...of a silly little Guardian scribbler like Abi Wilkinson might seem an odd thing to do. A year ago, I might have stepped over this tiny, obnoxious puddle of drivel. But Jeremy Corbyn came within a whisker of winning the last election, and Britain is closer to a take-over by a mixture of Stalinist hard-leftists and cultural Marxist New Leftists than it has been in my lifetime. This is no time to shake one's greying head and to chuckle indulgently, while muttering "silly little thing - she'll eventually see sense", because the leaders of the party she supports - Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell, Diane Abbott and Len McCluskey - are all in their sixties, and there is absolutely no sign of any of them seeing sense this side of the grave.
In the name of equality, Stalin deliberately murdered anywhere between three and seven million kulaks - i.e. peasants with brains and initiative who opposed collectivisation. Five million Ukrainians died as a result of famine between 1932 and 1933, which was itself a result of collectivisation. Between 1975 and 1979, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime killed some two million Cambodians - one quarter of the country's population - by working, starving and torturing them to death, or by simply slaughtering them. People were murdered for being academics, or doctors, or for wearing spectacles. I suggest Abi sticks "Pol Pot", "Year Zero" or "Killing Fields" into the Google search box and does a bit of reading, because she'll discover that the person most responsible for this unutterable horror was a Sorbonne-educated intellectual determined to create an agrarian utopia based on... equality!
The only real difference between those two hideous totalitarian ideologies, Communism and Nazism, is who their followers believe need to be killed or enslaved in order to achieve their respective but closely-aligned utopian nightmares - Communists believe whole classes need to be wiped out, while Nazis use race as their yardstick. To suggest that killing a socio-economic class is somehow less reprehensible than slaughtering a race because of a supposed difference in the motives fuelling the slaughter is morally deranged.
Just to be absolutely clear, the statements "I'm not about to defend Stalin", "I'm not about to defend Hitler" and "I'm not about to defend Chairman Mao", invariably end with a full stop: they are never followed by a comma and the word "but". The same goes for "I'm not about to defend suicide bombing", obviously.
How does anyone leave a British or American university not understanding these simple points?
Judging by what I have seen over the past decade, I'd have said they attend British or American universities precisely so that they cannot understand these simple points.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed the 'obnoxious puddle of drivel' by the way. Good to see you're still on top form!
I agree totally with your first point - a left-of-centre friend who now lives in Australia recently expressed surprise at the goofy pro-Corbyn attitudes of the young, educated Brits who've been visiting him and his wife this summer. The triumph of capitalism will count for naught in the end, because we on the Right have allowed the Left to turn our schools and universities into factories churning out educated fools incapable of thinking or arguing rationally, having been taught that their feelings are more important than silly old facts.
DeleteI was feeling particularly feisty yesterday - glad you enjoyed the resulting fury!
In February 2008 Diane Abbott, possibly the most stupid person in Britain and our soon-to-be Home Secretary, said on the Andrew Neill programme that Mao "did more good than harm." Another leftie who has been cracking the history books.
ReplyDeleteDiane Abbott is an exquisite example of a female equivalent of VS Naipaul's 'fish - in - a - barrel' targets, so faux - distractedly triple - tapped, in the Nobel Laureate's 'The Mimic Men.'
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