By Paul Austin Murphy, AMERICAN THINKER
I found the lovely image below on a Facebook page:
I posted the image beneath it as a response.
Yes, it’s that omnipresent double-standard again! That is,
National Socialism (Nazism) = bad
International Socialism (communism, Trotskyism) = good
This is striking primarily because — according to many sources — communism claimed far more lives than Nazism in the 20th century. Indeed, it can also be argued that the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, etc. were far more oppressive than the Nazis. The Nazis get a worse deal, of course, primarily because they instigated a Holocaust against Jews. Yet communists also wiped out entire classes and ethnic groups. Many contemporary Leftists — including some fans of Jeremy Corbyn — would like to do the same today; though this time with different “counter-revolutionary” or “reactionary” targets.
Many Corbynistas, for example, want to rid the world of the entire Right and indeed all other “haters”: e.g., “Tories”, fans of Trump, Ukip, the EDL, Britain First, “bankers”, “Daily Mail readers”, “Sun plebs”, “low-information voters”, “bigots”, “racists”, “Nazis”, “fascists” ad infinitum. Thus, in order to bring about peace, tolerance, and equality, segments of the Left now realize that a hell of a lot of people will need to be silenced, imprisoned, or killed. (How many Tories/patriots/right-wingers are there in the UK? 20 million or more?)
This means that it’s massively ironic that many Leftists have made various very-tangential links between Donald Trump and white supremacists and Nazis. The Leader of the British Opposition, on the other hand, has very many intimate, strong and blatant links to communists and Trotskyists all over the world; not just in the UK. (He also has strong links with Iran, Iran’s Press TV, Venezuela, etc.)
So this piece will be very British-centric in that it will concentrate on the British Labor Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn; who is, I suppose, Britain’s very own Bernie Sanders…
Corbyn’s Communist Comrades
Many people say “a man is known by the company he keeps”. That’s not always true. However, Corbyn’s campaign chief is Andrew Philip Drummond-Murray; who dropped his double-barrelled name to disguise his “class origins”. (He’s now named Andrew Murray.) He was a member of the Communist Party of Britain until he joined the Labor Party when Corbyn became leader. (He’s also became Chair of the Stop the War Coalition after Corbyn himself stepped down.) He only joined the Labor Party at the end of 2016. That’s just over half-a-year ago. He immediately became Campaign Chief of the Labor Party.
Andrew Murray is the son of Peter Drummond-Murray of Mastrick, a stockbroker and banker. Andrew Murray was educated at Worth School, a Benedictine independent boarding school in Sussex. From 1986 to 1987, Murray worked for the Soviet Novosti news agency. He has also expressed “solidarity” with North Korea.
Now for Seumus Milne.
He’s the Executive Director of Strategy and Communications for Corbyn and the Labor Party. His “communist tendencies” are very well-known. Milne is also a public-schoolboy, just like Andrew Murray. He’s also the younger son of former BBC Director General, Alasdair Milne.
In terms of politics, Milne has been a systematic fan of Stalin and the Soviet Union. He once claimed that “history has been unkind to” Joseph Stalin. He also gave the lowest number I’ve ever seen for the number of people murdered by the Soviet socialist regime.
Corbyn himself went to Castle House Preparatory School, an independent school in Shropshire. He was brought up in a seven-bedroom house in that charming county. He now lives in Islington, which is also where many very-posh (socialist) Fabians lived; as did Tony and Cherie Blair and countless “progressive” professors, lawyers, activists, etc.
Corbyn on Marx, Trotsky and the Soviet Union
Of course it’s true that someone could say that Marx was an “essentially a fascinating figure, from whom we can learn a great deal” and not be a fan — politically or ideologically — of the dead German. But if that someone is Jeremy Corbyn (a “radical socialist”) saying these things, then that’s something else entirely.
The Islington North MP also said:
“Marx obviously analysed what was happening in a quite brilliant way and the philosophy around Marx is fascinating.”
And as a Marxist socialist, I suppose that it’s almost inevitable than Corbyn will think of capitalism in 19th-century terms. After all, that’s when Marx was writing. Thus, when Corbyn also said that “[t]he [Conservative] Government’s policies… are a return to the workhouse” he was being a gross rhetorician — as Marx himself was.
