Jaroslaw Kaczynski's Peculiar Notion of "Martyrdom"

More evidence is becoming available that Lech Kaczynski was in some sense to blame for not only his own death in the Smolensk Air Crash but for all those other 90 passengers on board whilst his bother tried to run on the platform that it was a "Second Katyn" or martyrdom.

The Krakow Post has reported, that,

Polish television network TVN24 has released new materials that are reportedly recordings from the black boxes of the crashed Tu-154 plane that killed President Lech Kaczyński and 95 others in April.

The station is reporting that the transcript from the cockpit recording is incomplete, and a previously unreleased part of the recording is stirring up controversy about the entire investigation of the plane crash.

According to the television station, the doomed plane's captain, Arkadiusz Protasiuk, said during the flight, "If [we or I] don't land, [they or he] will kill me".

The recording is said to be unclear, and the exact pronouns used could not be determined. The context itself is also unknown. This part of the recording was said to be unintelligible during the initial investigation.

While the Polish government announced that they had recently deciphered previously incomprehensible parts of the recordings, Justice Minister Krzysztof Kwiatkowski, who spoke to the press yesterday, declined to confirm the accuracy of TVN24's report.

If the report of the recording is indeed accurate, it stirs up disturbing questions of who this "he" or "they" was that was putting pressure on the pilots to land in what had been described to them as dangerous conditions.

Some Polish media have speculated that Kaczyński himself might be the "he", as in August 2008, the late president had threatened his pilot when he refused to land under dangerous conditions in Tbilisi, Georgia.

This would make a total farce of the decision to bury Lech in the Wawel. Far from being a hero, he was clearly a foolish person who let down the Polish nation through his stubbornness anda plane of journalists that had landed shortly before at Smolensk told them not to try landing.

This did not stop Jaroslaw Kaczynski making the rash statement after catching up with his PO Presidential rival Komorowski following previously slumped ratings, that,

“I would like to mention here the man, the people who are the reason for our being here: my brother and all those killed in the Smolensk catastrophe. Let us remember them because this result grew out of their martyr-like deaths.”.

If Lech had a death wish, he should have gone somewhere near Kandahar in Afghanistan to get himself killed and not endangered the lives of so many others as he has by acceding to the USA's request to send another 3,000 extra troops to fight a futile war in that benighted land.

There was no "martyrdom" in these deaths and Poland should hold a public and open enquiry into the crash. That might convince naive martyr obsessed sections of the Polish population he was not a martyr but a reckless fool who caused the smouldering wreckage near Smolensk.

The New Rapacious Destroyers of Berlin.

Roger Scruton was entirely correct in the concluding chapter of England : An Elegy ( 2000) to remark that the "culture of repudiation" had not just affected Britain but also places like Germany as the,

"The loss of traditional virtue and local identity has occurred throughout Europe and is diaspora...which was struck by enlightenment and died. The global economy, the democratisation of taste, the sexual revolution, pop culture and television have worked to erase the sense of spiritual identity in every place where piety shored up the old forms of knowledge and custom."

Apart from London, which lost so many totemic landmarks of beautiful architecture in the 1960's, Berlin was inevitably more affected as it was flattened and razed by the Soviet capture of the city in 1945.

What has continued to happen is that elegant remnants have been blighted by asinine plate and glass kitsch or "starchitecture" which is even ruining areas that might have been at least preserved as they once had been.
Not only that the beautiful Art Gallery in what had been East Berlin, was restored only to have a huge tacky piece of trash that looked like a large football T-Shirt onto which someone had vomited, plastered on the front.

Lenin in Krakow 1912 to 1914.

The PZPR used to make much of the fact that Lenin lived and worked in and around Krakow between 1912 and 1914. Yet Jan T Malecki's claims that he merely "had sojourned through the city" in his A History of Krakow for Everyone is a somewhat inaccurate assessment.

The wave of iconoclasm that met the deserved demise of the Polish People's Republic in 1990 was entirely understandable and, in the case of the statues in Nowa Huta Square on Roz Avenue and museums lauding him in Ulica Topolowa, the removal was justified. Communism was never wanted in Poland.

Yet, paradoxically, the iconoclasm against Communism and the Soviet imposed People's Republic itself has involved rewriting the story of Communism to serve propaganda purposes and in it's own way to distort and eradicate the real history in place of history as propaganda for politicians in Poland fighting a "New Cold War" against Russia.

Denying Lenin ever existed in Krakow as though a mere emigre on the run only opens up the way for the kitsch version of Communism that treats it all as a bit of a joke with Goodbye Lenin Hostels and Cool Tours regarding Nowa Huta, built in the 1950s under Stalin's Polish puppet regime, as being Lenin's 'favourite' part of Krakow.

That claim, of course, despite the fact Lenin was dead by 1923 and his attitide towards Poland never directly as hostile. For PiS, and other rightists, he was a Russian and an atheist, the worst twin forces of influence possible on the course of Polish history and it's struggle for independence.

This was undoubted revenge for the fact Communism was never wanted in Poland and the Krakow Communists had removed the apostles statues outside the beautiful baroque Sw Peter and Paul's Church on ulica Grodzka and destroyed the legends and commemorations surrounding Pilsudski's legions.

Yet it distorts the past to eradicate Lenin from Krakow as Robert Service's Lenin :A Biography shows that his period in Krakow, then just a few kilometres from the border with the Russian Empire was essential for him to keep in contact with the comrades fighting the system there.Moreover, Lenin was one of the some 12,000 refugees from Tsarist Russia, most of whom were Poles but a good deal too who were Russians who hated Tsarism and wanted the destruction of the Russian Empire with as much fervour as Pilsudski of the Polish Socialist Party.

Whether nationalist or internationalist, radicals were pining for the coming of the Great War that was long awaited and which would reconstruct Central Eastern Europe free from imperialism and that was Lenin's idea as much as Pilsudski's.

In March 1887 Pilsudski was arrested by Tsarist authorities on trumped up charges of plotting to assassinate Tsar Alexander III and exiled for five years to eastern Siberia. Lenin's politics of destroying the Tsarist Empire. Their tactics were the same before the war.

Moreover, Bronisław Piłsudski, who had been friends with friends of Vladimir Lenin's brother, was similarly sentenced to hard labor (katorga) in eastern Siberia, for fifteen years for the assassination attempt.

As Robert Service emphasises,

"Such was Pilsudski's hatred for the Romanov Empire that he was willing to assist any virtually any other opponent of Tsarism. Thus his men helped with the dispatch of messages to Russia on behalf of the Bolsheviks"

Moreover, both Lenin and Pilsudski shared the idea of breaking up the Russian Empire into it's constituent parts, a strategy still aimed at by Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's National Security advisor, who admired Pilsudski and wrote a biography on him.

The differences came out only after the Bolsheviks had overthrown the Tsarist regime and wanted to export revolution to Germany through Poland with some Bolsheviks actually being Poles e.g Dzierzynski which was unsurprising given the multinational nature of the Soviet Union.

Lenin at no time showed any nationalist hostility to Poland but tended to think of it as no less ripe for revolution as the entire continent, though he tended to think of it in geopolitical terms as a fragmented state that would become part of a large expanding continental wide imperium.

The fact is that Lenin was a genuine fanatic with an apocalyptic and sincere view of exporting Communism as an idealistic Utopia, even if the aim was so lofty that any ruse or tactic was permissible to bring it about.

When Lenin stayed in Krakow he felt very much at home and enjoyed the freedom to write and smuggle letters of instruction to the Central Committee in Russia under conditions of freedom and no censorship under the relatively liberal Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The retrospective view that Lenin was a Russian nationalist mingling Russian imperialism and Communism is one that appeals to PiS politicians, the populist right wing rump of the Solidarity movement which undermined the People's Republic. Yet it is not the truth. Nor did liberation in 1989-1990 come from Heaven with Catholic piety winning over Evil Atheism.

Lenin was tolerated by a Catholic monarchy based in Vienna as he was acting to help undermine the rival Russian Empire. In return, Lenin could plot with freedom the destruction of the old order and regain control over the Bolshevik movement which had been difficult in Paris.

Moreover, Lenin thought of the peasants of Bialy Dunajec, Poronin and Zakopane where he climbed the Tatras as similar to those in Russia and felt at home there, despite not speaking Polish, and he was friendly with a great number of the most prominent Polish intellectuals of the time.

For if out of 150,000 Krakowians, some 12,000 were refugess and many, including the Russians, received material help from the Union of Asssistance for Political Prisoners. Lenin lived at 218 Zwierzyniecka, has access to the Jagiellonian University reading room and felt at home.

The Cafe intellectual scene was much to his liking and as Service states "Lenin greatly enjoyed Krakow....and the way it reminded him of home. The peasants who swarmed into the city on market days were recognisable types".

Kazimierz was similar to a Jewish shetl and Lenin wrote home to his mother that in being in Krakow it was,

"Almost Russia! The Jews here are like the Russians and the Russians and the Russian frontier are only eight versts away ( it's two hours away by train from Granica, nine from Warsaw) : there are bent nosed women in colourful dresses-it's just like Russia"

Lenin did not "hate" Poland. So the nationalist version of Lenin as some atheist Russian barbarian like the rest of the Bolsheviks who had no place in Polish history is a myth; he was tactically allied to the founder of the Second Polish Republic and, in fact, he liked Poland and fely at home in Galicia.

