey (1992) in which you can read about the sheer snobbery and condescension of the likes of George Bernard Shaw, H G Wells, Aldous Huxley and others. In ‘Fools, Frauds and Firebrands - Thinkers of the New Left’ by Roger Scruton (2015), Scruton dismantles the lunatic ‘intellectual’ left in Britain, the USA and France featuring the evisceration of Hobsbawn, Dworkin, Sartre and Foucault.
As a narrator of where this has led and might do so again there is no-one better than Giles Udy who is Britain’s leading historian of the Soviet Gulag system. He is author of the phenomenal ‘Labour and the Gulag: Russia and the Seduction of the British Left’ and is a regular contributor to The Times, The Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the i, UnHerd and the magazine Standpoint. His latest book, ‘At Dawn They Came: Soviet Terror and Repression 1917 - 1953’ contains personal accounts which really bring home the reality and true horror of hard-core socialism. He discovered that most people in Russia have relatives who had been in the Gulag at one time or another. Did it kill 60 million in the USSR? The actual figure is almost irrelevant.
“One death is a tragedy, a millions a mere statistic”.
Josef Stalin
The Gulag was started by Lenin and perfected by Stalin. Exposing it for what it was, we have the work of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago and Anne Applebaum in Gulag: A History. There was show trial after show trial of dissidents and ‘criminals’ to produce the political prisoners to send to the work camps. Western useful idiots never understood that the whole idea of the Soviet court system was to advance the revolution, not to dispense justice or determine right from wrong. Criminals went free. Good people of the wrong class with the wrong ideas were imprisoned, worked to death or shot. Holocaust victims or the Gulag? What’s the difference? Socialism, of course, is morally right and, because it is morally right, socialists think they can do as they see fit.
Giles Udy in his research work visited the secret city of Norilsk, 300 miles inside the Arctic Circle, where there is six weeks of darkness in the winter and temperatures can drop to -50℃. There is one third of the world’s nickel at Norlisk and vast copper reserves which are both impossible to mine without a source of disposable labour hence it’s being a part of the Gulag system. The industries are now owned by an oligarch but well after the end of communism it is still a secret city. Udy saw the camps and he saw the cells in the punishment block. They would be open-topped in the summer so prisoners were exposed to the blackflies. There was no bed, just a flip-down plank behind the door which was allowed to be folded down for lying on between 11 pm and 5 am. A prisoner’s clothes were taken for the night and he would be left in his underwear in complete dark, in the cold, and fed only punishment rations. The back of the door was studded to stop prisoners banging on it. What is really horrific about it is that it took a human mind to come up with this.
As well as the exposure of the truth given by Giles Udy’s work there is the writing in the Spectator and elsewhere of James Bartholomew who is the director of The Museum of Communist Terror which aims to keep alive the memory of the persecutions, terror, deaths and economic failures of the communist regimes of the 20th Century. It currently does this through its website and organised lectures in schools and universities while it is working towards the development of a full-size museum in London.
For those who travel, there is in Riga in Latvia, a Museum of the Occupation. For centuries Latvia was a battleground between Russia, Poland/Lithuania, Prussia/Germany and Sweden. Briefly independent between the World Wars it was invaded, occupied and absorbed by the USSR in 1940, steam-rollered by the Nazi armies, then retaken by the USSR within which it remained until it regained independence in 1991. I visited it more than once some 20-odd years ago. It has some shocking, hard-hitting exhibits and it leaves one with the same feelings of sadness, incredulity and desolation about the evil within humanity as does a visit to Bergen-Belsen or Auschwitz.
In the end, it was all for no point at all. It was a complete and utter waste of human lives and treasure. While conducting the Cold War which eventually broke it, because it ended up spending more than 50% of the USSR’s GPD on its armed forces, the CPSU tried and tried to maintain the fiction that the utopia was just around the corner. In the end, it just simply ran out of steam.
Can it happen in Britain? Well, we have had another couple of generations of gullible young and my goodness, have they been brain-washed in the schools and universities, these poor victims of the ‘Long March’. No matter how inconceivable we think it may be there is no point at which the inconceivable cannot happen within a generation or two. We see what is happening around us in this current ‘age of inversions’. We already have class and race antipathy, if not actual war, we have suppression of free speech, censorship and propaganda in what is, without doubt, a revolution under way. It lacks only the murderous terror; it seems happy to make do with cancellation, restriction and censorship while it kills quietly, sneakily and surreptitiously as it did in the ‘scamdemic’ - for now.
What we must never forget is that these horrors were all made possible by rich men in Wall Street who financed the Bolshevik revolution because they thought there would be something in it for them. Just as, a little later, they also financed Benito Mussolini’s Fascism and Adolf Hitler’s National Socialism. Bankers and industrialists are quite happy with collective authoritarianism because it provides captive markets for their industrial products and high taxation which governments can then recycle, back towards their industries. It’s a bit like stake-holder capitalism, Davos-style, the modern iteration of the same nasty ideas. Wall Street involvement with 20th century totalitarianism has been well documented by Professor Anthony C Sutton in his Wall Street Trilogy and National Suicide. Ultimately, here is where blame for the horrors of the 20th Century must rest. Why do most people not know about this?
I sit here typing this in the knowledge that in Highgate cemetery in North London there sits the tomb and memorial of Karl Marx, commissioned and paid for in 1956 by the Communist Party of Great Britain. I would like to see it smashed to pieces, Marx’s bones exhumed, ground to dust and the whole thing dumped in the English Channel beyond our territorial waters. The others of his family who are there and largely blameless may continue to rest in peace under a new, nondescript stone. One day, perhaps, a proper conservative government of Britain will have the courage to do this.
In the meantime, we must resist the on-going revolution with every fibre of our beings and, heeding the words of Solzhenitsyn…….
………. remember that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
