The Aged P

UK Labour Party leader Ed Miliband is angry because the Daily Mail drew attention to his father’s Marxist views. I think Benedict Brogan hits the nail on the head…

But the key point surely is that Marxism hated – hates – Britain. It hates our institutions, our economic model, our democracy, our independent media and our freedoms. And before the Marxists and their chums lost the argument, it wasn’t just some academic debate played out around the dining tables in well-heeled north London neighbourhoods: it was deadly serious. Yes, there is something distasteful about trashing a dead man’s reputation, and by the same token something noble about the way Mr Miliband and other politicians have risen to his defence. But Ralph Miliband, however well intentioned, was on the side of those who wanted to turn Britain into something dreadful. It is a testament to how comprehensive the defeat of Marxism has proved to be that the Cold War is all but forgotten, and our politics are repulsed by its harsh truths.

There is no doubt that Christine Blower, General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers is a hard left old school apparatchik, a humourless Fred Kite figure in the mould of Bob Crowe and Len McCluskey. That such prehistoric dinosaurs, still mouthing the empty platitudes and slogans of a long discredited messianic Marxist cult, should be the standard bearers of the shrivelled rump of a once mighty British trade union movement should come as no surprise….wasn’t it Marx himself who said that history eventually repeats itself as farce?

What does raise a few eyebrows, however, is that hundreds of thousands of teachers within the NUT, supposedly intelligent, educated folk, should be willing to see a relic like Blower as a figurehead for their profession.

Anyone familiar both with teacher unions and teachers, of course, would not be surprised at all. People like Blower dominate the infrastructure of the NUT because they throw themselves one hundred percent into the mind numbing routine of committees, minutes, agenda and motions that characterise the everyday business of union administration. Most teachers are happy to let them do it because they have better things to do with their lives…preparing lessons, marking work, shopping, kids, drinking, sex, gardening etc. They very rarely attend branch meetings or conferences – it’s far easier to leave it to the Blowers. So the Blowers drift to the top as a result of ….apathy.

But how come the apathetic majority of NUT members put up with being led by Blower and an executive dominated by fossils like herself?

It’s partly because quite a few teachers regard themselves as vaguely “left wing” …I say regard themselves because, of course, though they might talk the talk they never walk the walk. They are what Lenin called radish socialists…red outside, lilywhite inside.  They lead middle class lifestyles. They like to pretend the revolution..join the odd one day strike, maybe a work to rule but that would be as far as they would go.

This hasn’t always been the case. In previous decades there was always a solid core of professionals who would never ever dance to the Blower tune. But remember that many of today’s teachers are lower level graduates from second or third tier universities where a lack of academic rigour is matched with a shallow sub marxist pedagogy.

State school teaching today is a nice little number. No covering for absent teachers, generous salaries, lower contact hours, plenty of support, no compulsory dinner duties, long holidays and automatic pay increases. No performance payments and almost impossible to sack – no wonder they, like the police, resent any idea of change

That’s why Blower’s class warfare rhetoric strikes a chord. But it’s not a Marxist uprising– it’s a Luddite resistance against anything that threatens their cosy cartel

The Stalinists are here, says Dan Riehl, referring to Think Progress and their latest antics in the left’s Tucsonesque Rush Limbaugh/Sandra Fluke blitzkrieg.

There is no real difference between today’s un-American U.S.-based left and regimes such as Stalin’s – only they don’t quite yet have enough power. But they are busy aquiring it. You’re kidding yourself if you think otherwise. These are very dangerous people that need to be defeated for an America anything like how Conservatives view her to survive.

Sandra Fluke, a professional agitator, has become the poster girl of the left and the left supported President Obama and his administration. She appears to be a humourless, single-minded apparatchik, ruthless and intolerant of those with opposing views. Nevertheless it would be unwise to underestimate this woman. She is intelligent and has a superb feel for any political opportunity. She will no longer operate in the political shadows. She, and many like her, is the future of the Stalinist left.

You see the thing about Stalinists (or Marxists, as they should be called since the key element of Marx’s Communist version of socialism was the need for a dictatorship of the revolutionary elite) is that they are quite content to use the arena of freedom provided by parliamentary democracy to further their cause and impugn their political rivals. But once they have power that arena of free debate and discussion is dismantled and we enter the dark world of Orwell’s 1984 where it is no longer sufficient to withdraw from political activity and remain silent. Stalinists require that everyone publicly celebrates and praises the regime however degraded their circumstances.

As is often the case art can encapsulate the essence of this essential truth (largely ignored/forgotten by a complicit media that constantly revisits Hitler, Franco, Pinochet and other non Marxist authoritarian regimes)….so maybe this 1938 French political cartoon could give us a glimpse of the USA in 2037 at the beginning of President Fluke’s second term….

French anti stalinist cartoon 1938

BTW….The sign reads “We are very happy”

h/t GlobalSecurity Org

Since the eruption of the banking crisis in 2008 and the justifiable public anger in the UK & USA at the amount of taxpayers money that had to be pumped into the subsequent bailouts there has been a marked revival of anti-capitalist, class war rhetoric and a renewed interest in the ideas of Karl Marx.

At the same time the bombastic posturing of the former KGB agent Vladimir Putin who now rules Russia with the help of a gang of vindictive and sticky fingered ex secret policemen seeks to restore the reputation of that archetypal left wing dictator Josef Stalin who spent thirty years claiming to have constructed the world’s very first perfect socialist where all men were equal and where all the means of production were controlled by the workers themselves – or rather, since it would be impossible to run a business dependent on the fluctuating wishes of the masses – controlled by the officials of the Communist Party claiming only they knew the “true” wishes and feelings of the working classes.

Russia and communism are both getting a big media makeover.

Which is why every sane man and woman in the west should read “Child 44” by Tim Rob Smith

Read it and realise the true nature of Russia in the 1930s and early 50s, the society that lay behind the Five Year Plans and People’s Arts festivals and the edifice of lies and hypocrisy that was shored up by the Bolshevik hacks and their brutal enforcers – and the useful idiots in the west who fell hook line and sinker for the whole sham.

It is essentially a crime novel in the police procedural mould, a hunt for a serial killer of children in Russia during the 1940s and early 50s during the latter years of the Stalin regime. Or rather the non hunt because the Communists claimed to have created a new kind of society where poverty and greed had been abolished and therefore crime no longer existed. If crimes were committed they were deliberate anti Soviet counter revolutionary acts, political crimes – therefore almost all policing resources were poured into the political police, the NKVD /MVD. Everyday policing was left to the underfunded and despised Militia. It followed that if an act could not be considered a political crime then it just drifted under the radar.

The novel is about an up and coming NKVD officer who upsets his bosses because he wants to track down a serial killer. He continues this obsession even after he is transferred to a dead end Militia placement.

It is a cold story set against the background of the moral vacuum of Soviet Russia where the only imperative is to survive the dead weight of an oppressive and secretive regime. There are disturbing snapshots of the darkness within the NKVD/MVD – one of the most chilling moments is the description of NKVD “specialists” (i.e.torturers) leaving the Lubianka at the end of their shift, going home to their families after a day of breaking bones and smashing bodies as if they were office commuters.
Read it if you can – then keep it burned in your memory next time you see somebody waving a hammer and sickle claiming to represent “the workers” – or watch Putin posturing on a Russian TV clip….