Reading history backwards for nationalist purposes is one reason a museum to Lenin is needed in Krakow as it stresses the dangers of his blend of Utopianism and realpolitik made him a self righteous zealot but it did not mean he hated or wanted to subjugate Poland because he was really a "Russian nationalist" in disguise.

In actual fact, Lenin tended to like Galicia so much that he spent much time hiking in the mountains, producing polemics against anyone who deviated from his infallible role as leader of the party whilst virtually doing nothing else nor preparing for the Great War of 1914 which he did not expect.

This had been the war, what he was to call "the mighty accelerator of events" that would bring upon the collapse of bourgeois civilisation and a new world order of universal Communism, a vision based on his own creed but in line with what even most Polish intellectuals thought with regards the impending crash of the dynastic European Empires..
As this account explains,

Lenin, his wife, and his mother-in-law spent long summers in 1913 and 1914 in Poronin, just outside Zakopane, at a new house belonging to Teresa Skupien. The household left Cracow at the beginning of May and, the first year, did not return until the end of October.
In Zakopane, according to this account, Lenin hung out with such Polish writers as Zeromski, Strug, Orkan, and Witkacy. He sat in the sunshine in front of the Zakopane post office reading his letters and newspapers, played chess in the open air, and went for walks in the Tatry. Dr. Podleski, a dentist in Poronin, treated Lenin in the spring of 1914 and entered the patient's name and fee, 8 koron, in his account book.
In 1914, the entourage left Cracow for Poronin on May 9. On August 8, the Austrian police arrested Lenin as an enemy national: Austria and Russia had declared war. Lenin and his family returned to Cracow on August 19 after his release from the prison in Nowy Targ. They left for Switzerland a few days later.

As Service contends, Lenin had actually become complacent in Galicia and did not realise how serious the situation was when the Habsburg police stated rounding up Russians as potential enemies with Catholic Priests claiming Russians were poisoning the wells to kill the barbarian semi-oriental Russian hordes.
In fact, it had been Priests telling parishioners to poison the wells that led to typhus outbreaks, a thing mentioned with verve and satire by Jaroslav Hasek in Good Soldier Schwiek when the Austrian Imperial Army reach the battle lines in Galicia only to get dysentry-including Polish troops serving as Galician regiments.
Given that's the kind of sabotage PiS would approve of, a museum for Lenin explaining this cultural and intellectual milieu would be better than the kind of idiotic bans proposed by the Sejm in 2009 which called for the banning Communist insignia or the marketing of such symbols.
Communism had little support in Poland amongst Gentile Poles and mostly among post-ethnic Jews like Isaac Deutscher ( the hagiographer of Trotsky born in Chrzanow ). Lenin was subsequently astounded when in 1920 the Bolshevik forces were not welcomed as liberators as others like Stalin, the Commissar for the Nationalities, had warned him they would not.

What any new museum of communism or of Lenin must do is avoid propaganda. Lenin and even Stalin, though he resented Poland for repelling Bolshevism and humiliating him as a military leader in the war between the Reds and "the Pans", were not Greater Russian nationalists.

The Soviet Union bore marks of the brutality encouraged by the repression of Tsarism but as Anne Applebaum stresses, the Tsarist prison was rather comfortable compared to the slave camp network of the Gulag which was part of the attempt to frogmarch and hurl "the people" towards Utopia.

Even when Stalin got his revenge on Poland by being ceded Poland to the USSR's sphere of influence after 1945 those who installed the UB and the apparatus of repression were multinational-Mikoyan was Armenian, Beria was Mingrelian, Stalin was Georgian as were many of his henchmen.

Lastly, even Lenin was of Mongol-Tatar, Russian, German and Jewish mixed ancestry from Kazan and who detested Russia and the lazy Russians he wanted to drive towards happiness by force. Claiming Bolshevism was Russian is propaganda as history useful in the notion of a "New Cold War".

That propaganda notion is one put forth by those who still want the Russian Empire broken up into smaller parts so as to gain control over the oil and gas wealth for the benefit of the Great Powers in the new Great Game, the renewed struggle between Empires over resources which was occurring before 1914

Unlike before 1914, the main focus of Imperial rivalry is between "the West", Russia, China and the West over Eurasia rather than between the dynastic Empires of Europe and breakaway states motivated by ethnic irredentism and the stakes are not only minerals but today oil and gas pipelines instead of railways.

Bibliography

Robert Service, Lenin : A Bibliography.
Jan T Malecki, A History of Krakow for Everyone.
( A essay on Lenin in Exile with be forthcoming soon based on a review of Helen Rappaport's Conspirator: Lenin in Exile. )

The Outrage of the Defenders of Leon Trotsky

It is slightly weird that there are still some Trotskyists in Britain who still hero worship Leon Trotsky after the reams of evidence that have come from archives in Moscow in recent years that have confirmed that Trotsky was a brave bad man, though with certain qualities, such as charisma and the ability to write rather well.

More than any other leading Bolshevik, Trotskyists have been fulminating at Service's supposed "hatchet job" on Service's excellent Trotsky: A Biography. In turn each of these ideologues will be dealt with for their cheap invective, cherry picking of quotes and blatant distortion of what Service has written about this mass murdering ideologue.

To begin with here are some hack propagandists I intend to precision skewer for their utter bitterness and outraged self-righteousness and misplaced faith in this supposed revolutionary hero. Most of which seems to pun rather childishly on the name "Service" as merely assert faith in Trotsky rather than deal with the facts.

Peter Taafe, A Dis-Service to Trotsky The Socialist Party/Socialist Alternative.org
Paul Hampton, A Hatchet Job on Trotsky ( Worker's Liberty )
David North, In the Service of Historical Falsification ( WSWS )
David North, Historians in the Service of the “Big Lie”: An Examination of Professor Robert Service’s Biography of Trotsky
Hillel Ticktin, In Defence of Leon Trotsky.

Peter Taafe


This rather tedious and unintelligent man does nothing to engage with the substance of Service's biography other than express common places that re-iterate the mythology of Trotsky as well as moaning about how long the book is, as if that was somehow in itself an argument against it.

"This book is very thick - running to 600 pages - but is very thin when it comes to an honest political examination and analysis of the ideas of Leon Trotsky, the subject of Service's tome".

The only thing which is very thick is Taafe who seems to think that anything Service writes should be treated with scepticism simply because he conducted a debate with Christopher Hitchens at the Hoover Institute which is considered parts of the US Establishment and hence necessarily invalidates anything he has to say.

To this fool, debating Trotsky at the Hoover Institute means he must be a tool of "the ruling classes" to smear Trotsky and thereby deny hope to those yearning working masses for whom Trotsky was a beacon of working class militant struggle. Yet as Service points out, Trotsky regarded the proletariat as a means to his ideological ends of destroying the system.

Taafe whines pitifully that,

"This is a mild example of the epithets Service flings at Trotsky. He presented "serious inaccuracies" in his writings, he was an "intellectual bully"; he was "vain and self-centred". Two lines after making this charge Service says that Trotsky "disliked boasting"!"

Well , that quite possibly because it was true of Trotsky. A person who feels no reason to boast can feel so arrogant that he feels no compunction to engage with tedious politicking. Like Verkhovensky in Dostoevsky's The Devils, Trotsky used to sit out boring committee meetings in silence.

Trotsky would usually doodle on bits of scrap paper, yawn, read newspapers ostensibly in front of dull speakers. Had the slow witted Taafe been alive then at committee meetings then , Trotsky would have treated him no doubt as an elephantine bore. The fact is Trotsky was not a pleasant man and very condescending to those of lower intellect than he.

Service is revealing his self centred arrogance and to do so by quoting primary historical sources is not "boasting". It just means Taafe lacks the intellectual capacity to engage with Service who has obviously riled him into making highly embarrassing You Tube videos that reveal his own lack of capacity for critical thought.

"He is accused of base motives in allegedly "abandoning his first wife" and his two daughters, who Service nevertheless concedes urged him to escape from Siberia in order to link up with Lenin and the RSDLP leaders who were producing Iskra (The Spark), the revolutionary paper of the time. On virtually every page there is at least one distortion, and often more, of Trotsky's ideas, his personal life, etc."

If Trotsky is accused of such behaviour, as fully documented by Service, then it is no use ignoring what Service says with regards Trotsky being a charming egotist who was always willing to put ideological imperatives before basic care and concern for his first wife, with women seen as subordinate to his world historical mission.

Unwilling or more likely incapable of challenging Service, Taafe reacts with scorn and sarcasm typical of those motivated by idolatry for the man and not concerned with all those people he betrayed in his rather unpleasant way, whether they were personal relations of the Kronstadt Sailors,

"There is not one relevant new fact which adds to our picture of Trotsky in this book... apart from learning that Trotsky's children acquired a "Viennese accent", surprise, surprise, when they were living in that city".

So they did and how does that detract from Service's biography? Answer: it does not. If Taafe is so fundamentally unwilling to react intelligently, it is hardly surprising Service has refused to debate with him any more than one would bother with a cranky religious fundamentalist standing on Hyde Park Corner.

Taafe deliberately distorts and cherry picks his way through Service's biography to find things he finds offensive and objectionable. For example,

" Incredibly, we learn, for instance, that prior to 1914, Trotsky was not a "Marxist theoretician"! Unfortunately for Service's "self-serving" account, there is the small, 'unfortunate' detail of Trotsky as the chairman of the Petrograd soviet during the 1905 revolution !"