Take also the following speech from Corbyn:
“… I had an interesting meeting with an environmental campaigning group from the Soviet Union…. those people felt that they had the power to change the policies to stop the destruction of their own environment. The policies of free-market economies… have led to the pollution of the North Sea and the Irish Sea…”
So Corbyn believed that environmental activists had more political power in the Soviet Union than their equivalents in the Western democracies. What’s more, Corbyn seems to have thought this simply because of what was said to him during a single meeting.
In retrospect, it’s ironic that Corbyn said the above just two years before the fall of the Soviet Union. This isn’t a surprise. Corbyn, at that time, had a more favorable opinion of the Soviet Union than he had of the United Kingdom.
Corbyn’s friend, George Galloway (also of the Stop the War Coalition), still mourns the death of the Soviet Union and has publicly stated that. I wonder if Corbyn does too. He’d never admit that today. After all, large sections of the Labor Party (before Corbyn’s rule) have always been strongly against communism and Marxism – and not only since Tony Blair!
Of course, the official socialist mythology (though not for Seumus Milne, Andrew Murray, George Galloway and other communists!) is that Stalinism — and sometimes the Soviet Union itself — wasn’t a true theological example of socialism/communism. All true examples of socialism will, of course, come in the future. All past examples of socialism/communism have been false examples. One true example of socialism might well have come to pass on the 9th of June, 2017, if Jeremy Corbyn had been elected prime minster of the United Kingdom. Corbyn’s socialist state will only become false (or “deviant”) socialism when it fails; which it will do because every other socialist state (dozens of them) have failed in the past.
In 1988, Corbyn also took his honeymoon in the Soviet Union. It was then (or just after) that Corbyn called for a “complete rehabilitation” of Trotsky.
A Labor Party source, in response, said:
“Jeremy Corbyn has clearly been fixated by the political ideology and tactics of Leon Trotsky for some time, but perhaps he could now focus on the rehabilitation of the Labour Party, which has been performing very poorly in the polls since he became leader. Trotsky didn’t have to worry about the troublesome business of winning elections, but the Labour Party does.”
Trotsky has a glowing name in many socialist circles simply because his name isn’t Stalin. Unlike Stalin, however, Trotsky never had massive state power. Thus Trotsky could never have caused as much pain — and killed as many people — as Stalin did. Had Trotsky gained state power, however, he would quite possibly have been even worse than Stalin.
For example, in 1918 Trotsky was the first Bolshevik to agitate for concentration camps (the Gulag) for political prisoners and the “bourgeoisie.” Before Lenin’s death (in 1924) there were hundreds of Bolsheviks concentration camps in the USSR (i..e, before Stalin’s rule!). Trotsky is also well-known for having slaughtered thousands of anarchists and — the wrong kinds! — of socialist in Kronstadt. In any case, Trotsky was much more ideologically obsessive than Stalin and thus, perhaps, he would have potentially been far more dangerous and bloodthirsty (had he gained power) than Stalin.
So when did communism “become fashionable again?” In 2015, when Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the British Labor Party — that’s when.
It is not true that the Communists have murdered vastly more people than the Nazis. The Nazis killed about 35 million people. Nearly all of these murders were deliberate and premeditated. On the other hand, the victims of Communist regimes, while they were perhaps twice that number if you include all of the Communist regimes (Russia, China, North Korea, etc.), were mainly victims of what American law calls “willful indifference to human life.” Most of the victims of Communist tyrannies died as a sort of byproduct of the regimes’s efforts to promote extremely rapid industrialization, massive increases in armaments production, and less often, increased agricultural production as well. Social experimentation, such as forcing all peasants onto communes and collective farms, were another cause of mass deaths. These policies resulted in millions, perhaps tens of millions, dying of starvation. There were also several million slave laborers who died of overwork and appalling living conditions as well as starvation. By and large, these Communist “experiments” failed to increase production and brought only misery and death. But killing the victims was not usually the specific objective of these “experiments” The Communists simply didn’t care who died or how many people died in their rush to industrialization. They were indifferent to human life, because for them the collective was everything and individuals counted for nothing. But their murders, for the most part, were less motivated by malice, and often only half-intentional, unlike the Nazis, whose murders were nearly all premeditated, with malice aforethought.
From one Facebook comment, the writer concludes that Communism is having a revival? There are more cannibals in the U.S. than there are communists. Those who stay up at night worrying about Communism are ignorant about history and far too stressed out to be taken seriously.