‘For all its brutalities and failures, communism in the Soviet Union, eastern Europe and elsewhere delivered rapid industrialisation, mass education, job security and huge advances in social and gender equality. It encompassed genuine idealism and commitment.”
Once upon a time, an apparently sane and intelligent person, perfectly mannered, charming and with a good job, sat down, switched on his computer, paused for a moment to reflect, and then typed the passage I have just quoted. Then he sent it to a national newspaper where everyone could see it. Really he did.
It is right up there with “Apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?”
In the same article the author argues that it is “a moral and historical nonsense” to say that Stalin was as bad as Hitler because “there was no Soviet Sobibor or Treblinka”; complains that the number of fatalities caused by the Soviet system is exaggerated; says that there are lessons to be learnt from Soviet success; and, crucially, regrets that with its demise we lost a “powerful counterweight to western global domination”.
I was quite surprised that he didn’t add that you can’t make an omelette without killing a few million people.
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Seumas Milne wrote this piece ten years ago for The Guardian (during a period in which Michael Gove dubbed it “the Prada-Meinhof gang”) and in 2012 reprinted it in his book The Revenge of History. In 2015 Jeremy Corbyn appointed his old friend and close ally executive director of strategy and communications of the Labour party.
Anyone wanting to understand the argument about antisemitism and Labour needs to understand this: it is tangled up in something much bigger. The Corbyn left rejects western liberalism and the foreign policy that accompanies it.
There are any number of people and places you could start the tale of this ideology. In Siberia, or in the Congo, or in Ghana or a thousand other places, but let’s try New York.
In 1964, caught up in an increasingly violent factional row, the African-American dissident Malcolm X decided Harlem had become too hot for him. So he set off for the Middle East, seeking and finding intellectual inspiration.
His pilgrimage led him down two paths politically. The first was the adoption of a more orthodox form of Islam, the second his engagement with the idea of Pan-Africanism, the idea of various African dictators (some of whom had earlier been independence fighters). Together this led him to an emphasis on the idea of a single African people victimised by colonialism.
“Pan-Africanism was warmer to the Soviet Union than it was to America
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Pan-Africanism adopted socialist economics, was warmer to the Soviet Union than to America and was extended to Arab countries, assigning to them African identity. In Cairo, making friends with his new Middle Eastern allies, Malcolm X embraced fierce anti-Zionism. He had long regarded Jews as exploiting black people, and he now added hatred of Israel. He talked of “Zionist dollars” bankrolling colonial oppression.
Before Malcolm died, he had inserted these ideas into the mix of American left dissent. They were taken up, for instance, by the Black Power student leader Stokely Carmichael, who before long began calling himself Kwame Ture, adopting the names of the Pan-Africanist dictators of Ghana and Guinea. “The only good Zionist is a dead Zionist,” Ture used to say, adding praise for Hitler just to spice things up a bit.
It is this mixture — civil rights dissent, black power, Pan-Africanism, opposition to the Vietnam War, neutralism and pacifism, anti-Zionism, anti-colonialism — that reshaped the left in the 1960s as it attempted to regain its footing after the death of Stalin. It brought together good causes and bad, the connected and the unconnected, in an angry denunciation of western liberalism.
This new anti-imperialism saw — sees — America and American power as the predominant world evil. African dictatorships, Soviet repression, Islamist terrorism, fundamentalist misogyny are all only a problem if they can somehow be blamed on the United States.
Those wondering why Jeremy Corbyn has been so ineffective in his response to the antisemitism row are missing how difficult this topic is for him. It is closely tied to his overall world view.
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Seumas Milne, who writes with great verve and has the intellectual confidence to express his ideas clearly, sets out the argument of left anti-imperialism very boldly in The Revenge of History.
He begins with a celebration of the way that “the US client state of Georgia” was “crushed in a brief and bloody war” by Russia in 2012. Georgia, he explained, “was a particular favourite of Washington’s neoconservatives” and its forces were “armed and trained by the US and Israel”. After two decades “the years of uncontested US power were over”.
Oh great. Contested now by Vladimir Putin. That’s excellent news, Seumas, thanks.
Not just by Putin though. Also by 9/11 (“perhaps the most successful terror attack in history”), the financial crash, the rise of China and the populist economics of Latin American strongmen. All these had ended the attempt by “the West’s political and corporate elites” to “spread a globalised model of neoliberal capitalism across the world”.
Yes 9/11 was an atrocity but it was one, you understand, that America brought upon itself, an act of resistance against American interference. This interference was even disastrous in Kosovo where the Nato bombing campaign “increased both the scale of ethnic cleansing and repression it was supposed to stop, and only secured Serb withdrawal through Russian pressure.” Ah, Russian pressure, that’s all right then.
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For most of us in the political mainstream, Nato and its allies are the defenders of liberal values as well as national security. For Milne, for Jeremy Corbyn, for their supporters, Nato is the dark star.
What is happening in the Labour party is not (just) the crassness of a few councillors and the odd MP saying some embarrassing things about Jews. It is the abandonment of its identity as an Atlanticist progressive party. And it cannot be stopped until this identity is reasserted.