In fact Service mentions the period "before 1914" prior to 1905, when Trotsky had converted to Marxism, when he was more a narodnik or more in tune with the Social Revolutionaries in the 1890s before he became involved with the leading Marxist grandees like Martov and Plekhanov.

Taafe's comment shows he has not even bothered to read the book at all but has just scented someone who calls Trotsky somewhat of an opportunist and so projects that sin back on to Service in some desperate struggle to prove Service is "lying". Trotskyists and Marxist-Leninists are known for believing that opposition to their worldview is proof they are right.

This is proved by Taafe quoting Trotsky to prove Trotsky was right and Service must be wrong.

"Service goes on to argue that Trotsky was "not original"; this theory was really the intellectual property of Alexander Helfand, better known as Parvus, who collaborated with Trotsky. Unfortunately for Service, we have the admission by Trotsky himself that Parvus contributed the "lion's share" of this theory. But Parvus stopped short of drawing the bold revolutionary conclusion advanced by Trotsky".

Again this is tedious. An admission by Trotsky is just an admission by Trotsky who would have every reason to think he was an especially original theorist which he was not: Trotsky picked up those ideas he believed would be of Service in furthering his status and image as a unifier and unique leader of the revolutionary masses.

Which is why Taafe rationalises Trotsky's own justification for the suppression of the Kronstadt revolt of 1921 without providing historical evidence to the contrary to the established fact that Trotsky ordered the repression of the sailors and that they were the same sailors.

And even if they had not, having disposed of the democracy of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, there was by then no means of redress against forced grain rquisitioning, repression of a free press, lack of pay and conditions. Taafe pathetically repeats again Trotsky's self serving justification as a matter of faith and truth by authority.

"Trotsky, for instance, is accused of "omitting" in My Life any mention of the Kronstadt revolt of 1921. Trotsky himself explained when he replied to the "hue and cry over Kronstadt" in the 1930s that this was for the simple reason that this was not considered to be a major event until resurrected by latter-day critics such as anarchists and, unfortunately, by Victor Serge in the 1930s".

Why it was unfortunate for Serge to keep reminding Trotsky of it has nothing to do with his being an "anarchist", as Serge has become a Bolshevik by 1918 and had subsequently developed an independent mind of the sort Taafe lacks entirely as he parrots out the ideological line as Pure True Gospel.

"Trotsky was accused of "suppressing" the Kronstadt sailors", the "same ones" who participated in the October revolution. In a forensic analysis, he showed that this was not the case - he played no direct role in the suppression of the Kronstadt revolt but accepted full "moral responsibility" for the actions that were taken".

Trotsky did not take full "moral responsibility" for crushing the Kronstadt Mutiny. He lied about it consistently or used casuistry and sophistry to conceal his crime.

"The Kronstadt 'rebels' demanded "soviets without the Bolsheviks", which was applauded by the counter-revolutionaries in Russian and worldwide.Service just repeats falsehoods - without any evidence whatsoever - to try and convince us that the sailors of 1921 were the same as the heroic insurrectionists of the October revolution, which they were not. The vast majority of Petrograd workers supported the action taken against them".

Which "counter revolutionaries" supported the Kronstadt rebels is not supported by evidence. The method of argumentation is using what Orwell knew in Politics and the English Language as a term used meaninglessly to mean that those who did not support the Bolsheviks were all part of a seamless and sinister imperialist plot.

Moreover, the pathetic reference to putting the Kronstadt rebels in scare quotes is a feeble line of argument designed to presuppose in advance, without evidence, that they were in league with the Imperialists, a claim later made by Stalin who claimed they were receiving money from Washington.

A claim which precisely was facilitated by the kind of paranoid conspiracy theory Taafe wheels out in defence of this act of brutality for which Trotsky was responsible

"Using independent sources Trotsky showed that the leaders of the revolt, for their own selfish ends - during the civil war - demanded special privileges. They even threatened to take over the Red Fleet which, with the thawing of the ice between Russia and Finland, would have opened the gates to an imperialist attack at the very heart of the Russian state. Reluctantly, therefore, the Russian workers' government, after the mutineers refused to negotiate and withdraw, quelled the revolt".

Again Taafe provides no evidence Petrograd workers supported its crushing.

The evidence is copious that most Petrograd workers were fed up with the Bolsheviks repression by 1920 as many were rebelling, going on strike and demanding an end to the appalling way they were being treated under the Bolshevik regime. Maybe they were the 'wrong kind of workers'.

After all Taafe conflates the Bolshevik elite with "the workers government" , so naturally those who dissented were not real workers but enemies of the people.

If this dull ideologue had anything that could pass for analytical skill, he would be able to cut a swathe through the murderous verbal fictions used by the Bolsheviks and unclog the drivel clogging his own brain from thinking constructively and objectively.

If they had not been 'real workers' valued by the workers, there would have been no need for regular Red Army conscripts to be shadowed by blocking detachments ordering those who retreated to be shot. And even if these sailors were not "the same" but mere peasants as Trotsky claimed, it was hardly ethical to demand they be "shot like partridges"

Paul Hampton

"Robert Service has long advocated the "continuity thesis" - the claim made by cold-war historians and by Stalinist apologists that Lenin (and Trotsky) led to Stalin"

This is the most stupid conflation, as if Stalinists and those who regard Communism in the Soviet Union as a catastrophe are two peas from the same pod. Hampton blethers on that Service,

"...is explicit about this in the book, but with an added twist. He makes Trotsky an even greater villain than Stalin or Lenin. Trotsky "lived for a dream that many people found a nightmare", claims Service".

This is, of course, absolutely true as all Utopian zealots assume that some abstract Historical entity, in Trotsky or Stalin's case the proletariat, represent a mathematical X in History which is unified in one singular movement towards a single vision of Paradise on Earth.

In that sense Service is entirely correct that such visions can only but polarise opinion as no one person, be it a commissar such as Trotsky nor the eventual dictator Stalin, can have a monopoly of what this illusory vision at the End of History would look like.

All societies contain millions of people with their own individual dreams, hopes and aspirations and any God Society allows for a pluralism in which people are best left alone to their own devices subject to some amount of necessary state power and government.

Hampton warbles on that Service is just wrong to maintain that,

"[Trotsky’s] ideas and practices laid several foundation stones for the erection of the Stalinist political, economic, social and even cultural edifice. Stalin, Trotsky and Lenin shared more than they disagreed about".

This is true as all of them from the outset of the Revolution sought policies of mass collectivisation and breakneck industrialisation in which the peasantry were going to be forced to work on collective farms whether they liked it or not,

"If ever Trotsky had been the paramount leader instead of Stalin, the risks of a bloodbath in Europe would have been drastically increased... The point is that whoever governed the USSR effectively stood in need of deeply authoritarian methods to conserve communist power"

This is true as after 1918 there was going to be no open democracy after the Constituent Assembly was dissolved. No free press, apart from continuous polemics from Trotsky, and no liberty for individual thought outside The Party. That's what totalitarianism means.

Hence those workers and peasants who did not understand this would be in need of large doses of re-education.

It did not matter that most of them voted for the Socialist Revolutionaries, When they did Trotsky was a key figure in dissolving it and saying they had been consigned to the "dustbin of History". So true, as Service puts it,

"[Trotsky’s] lust for dictatorship and terror was barely disguised in the civil war. He trampled on the civil rights of millions of people including the industrial workers"

Hampton, rather like Taafe, is trying to rally the faithful in defence of Trotsky as he distorts, misinterprets what he writes and muddles up the whole point of history which in the hands of professionals depends crucially on chronology

"For Service, Trotsky’s role in the flowering of working-class democracy in 1917 scarcely figures. He omits important matters such as the democratic votes in Duma elections and in the Petrograd Soviet itself in the autumn, when the most democratic bodies in Russian history voted overwhelmingly for Bolshevik representatives and for Bolshevik resolutions calling on the Soviets to take power from the highly undemocratic, warmongering, pro-landlord and anti-working class Provisional Government".

But that came before the workers stated chafing at what Trotsky was later in 1921 to offer-"militarised labour armies" and the obsession against the Workers Opposition. even in the Bolshevik Party, that Trade Unions were no longer necessary as the Bolshevik regime was a 'workers state'. All this is comprehensively documented by Service.

Hampton then states,

"Service can barely bring himself to recount the threat present by the right-wing general Kornilov, who attempted a proto-fascist coup in August 1917. He suggests that if only the Bolsheviks had left alone, Russia would have evolved smoothly towards a bourgeois democratic republic".

The use of the word "hardly bring" is a venomous pathetic little snipe that suggests Service is "concealing" key facts and id, naturally wholly unlike the witless and banal Hampton, a mere propagandist. It was the leader of the Provisional Government Kerensky who called on the SRs and Bolsheviks to defend it against Kornilov's action.

Skipping merrily across the repressive measures and introduction of the Red Terror, Hampton then spews out this nugget of utter wisdom,

Rather than explain the terrible circumstances of the civil war, and register that Trotsky’s intervention was critical in winning it against 21 armies from 14 countries, Service focuses on Trotsky's decision to have the Bolshevik Panteleev shot after the battle of Kazan in August-September 1918.A scandal previously suppressed? Not at all. There was a Politburo enquiry in April 1919. It found that Panteleev was shot as a deserter.

If by 'desertion' Hampton means this previously erstwhile Bolshevik decided to take a steamboat up the Volga to avoid the civil war between the SR's and the Bolsheviks, then that is a curious way of putting it.

And ,of course, a Politburo enquiry in a non-democratic regime was really going to go against what Trotsky had decided when he had those on board summarily executed. With no separation of powers, no independent judiciary. A Politburo was hardly going to be objective.

But it only suffices to crawl cravenly back to the sacred texts to find a rationalisation for Trotsky's cruelty. Ignoring what Service maintains all along about how selective Trotsky was in his memoirs, as all politicians are, with the exception of the secular saint Trotsky, Hampton opines,

'The incident was recounted by Trotsky in his autobiography My Life in 1930 and discussed by Isaac Deutscher in his biography published in 1954. As Trotsky put it: "I appointed a field-tribunal which passed death-sentences on the commander, the commissary, and several privates – to a gangrenous wound a red-hot iron was applied. I explained the situation to the regiment without hiding or softening anything."

That's nice of him. If that is what "socialism" is, then it would difficult to see how Fascism could be much different, only that it was only after Trotsky's suppression of the Kronstadt revolt in 1921 Fascism did come to power and self consciously emulated Bolshevik theory and practice.

As for the rest of Hampton's feeble rationalisation, there is no point going on with it when he states,

Deutscher, who saw Stalinism as (unfortunately) the only way for progress in Russia at the time, presented Trotsky's call for the "militarisation of labour" in 1920 as a prescient foreshadowing of what Stalin did in the 1930s.

Only a somewhat pitiful crank clinging on to a dogmatic pseudo-religious form of faith could think Isaac Deutscher was somehow a heretic for writing about Trotsky in this way whilst writing a generally favourable three volume Prophet series of books on the man and his Revolution.

If this is not clear from this quote I cannot think what possibly could be,

Trotsky used the term "militarisation" in the interests of honest dealing within the workers' state, and not because he rejoiced in repression. "Of course, it is only an analogy, but one that is very rich in content."

The Romantic Myth of Leon Trotsky Debunked.

The most controversial figure in the pantheon of Russian Revolutionary leaders has remained that of Leon Trotsky and Robert Service's devastatingly accurate biography of this brave and bad man still has the capacity to annoy Trotskyists like Tariq Ali, Chris Harman and Peter Taafe.



Service is far more asture than these ideologues and correctly claims that Trotsky was both an opportunist and self serving ideologue ( no less than his sententious devotees ) and that has led to outrage amongst those who still cannot come to terms with his direct role in creating a horrific totalitarian state.

Service mentions the obvious facts about Trotsky's career as a professional revolutionary: the fact that he joined the Bolsheviks late only when he saw the opportunity to seize power in the run up to October 1917.

This was after having back in 1905 condemned Lenin for his "Jacobinism" and compared him to Robespierre for his factionalism. This was merely a pose to upgrade Trotsky into a potential great man of the Revolution who stood above dull politicking.

The faith in apocalyptic violence was always part of Trotsky's creed of world historical Revolution as only through Terror could a New Man be forged and to which ends millions of lives could be sacrificed.

Trotsky, however, before the Great War posed as the great unifier who was above factional squabbling but once the chance to become a world historical leader presented itself he changed his tune and started playing on crude demagogy and joined the Bolsheviks after February 1917.

As a street agitator denouncing the continuation of the Great War, Trotsky was already countenancing mass terror when addressing the Kronstadt naval garrison on Anchor Square where he called for the violent removal of the Provisional Government,

'I tell you heads must roll, blood must flow...The strength of the French Revolution was in a machine that made the enemies of the people shorter by a head. This is a fine device. We must have it in every city'

This is the point lost on Tariq Ali, a remnant Trotskyist, who condemned Service's "counter-factual school" of history, a total invertion of the truth as it is Ali who is doing that by pretending that had it not been for Lenin and Trotsky, then,

'...what might have happened had Generals Kornilov, Denikin and Yudenich triumphed instead of Lenin and Trotsky. One thing is virtually certain: since the revolution was portrayed as the work of Jewish-Bolsheviks, a wave of pogroms would have decimated the Jews.

This ignores the fact that the Civil War followed the Bolshevik seizure of power and which with Trotsky's backing was designed the telescope revolution in Russia into one universal Civil War across Europe as a specific aim. That was what Trotsky meant by "permanent revolution".

On July 2 1917, Trotsky had already endorsed the idea of a proletarian and peasants revolution in which the Bolsheviks alone were to be the sole vanguard party and about how a dictatorship of the proletariat was to be set up and created and enemies of the people disposed of.

It was enough to smash the entire existing system and break all possibility with liberal democratic politics in such a way that there was no way through consent and negotiation of creating a new government that could not but be based on mass violence and state terror.

Well before the Civil War got under way in 1919-1920, Trotsky was pushing harder for a policy of a totalitarian One Party State that could only but polarise Russia and push it further towards a colossal bloodbath that it became.

For at start the attempted Kornilov Coup was not merely thwarted by the Bolsheviks but by the Socialist Revolutionaries and other left wing groups who defended the Revolution from what was a confused and hardly threatening debacle at the behest of Kerensky himself, leader of the Provisional Government..

Ali's ignorance of the Russian Revolution's dynamic is confirmed by the fact that Denikin and Yudenich's White Forces only started to muster in late 1918 and in full force in 1919 after the Civil War had been started not by anti-semitic reactionaries but by rival left wing groups.

After the Bolsheviks received only a quarter of the vote in the Constituent Assembly of 1918, the Sovnarkom and the power of Military Revolutionary Committee led by Trotsky dissolved it as they would tolerate not rivals, not even from the Left SRs who opposed the war.

Having already committed himself to the Bolshevik's effective hijacking of the Russian Revolution by Lenin and agreed to having made peace with Germany at Brest-Litovsk in 1918, he was bound now to the Bolsheviks if he wanted to continue to make an impact.

When the SRs retreated from St Petersburg to Kazan , Trotsky in his new capacity as the People's Commissariat For Military affairs now turned on the Kronstadt sailors as early as April 1918 when they started complaining of the lack of pay and conditions.

Trotsky harangued the sailors he had just one year before called on to overthrow the Provisional Government by cursing the sailors 'with his tongue for quarter of an hour and sent them away like whipped curs' according to one eye witness.

Furthermore before that he had made it quite clear that his view of the sailors, the "beauty and pride of the Revolution" were always going to be subordinated to his orders and that the masses required as Service puts it 'strict tutelage' by The Party.

When Trotsky dashed out to Samara to whip the disillusioned Czech legions into line, they accused the Bolsheviks of treachery and joined the Committee of the Members of the Constituent Assembly ( Komuch ), an anti-Bolshevik counter government based in Kazan.

Military conflict between the SRs and the Bolsheviks broke out in June 1918 and this threatened to drive a wedge between Petrograd and Moscow and the grain supplies needed in the cities. That was the direct result of the destruction of democracy in Russia.

The Bolsheviks under Trotsky initiated the forced requisitioning of grain from peasants-the Food Dictatorship-which in turn drove the Left SRs to join the so-called "counter-revolution" and who were ruthlessly crushed by detachments of Latvian riflemen.

Forced grain requisitioning at the barrel of the gun and bayonet was justified in laguage later used frequently by Stalin when scapegoating the richer peasants or Kulaks for hoarding grain that they were expected to harvest for nothing other than serving a dictatorial state.

Trotsky called for those 'hoarders' to be sentenced to ten years hard labour, a policy that rapidly started to develop into the policy of the Red Terror ans the enemy deserved 'merciless annihilation' in his words.

The Left SRs were supporters of the Revolution that Trotsky had supported in the early 1900s until he embraced Marxism. Now he was determined to crush with maximum force those like Mikhail Muravev and even previously erstwhile Bolsheviks like Pantaleev.

Pantaleev had been commissar of the Numery Petrograd Regiment and rather than confront the Bolsheviks after battles around Sviyazhsk, he commandeered a steamboat up the Volga to Nizhni Novgorod were Trotsky ordered those on board to be summarily executed

That enraged Bolsheviks serving in the Red Army, that Lenin and Trotsky now fully endorsed an extension of this policy of arbitrary discipline and state terror by using the Cheka, the political police set up in December 1917, to launch an all out Civil War on all 'class enemies'.

As Service makes it clear the point of no return had virtually already been reached,

'Lenin and Trotsky wanted a civil war in order to have the chance to carry out the irreversible suppression of enemies of the October Revolution. Neither of them said this directly in public. A telegram Trotsky sent to Lenin on 17 August summed up their attitude

"....I consider it unacceptable to let steamers sail the Volga under a Red Cross flag. The receipt of grain will be interpreted by charlatans and fools as showing the possibility that agreement can be made and civil war is unnecessary....Air pilots and artillerymen have been ordered to bomb and set fire to the bourgeois districts of Kazan and then Simbirsk and Samara. In these conditions a Red Cross caravan is inappropriate....

To that extent Tariq Ali, rather like Trotsky's hagiographer Isaac Deutscher, is correct to assume that,

The socialist revolution, unlike the bourgeois revolutions that transformed Europe in the 16-18th centuries, was a premeditated project intended for a more advanced country than Russia.

Even for its leaders, the Bolshevik triumph of 1917 was a leap in the dark. Bolshevik orthodoxy did not believe that the infant republic could last on its own. The party leadership was waiting for the German revolution to break its isolation and transform Europe.

Yet this hinged on a tremendous continental wide fantasy and gamble effectively quashed by the suppression of the Spartacist Revolt of November 1918 in Germany led by the romantic Marxists Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg.

Yet it was Luxemburg who castigated the Bolsheviks for their arbitrary Red Terror and extension of Tsarist style tactics taken to extremity in crushing democratic activism by the masses and substituting the dictatorship of the proletariat for a dictatorship over them.

'It is amusing to note the strange somersaults that the respectable human “ego” has had to perform in recent Russian history. Knocked to the ground, almost reduced to dust, by Russian absolutism, the “ego” takes revenge by turning to revolutionary activity.

In the shape of a committee of conspirators, in the name of a nonexistent Will of the People, it seats itself on a kind of throne and proclaims it is all-powerful. But the “object” proves to be the stronger. The knout is triumphant, for tsarist might seems to be the “legitimate” expression of history.

Tariq Ali soft peddles the terror and mass murder unleashed by the Bolsheviks thus,

'Instead the main imperialist states decided to back the White counter-revolution, leading to a civil war that was won by the newly created Red Army, but at a terrible cost: the peasants had been alienated by forced requisitions and conscription. The civil war of 1918-21 exhausted the tiny working class. Many died and a layer that survived was rapidly absorbed into the machinery of the new state.

That is an expedient falsehood if the unpleasant realities that happened during the Red Army's methods of inducing and fighting civil war and the fact Trotsky was the commissar on the spot who started the forced grain requisitioning whilst Lenin gave bureaucratic orders from Moscow.

The best Ali can feebly muster in his defence is this,

Trotsky, as the founder and organiser of the Red Army, was undoubtedly ruthless in ensuring the victory of his side – as was Lincoln during the American civil war.

Exhausted at home and isolated abroad, the Bolshevik leaders, obsessed by the fate of Robespierre and Saint-Just, decided that they must hold on to power whatever the cost. An early outcome was the brutal repression of the Kronstadt sailors' mutiny.

What Ali fails to mention is Trotsky's key role in crushing the Kronstadt Revolt in 1921. He mentions it as if it had nothing to do with the way that Lenin and Trotsky had seized power, suppressed any form of democratic accountability..

Moreover the manner Trotsky in the 1920s subordinated workers to the need for centrally commanded "labour armies", all of which was supported by Stalin completely, counters the myth that Trotsky and Stalin were always so fundamentally different during the Revolution.

The facts about Kronstadt are now well established and it is truly chilling that those like Ali can skip over how and what Trotsky did to these sailors in getting Sergei Kamenev, the Red Army Supreme Commander to order Tukhachevski to get troops to suppress the mutiny.

The mutiny was essentially a complete repudiation of every draconian anti-worker policy the Bolsheviks had instituted from forced requisitioning and the armed units that blocked the free exchange of goods as well as the poverty and disease and crushing of trade union rights.

The Kronstadt Mutineers Manifesto was clear,

In carrying out the October Revolution, the working class hoped to achieve its liberation. The outcome has been even greater enslavement of human beings.

Power has passed from a monarchy based on the police and gendarmerie into the hands of usurpers - Communists - who have given the toilers not freedom but the daily dread of ending up in the torture chambers of the Cheka, the horrors of which exceed many times the rule of tsarism's gendarmerie.

Calling for "exceptional measures" the troops marched across the ice and were "petit-bourgeois" counter-revolutionaries who should be "shot like partridges" on the basis that they were prepared to aid an Allied invasion via the Baltic.

Following a practice later used by the Red Army during the Second World War under Stalin was the use of "blocking detachments" to ensure the Red Army did not take one step back. Trotsky's crushing of Kronstadt thus had an other element that led to Stalinism.

Dzierzynski's Cheka stayed in the rear, with their machine guns ready, with orders to kill all retreating soldiers. As Richard Pipes puts it in Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime "Some Red soldiers refused to charged; about one thousand went over to the rebels."

So unpopular was this attack that Tukhachevski even had to send in special units within the regular Red Army troops to combat the possibility of internal dissent and rebellion against the military orders.

The sailors were later either shot or sent to the nascent Gulag labour camp or 'disciplinary colony' at Ukhta in the Russian North or sent to other naval units. This was ordered by the Politburo with Trotsky and Lenin present on 27 April 1921.

In the 1938 when questioned about Kronstadt by Victor Serge, Trotsky simply lied about it all,

“I never spoke of that question [Kronstadt 1921], not that I have anything to hide but, on the contrary, precisely because I have nothing to say...Personally I didn’t participate at all in the crushing of the rebellion, nor in the repression that followed.”

Ali's view of Trotsky being wholly at variance with the terrorism later used against the Bolshevik Party itself is based on a pure ideology divorced from the facts as they really were and indifference to the realities.

Trotsky's draconian policies of decimating soldiers in the Red Army for failures, his kidnapping of Generals families as hostages to ensure "loyalty" and continual threats to execute soldiers for failing were wholly disproportional.

Ali deludes himself completely in the most "counter-factual" manner possible by then asserting that the descent of the Bolshevik Revolution into bloodshed was not inherent in the way they seized power but in the myth of Imperialist Encirclement and war losses.

A later result was Stalinism, which destroyed not simply the aspirations of the revolution but most of its leading cadres.Ninety per cent of Lenin's central committee were denounced as traitors and executed. Stalin killed more Bolsheviks than the Tsar.

That was not merely Stalin's work but was inherent in the militaristic nature of Trotsky's Bolshevism when in 1918 he opined "Soviet saboteurs must be punished as severely as bourgeois ones".

John Gray correctly asserts that Stalin simply took the Terror initiated by Lenin and Trotsky and applied it more ruthlessly, with the exception that he applied it, as Lenin and Trotsky only did on a relatively small scale, to the Bolshevik Party itself.

'Together with Trotsky, Lenin set up concentration camps, instituted a system of hostages to ensure obedience in suspect groups and executed about 200,000 people between 1917 and 1923. The Bolshevik leaders were clear that state terror was indispensably necessary for achieving a communist society in which the State – along with war, property, and religion – would no longer exist. It was Lenin and Trotsky, not Stalin, who pioneered state terror in Russia, and they did so in order to realise a vision of Utopia

'Trotsky totally destroyed the voluntaristic aspects a citizens militia of idealists for the Revolution and excoriated those like I.M Smirnov, a Left Communist who complained about Trotsky's hierarchical regulations as being contrary to the comradely traditions of the party.

That makes a mockery of Ali's bland insistence that,

Attempts to reform the system from within failed largely because the bureaucracy refused to surrender its power. Ultimately it exhausted itself and capitulated quietly and shamefully to the forces of global capitalism

This is nonsense. The Soviet Union failed precisely because being held together by force, that lack of willpower to maintain it by such means by the late 1980s accelerated the desire to be rid of this totalitarian state as the historical truth of the early years came out under Gorbachev

In fact long before perestroika and glasnost, Trotsky's complicity in crushing the Kronstadt sailors in 1921 had been publicised by those opposed to Trotsky's later desire to cover it up in the 1930's when he wrote The Revolution Betrayed and My Life.

Every occasion on which Trotsky tried to talk about what Ali calls his devotion to 'the transition from the the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom and workers 'self-emancipation' he was embarrassed by those like Victor Serge who kept bringing it up.

This was particularly humiliating when Trotsky was trying to pose as the champion of anti-Stalinist resistance during the Spanish Civil War ( 1936-1939 ) when he castigated Stalinist agents of the NKVD for tracking down and liquidating the rival democratic left.

Viktor Serge, a former anarchist of Russian parentage who had gone to Russia to support the Revolution demanded Trotsky face up to his role in crushing the Kronstadt Mutiny and thus his role in setting up a One Party State.

Trotsky's reply was intellectually feeble rationalisation based on what Service correctly calls 'casuistry' and 'Jesuitical sophistry' as he maintained that the Kronstadt sailors of 1917 were not the' same ones' he ordered to be mercilessly crushed in 1921.

But they were the same sailors, of course. In 1919 the sailors had fought bravely for the Red Army but of the 10,000 who had been stationed there in 1917, some 4,000 had turned in their Bolshevik membership cards by the winter of 1920-1921.

So in the sense that there were 4000 fewer Bolshevik Kronstadt sailors they could be considered not exactly the same sailors. A devious sleight of hand. Serge was having none of Trotsky's evasions and dissimulation . In Once More: Kronstadt, Serge insisted,

'There remains broadly the fact that the uprisings of Kronstadt and other localities signified to the party the absolute impossibility of persevering on the road of War Communism. The country was dying of bitter-end state-ification. Who then was right? The Central Committee which clung to a road without issue or the masses driven to extremities by famine?

L.D. Trotsky emphasizes that the sailors and soldiers of the Kronstadt of 1921 were no longer the same, with regard to revolutionary consciousness, as those of 1918.... But the party of 1921 – was it the same as that of 1918? Was it not already suffering from a bureaucratic befoulment which often detached it from the masses and rendered it inhuman towards them?

When and how did it begin to employ towards the toiling masses, whose energy and highest consciousness it expressed, non-socialist methods which must be condemned because they ended by assuring the victory of the bureaucracy over the proletariat?

This question posed, it can be seen that the first symptoms of the evil date far back. In 1920, the Menshevik social-democrats were falsely accused, in a communiqué of the Cheka, of intelligence with the enemy, of sabotage, etc. This communiqué, monstrously false, served to outlaw them

Let us go back still further. Has not the moment come to declare that the day of the glorious year of 1918 when the Central Committee of the party decided to permit the Extraordinary Commissions to apply the death penalty on the basis of secret procedure, without hearing the accused who could not defend themselves, is a black day?

That day the Central Committee was in a position to restore or not restore an Inquisitional procedure forgotten by European civilization. In any case, it committed a mistake. It did not necessarily behoove a victorious socialist party to commit that mistake. The revolution could have defended itself better without that.

We would indeed be wrong to conceal from ourselves today that the whole historical acquisition of the Russian revolution is being called into question.

Out of the vast experience of Bolshevism, the revolutionary Marxists will save what is essential, durable, only by taking up all the problems again from the bottom, with a genuine freedom of mind, without party vanity

Trotsky's response was simply to ignore it or blatantly lie about his role in it, as do his dwindling band of fanatical theologians of revolution who still cling to the myth of Trotsky as as some "martyr" to the Russian Revolution or, as Deutscher put it, The Prophet Outcast.

Bibliography

Robert Service, Trotsky: A Biography.
Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime.
Victor Serge, Once More: Kronstadt.
Victor Serge, Kronstadt 1921, Trotsky’s Defense. Response to Trotsky.
John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Revolution and the Death of Utopia.
John Gray, A Trail of Terror Stretching 200 years ( The Times )
John Gray, Behind the Myth ( Literary Review )

Leftist Doublethink in Another " New Cold War"

As much as Edward Lucas, is a trite propagandist for Natopia and enforcing neoliberalism with a dash of blood and military prowess, what is almost indistinguishable from neoconservativism or the most extreme forms of American Nationalism, it is true that non-aligned sovereign nations have also acted according to Orwellian style doublethink.

If there is any legacy left from the Old Cold War, it lies in the sphere of influence exerted by rhetoric and what is now termed "public diplomacy", that is, mass propaganda which newly emerging states such as Venezuela have been using for using external threats to consolidate domestic authority.

Often with radicals such as Noam Chomsky and journalist John Pilger, the "Anti-Americanism", has with them become an uncritical creed in which the rather cynical realpolitik of states like Russia, Venezuela and Iran has been ignored or overlooked in favour of emphasising the fact that all these states are threatened by the USA.

There is no doubt that these states are menaced by the White House and the Pentagon for the simple reason that the USA is desperate for sources of oil diversification and wants, to use Greg Palast's phrase, "the best democracy money can buy" by meddling in the affairs of these states. The fact is that even when possibly well intentioned it will backfire.

Notions of "sovereign democracy" in Russia, Venezuela and Belarus are responses to this as well as messianic Western New Cold Warrior rhetoric by those like Radek Sikorski, the Polish Foreign Minister, who in 2005 held a conference placing these Belarus as part of The Axis of Evil.

As George Orwell once wrote, such simplistic notions of Good versus Evil belong in the playground and not in sensible political analysis, though Orwell has been unfairly conscripted by Natopians as a Cold Warrior because he was brave enough to challenge the uncritical deification of Stalin's USSR.

Yet that period of Nazi and Stalinist totalitarianism was a less prescient vision of a nightmare to come than that offered by the conservative English novelist and essayist Aldous Huxley in the 1930s whose Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited, written after WW 2 has more relevance in 2010.

Huxley was a critic of the capacity both of Soviet totalitarianism and US style capitalism to stifle individuality and free thinking, one reason why even in those days The Daily Telegraph could praise Huxley's vision of mass manipulation and indoctrination as inimical to political liberalism.

Even in 1959 Huxley could write in Brave New World Revisited that the USA had very much moved away from the conservatism of the Founding Fathers and towards a more 'benign' form of indoctrination and thought control bolstered by mass production, Fordism, and consumerism.

During the Cold War only ideologues continued to ignore the evidence of systemic repression as though political liberty meant little in the USSR, scientists and technicians ( for example Sakharov ) were given freedom to do as they pleased providing they did not stray from the ideological strait jacket of Soviet ideology.

But what Huxley foresaw was that even in the USA, "representatives of commercial and political organisations...( had ) developed a number of new techniques for manipulating, in the interests of some minority, the thoughts and feelings of the masses.

Huxley predicted

"The problem of rapidly increasing numbers in relation to natural resources, to social stability and to the well being of individuals-is now the central problem of mankind and will remain the central problem for another century"

Within Britain in particular, New Labour's policy of using mass migration as a tool of driving down wages and boosting the skills base or the pool of available labour has always created a quandary for the left since the 1960s and Britain is now vastly overcrowded and over populated.

Moreover, this massive increase in population created by "progressives" has been matched by New Labour's increased authoritarianism and the erosion of political liberties that too few take seriously, apart from those obsessed with seeing in other nations like Venezuela something different and better. Though Chavez has improved the living standards there

Some of the worst offenders in this respect are the journalists John Pilger and editor of The Guardian Seumas Milne who seldom deals with the Great Game for the oil needed to feed a growing population because he would be unwilling to countenance migration controls as they would be considered "racist".
When writing The New Rulers of the World, token mentions are made to Russia and China-their repressive regimes are taken for granted-but the fact that "leftist" radicals have often actively given their benediction to China, a nominally communist party state pursuing breakneck industrialisation is not mentioned by Pilger.

Take for example the fact that the ex-Mayor of London is feted as a man of the left by those like the Guardian editor Seumas Milne who support Ken Livingstone's veneration of Venezuela and also a cynical realpolitik that welcomes China's ascendency as a superpower without much concern for human rights.

Livingstone has, as Clive Bloom author of Violent London suggests, a very authoritarian streak in him. He makes jibes about about political opponents being like Nazis and Fascists like a student. Yet as Anne Applebaum in the introduction to Gulag: a History pointed out, he also still romanticises the Russian Revolution and thinks it was 'deformed' and not democidal totalitarian state from the moment Lenin took power in October 1917.

The only complaint Livingstone has is that Lenin's tactical mistakes were those of the economy. Not the fact that democracy has been crushed by January 1918 and alternative socialist rivals removed to Solovetsky island for "re-reducation". Such pro-communist sympathies go towards explaining how he can easily praise China.

The proof that Livingstone is past it was shown in his Orwellian statement comparing the police response to the Poll Tax Riots of 1990 to the Tianiamen Square massacre of 1989, a comment that was complained about for its facile and callous stupidity at the time but also for the craven sucking up to China and omitting China's appalling human rights record.

Anti-Americanism, 'identity politics' and allying with hard left ideologues like Calvin Tucker who supported the USSR's continued existence and who has rebranded himself into Chavez's main propagandist in Britain is hardly wise too. Few have read the interview he gave for the webzine 21st Century Socialism.

When Lenin took power in Russia, the only economic transactions people made was that they brought the food they would eat that day, and a couple of times a year they would buy an item of clothing. I remember my grandmother saying 'you could leave your front door open', we are talking about pre-WW1 London. You could leave your front door open, everyone said, but that's because no one had anything to steal.

And as someone like Lenin could see, you could organise supply and demand around the very simple needs that people had. But nowadays, even people living on state benefits make dozens of economic transactions a week. It is a huge complexity, and there is no way a centrally planned economy is going to be able to manage the scale of economic activity we now have.

The tragedy is, a lot of people on the left have moved from accepting, that as a means of distribution and exchange, the market can't be bettered- to assuming that therefore the market can do everything else in society. And really it can't. It's a very good mechanism for the distribution and exchange of goods. Full stop.

Fidel pre-dates the recognition of all this, and Raul has got to allow the most dramatic economic growth in human history has been China, where they kept control of the commanding heights of the economy, but allowed a service and light industrial sector to grow up around it.

'But still the majority of the economy in China was in the hands of the Party. When I was discussing where should I open an office in China - Shanghai was clearly the parallel city, but we also had to be in Beijing because that is where the decisions finally get taken

'There is no mention of China's concentration camps, the largest number of executions in the world and it's policy of "no strings attached" colonialism in Africa because "identity politics" means only white Europeans are to blame. The myth that only whites can be racist, as racism is connected to Lenin's dictum of kto-kogo, which dominant group is oppressing which holds.

Whatever the big corporations are doing there, it requires the backing of the Party. And what the Chinese have done is, they have become totally predominant in a whole series of products

Livingstone is only anti-corporatist when it's US corporations and his none too secret admiration for Chinese superpower is a misguided one that puts him in the same category as "realists" like Rupert Murdoch and others sucking up to China like the doddering halfwit Lord Rees Mogg. Since Pilger hates "Murdochracy" Pilger's silence is odd.

There is no mention by Livingstone of democracy in Cuba, the political repressions, the jailing of dissidents or the effective policy of whites only beaches and promotion of covert sex tourism for Cuba is still trendy ( think of those Latin American bars in Fulham like Havana ) and Ken always wants to be "with it".

The Politics of Livingstone as a "global figure" detracts from his need to address mundane issues in London which he showed great skill at times. Yet looking at those views as expressed in 21st Century Socialism gives people an insight into the fact he would use London to promote an "alternative" to Tory Britain.

In 21st Century Socialism "Red Ken" still buys into the romanticism of the Russian Revolution as a "deformed" revolution, no doubt to please London radicals ( Trotskyist types and SWP fanatics who are terminally incapable of getting it that Lenin hijacked the Revolution and set up a totalitarian state almost immediately and intentionally. )

Livingstone absurdly omits all mention of his crimes, his terror his collective punishments and restoration of the death penalty after the Provisional government had abolished it in 1917. The reason is he wants to curry the favour of the StWC types, a motley band of power hungry ex-CPGB members.

"The biggest beneficiaries of the Russian Revolution were actually people in Europe and America who were given the welfare state. The terror of Stalin... none of this was conceded out of generosity, it was a fear of Stalin's legions".

Tell that to the London Poles, either the new transient migrants or better the older generation of political exiles and it would be treated with utter contempt. Post-war reforms were conceded because it was Labour reformism which built on the limited liberal legislation and grassroots unionism.

It had something to do with the fear of the USSR seeming to provide social security, scientific wonders like the first satellite in the Space Age, the Sputnik- and other achievements that were bought at far too high a cost in human liberty and maintained by a system of repression. Hence Seumas Milne's paeans to the USSR in The Guardian.

The anti-Americanism and talk about the US role in Latin America also reflects double standards: Venezuela has the right to be free and have real self-determination but not Tibet. This doublethink might reflect a degree of reality but to call it "socialism" is as absurd as the USSR or CCP's brand.

"It is ridiculous. Also, when people talk about China's attitude towards Tibet; the simple reality is: no Chinese government, communist or capitalist, would ever let Tibet go - because they know that within a year there would be a huge American military base there, they would be surrounded on that side, and this is just the reality of big power politics".

In which case, there is no need to single out the USA as uniquely malign. Sacrificing Tibet to what amounts to a cultural genocide has been met by silence by John Pilger and Seumas Milne. And in Burma and Africa, Chinese Imperialism has likewise not been mentioned. This is no "censorship by omission" as Pilger terms it.

Though it's little to do with the actual governance of London beyond grabbing the votes of Chavez fans in antinomian radical London, the votes of ageing anti-Vietnam types who must be approaching 60 and will be dying or dead in the next decade or so. Those like the pathetic Vanessa Redgrave.

In any case, Livingstones' connections with Chavez and the "anti-war' movement conceal the fact it's merely against the USA's "war on terror", human rights and its cynical alliances with unpleasant regimes are attacked but the double standard means that never gets extended to Chavez's allies like Iran or Zimbabwe.

The very word "leftist" is indicative of the problem: like conservatism it represents the demise of Western socialism as a coherent political project as radicals hitch themselves to this or that nation entrusted to act as the global hegemon or, as Martin Jacques calls China, a "systemic alternative".

As for John Pilger, his own view of the Soviet Union remains close to the Trotskyist version of the Russian Revolution that stagnated into bureaucratic excesses but which was still potentially reformable. Such radicals still use "Eastern Europe" instead of Central Europe and venerate the potentialities of "reformed communism".

Unlike Seumas Milne, an unabashed champion of the USSR, Pilger is too clever as a propagandist to call himself a "communist" or have any consistent vision of the complexities of the Russian Revolution or the Cold War, apart from being utterly self serving in hitching himself to the dissident cause in "Eastern Europe" in one or two essays.

The atrocious human rights record of Iran which has the highest rate of executions next to China does not stop Pilger's hero Hugo Chavez from aligning with it. States often operate according to self interests whilst prating about universal values. That's as true of Britain as Venezuela. But Pilger fawns on Chavez without asking difficult questions.

Hugo Chavez is also aligning himself very closely with Russia which is not known for having a particularly good record on human rights in Chechnya. Venezuela and Russia have been conducting joint naval manoeuvres in 2006 and have arms deals agreements as well. That's hardly edifying for a man who claims to be a libertarian socialist.

Yet Pilger does not condemn that. Nor does he condemn the bilateral deals with Belarus which also have an important role in propping up the international arms industry. If Britain is to be condemned, then it must be because the trade is inherently bad to Pilger. Or else only if Britain does it but not Venezuela.

Pilger does not make that argument with regards Venezuela. So it must be that it is the choice of nations that Britain chooses that is wrong. Yet if Chavez is doing deals with Russia and also voting in the UN General Assembly not to to oppose the Burmese military junta, then he is being hypocritical.

The reason for this is that Pilger's interpretation of morality is the defence of the revolution. Most of the oeuvre of the anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist left is based on trying to prove that the failure of revolutions is wholly due to imperialist machinations that derailed them into Stalinist excesses.

Never that the original sin was planted within the revolution itself as experience has repeatedly demonstrated. If it can be proved that Britain had a Gulag in Kenya, then Stalinism is nothing out of the ordinary and can't be used as a reason why revolution cannot be tried again and again.

Mike Davis is another Trotskyist who wants to use history as propaganda in Late Victorian Holocausts. The Stalin terror famine was part of a deliberate attempt to kill people in Soviet Ukraine and to exterminate the kulaks as part of a class war. In British India the effects of a natural famine were compounded by incompetence.

The people killed in the Indian famines were victims of manslaughter and callous laissez faire policies whereas those victims in Ukraine were murdered intentionally in full consciousness of what was happening. The failure to distinguish is a rationalisation of an ideology of revolutionary change. That only Stalin made Lenin and Trotsky's regime become and Empire.

The one that goes from one extreme-that a crime is not a crime if 'we' commit it to the equally hypocritical one that crimes are only real crimes if 'we' commit them, whilst Stalinism is a historical 'detour' or 'deviation' and making no mention of those committed by the NLF in Vietnam, the Bolsheviks or Mugabe.

Pilger refuses to consider that the mujahadeen were not exactly the same thing as the Taliban or Al Qaida because he simply can't countenance the idea that a jihad against the Marxist-Leninist PDPA regime was popular amongst the rural masses. So the reality needs to be re-invented for pure propaganda reasons.

The root causes for the jihad against the PDPA lay in the revolt against its execution of the village sufi ulema, harebrained collectivisation plans and introducing widespread police state terror. Pilger airbrushes this out of his chapters on Afghanistan in both New Rulers of the World and Freedom Next Time.

The reasons for Pilger hypocritically introducing in his own work what he berates others for'-censorship by omission'-have as much to to with the element of racialism that pervades his entire output and the sentimental belief that Third World Revolutionary movements were 'internationalist'.

In the case of Afghanistan with the PDPA the historical facts never backed this up. Pilger fails to mention that the PDPA was ridden by tribal factions with the Khalq leader Amin organising the murder of rival Taraki, his Parcham, soon after coming to power by a coup. There was nothing edifying about this squalid power politics.

That and the mass murder of 27,000 people between 1978 and December 1979 i.e before the Soviet invasion is ignored in favour of a mendacious idea that the PDPA was trying to bring progress, women's liberation and freedom to Afghanistan. So the mass terror is conveniently ignored.

Pilger opines tenderly that "13,000 prisoners were freed and police files publicly burnt". Clearly this Bastille moment is considered to outweigh the evidence of PDPA brutality. Had Amin and later Mohammed Najibullah been close to the USA, Pilger would revile them as 'stooges'.

But the reality is that neither Communist faction ever had a popular power base is screened out in The New Rulers of the World because Pilger is only interested in trying to pin the entire blame for Afghanistan's descent into chaos and bloodshed on 'the West'.

'....although occasional reference was made to the Anglo-American role in the creation of the fanatical jihadi groups which spawned the Taliban, there was no mention of the extraordinary period in the recent past of this benighted society which would have cast 'our' war for human rights and 'civilised values' in its true perspective'

The use of the word 'extraordinary' might seem as though 'promising', set up like some rosy , even potentially social democratic experiment in good living before the sinister capitalists wrecked it all. Whilst Brzezinski's machinations in funding the mujahadeen were badly conceived shoddy realpolitik, they exploited the chaos: they did not cause it

The PDPA is described as a 'liberation movement' which was 'by all accounts a popular revolution'. Pilger then backs that claim up by citing reports from, of all places, The New York Times, and Wall Street Journal. The very sources he usually claims are form of "invisible government" and part of the "hidden agendas" of corporate capitalism.

That is, the very corporate media he says obfuscates by omission. In fact, there was nothing 'popular' about it unless one has been trained to see reality correctly at a London conference of pseudo-worker-intellectual SWP ideologues. The revolution was always distinctly unpopular outside Kabul.

Not least due to the mass killing of respected village ulema and the Sufi Muslims who got in the way of Progress, a view held by Leon Trotsky who said in relation Central Asian Islam that "the putrescent tissue of Islam will vanish at the first puff". Tariq Ali, who suggested the title The New Rulers of the World to Pilger is still an ardent admirer of Trotsky.

The way Pilger propagates the falsehood about the PDPA is relevant in two ways.

Firstly, to give a subtle retrospin in favour of secular revolutionary politics and to fake the idea that the Soviet Union was a 'deformed' state due to Stalin. Hence Revolutions always create more good than evil and their failure just must be down to sinister imperialist machinations.

Secondly, the fact that the Afghan masses rose up against the PDPA regime just must means they were duped by the West. Stupid peasants can't think for themselves, unless, of course, they are part of the heroic and mythical 'the Iraqi resistance' who are fighting the USA, a view held again by Tariq Ali whom Dennis Potter correctly called a 'gibbering finger pointing nincompoop'

The idea that blacks or those with brown skins should naturally fall in with Third World Revolutionary movements is also part of Pilger's interpretation of South Africa. On page 289 where Pilger writes that 'the new African bourgeoisie' in the ANC, such as Mamphele Ramphele who was a Black Consciousness activist, share the,

'fawning of white technocrats in thrall to capitalism's new supercult'.

Evidently what comes naturally to 'whites' is somehow seen to be a betrayal of 'authentic' African values and consciousness, the revolutionary anti-imperialist ideology of Franz Fanon whose visceral racial ideologies and glorification of terrorist violence was inherent in The Wretched of the Earth which Pilger quotes from.

Pilger has many legitimate criticisms of the ANC elite and how many blacks have sunk further into poverty since 1994. Moreover, few ever bother to mention that Mandela,

'ordered the bloody invasion of tiny Lesotho. He allowed South African armaments to be sold to Algeria, Columbia and Peru, which have notorious human rights records. He invited the Indonesian mass murderer General Suharto to South Africa and gave him the country's highest reward ( Suharto had given money to the ANC in exile ). He recognised the brutal Burmese junta as a legitimate government, even though the plight of its legitimate leader Aung San Sui Kyi, who is under permanent house arrest, reflected his own struggle'

Yet such criticisms of Mandela have also been made by the staunch conservative Peter Hitchens who made the documentary 'Beneath the Halo' looking at how liberal beatification of Mandela belied the reality. Yet Pilger can not bring himself to regard Mandela as an "Uncle Tom", the term he used for US President Barack Obama, so he takes up a different pose.

That Mandela was in exile too long, does not really understand the world any more and has been captured by 'white power'. In Freedom Next Time that becomes clear in Pilger's interview when he writes on how Mandela sitting in a mansion seems an unworldly figure with his shoelaces untied.

The irony is that all 'empowerment' on the basis of race is a form of racialism. In the end, black power movements advance the interests of those who use it to ride into positions of power and influence. In some ways, it is an inevitable consequence of what the Apartheid regime called 'group rights'.

The notion of group rights when aligned with class and resentment about 'haves' and 'have-nots' can make for a lethal combination. Yet Pilger never bothers to criticise Robert Mugabe, not least as Pilger wants to show solidarity with those calling for more radical forms of 'land restitution'.

Pilger mentions Mugabe only twice. First on page 274 when he writes that the level of land evictions has increased and that only 1% of the South African budget went on land restitution in 2005. Pilger writes of how when Mugabe attended a ceremony to mark Mbeki's second term 'he was given a standing ovation'.

To be fair, Pilger uses that to act as a warning of what might happen if restitution is not advanced more quickly. Naturally, how that could be done without provoking open conflict does not interest Pilger who cites another author Bryan Rostron who does refer to Mugabe's 'despotism'.

Yet when Pilger mentions Mugabe again on page 285, with regards forced removals, he hedges his language in such a way as to rationalise his policy of mass terror and murder into a predictable accusation of double standards from the West for criticising the Zimbabwean dictator but not South Africa.

This kind of brutal treatment, at worst, state vandalism, is not very different from that which drew the West's opprobrium to Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe-but not to South Africa, where foreign capital investment has returned to the record levels of the apartheid years'

'State vandalism' is a curious term for mass murder not only of white farmers but also of their black workforce.

If Pilger can't see the difference between a policy of mass terror and dictatorship and land evictions that do not actually kill people, then its clear he can't be taken that seriously as an objective journalist. Pilger will not criticise Mugabe because one of his main supporters is none other than Chavez.

Chavez also backs not only Mugabe but has also voted against any actions to censure the Burmese Junta in the UN. Yet Pilger has uniquely held British businesses responsible for propping it up. If the USA had vetoed actions, Pilger would have been thundering against that and its backing for the generals regime and economic greed and hypocrisy.

But, of course, Chavez is not completely white and is officially an 'anti-imperialist' leader of the Non-Aligned Movement. As with other liberation leaders, they are only acceptable when they share Pilger's hatred of America. That the lens through which he judges all good and evil. This is precisely the kind of expedient falsehood Orwell complained about in the 1930s

As with Jose Maria Horta in East Timor, he sees them as sell outs the moment they become 'close' to the West, despite having risked their lives against the dictatorship of Suharto. Pilger did not do that and as such shifting allegiances on the basis of being Anti-American is precisely the definition of what Orwell mean by "transferred nationalism'.

Pilger thus has no right to invoke Orwell as a model for his own journalism. As ids clear when Pilger produced one of his more than usually unhinged diatribes for the New Statesman in Truth and War mean nothing at Party Conferences, September 25 2008 ).

In it he justifiably complains about how the media coverage of the British political conference season of 2008 has remained largely silent over the Iraq War which was supported by both parties, with virtually no real parliamentary debate or challenges as regards its wisdom, and the fact that the spread of the financial crisis is connected to the USA's colossal run up of debts.

Pilger is right that in Britain there are two political parties dominated by one ideology. Not least in foreign policy. Pilger writes,

Understanding this silence is critical in a society in which news has become noise. Silence covers the truth that Britain's political parties have converged and now follow the single-ideology model of the United States.

This true. However, he makes yet another effort to compare his journalism to that of George Orwell in order to distinguish himself from the other creeping conformists in the mass media who merely trot out received platitudes and who regurgitate official propaganda.

This would be more convincing if Pilger did not increasingly base his own journalism not on reporting from stricken war zones but on writing articles based all on political spinning, crude propaganda and little substance.

This is shown when Pilger opines,

Reality can be detected, however, by applying the Orwell Rule and inverting public pronouncements and headlines, such as "Aggressor Russia facing pariah status, US warns", thereby identifying the correct pariah; or by crossing the invisible boundaries that fix the boundaries of political and media discussion. "When truth is replaced by silence," said the Soviet dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko, "the silence is a lie."

Yet what Pilger calls the 'Orwell Rule', the invertion of public pronouncements to reveal the real truth, was never, in fact, Orwell's rule, which is precisely why in 1984 he satirised the belief that truth could be arrived at purely by reversing by giving "The Party" slogans such as 'war is peace, slavery is freedom and ignorance is strength'.

Orwell was satirising those with a totalitarian mindset who believed, that by simply inverting 'official truths', one somehow arrives at unofficial truth when all that happened is that one set of untruths was replaced by another set by those far more dogmatic in preaching it as the total truth.

That is essentially what happened under the Soviet Union when the Bolsheviks came to power and what was meant with Orwell's concept doublethink. That because the 'morality' of their political opponents was hypocritical, then the only morality that mattered was the one that allowed the concentration of power in their hands so that they could change society for the better.

Doublethink was intended to be a concept that could be applied to all political dissimulation where those who were more aware of the truth decided that the masses were too stupid to be able to understand it. So it was necessary to feed them untruth in order to mobilise them and to get them to do what the political elite knew what was best.

What Pilger misses is that doublethink for Orwell is the systematic application of hypocrisy to its logical conclusion. For, if the political elite was telling lies, then the opposition should do so even more effectively than them and not have any moral scruples at all that they could be held accountable for.

All that would be necessary would be to draw attention to the hypocrisy of the powers that one was against and ignoring it when committed by people one regarded as being on one's own side or who are standing up the the power which is considered the sole and original first cause of all the world's problems. Today, for those like Pilger, that means overwhelmingly the USA.

In this regard, Pilger would be more convincing if he abided by the standards of journalistic integrity he is so keen to set for others in his profession with regards silence and hypocrisy.

The very article in which Pilger's citation of The Orwell Rule appears is itself loaded with ideological assumptions which cite 'Western' hypocrisy but screen out any consideration that Pilger might be somewhat of a hypocrite for mentioning two writers, Yevtushenko and Stephen F Cohen, who supported the continued existence of the Soviet Union until its demise in 1991.

Unless people had forgotten, the Soviet Union was a One Party State and an Empire. Why does Pilger mention these one dissident and one American supporter of the USSR and "reform communism" but not Solszentitsyn, Sakharov and a whole lot of Soviet dissidents and certain ?

Well, firstly, the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, whose quote "When truth is replaced by silence the silence is a lie", is one Pilger quotes with approval. Yevtushenko was a dissident who played an important role in 'breaking the silence' about Stalin's anti-semitism and who in 1961 wrote a poem Babi Yar

Yevtushenko attacked the way the Soviet regime had distorted the Nazi massacre of the Kiev Jews by pretending that it was targeted specifically against the Jews and not just all Soviet citizens of which some happened to be Jews. Pilger might also have mentioned those criticising the slave labour camps or Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

Pilger quotes Yevtushenko , partly because it suits his image too to be some kind of dissident. He is always keen to identify himself with former Eastern European dissidents for his heroic correspondent pose in the West.

Yet he curiously continued to remain mostly silent about the Soviet Union's domination of Poland and Czechoslovakia, confined to its 'sphere of influence', whilst being very vocal about CIA involvement in the repression of left wing goverments in Latin America.

As Pilger has made it his purpose to cover most of the world's doomed uprisings, it is curious that he never bothered to report much about Solidarity in 1981. There are no reports from Pilger on that.

Yet those dissidents connected to it hated the Soviet system and wanted an end to it are almost entirely ignored.

It just didn't matter that much even though it happened and that most Poles, to Pilger's ire in his book Hidden Agendas, supported the Catholic Church and flocked in hundreds of thousands to turn out in Krakow back in 1979 to welcome John Pope Paul II. Glibly he compares it to the hullabaloo over Princess Diana's funeral.

For the simple point is that many Marxists were never that happy about Poland's resistance to Communist rule being so dominated by Catholicism nor the resistance to the spread of Communism through Poland even going back to the Polish-Soviet War of 1920.

Poland was regarded by many radical Marxists as a priest ridden backwater and den of reactionaries, a view held by those like Terry Eagleton, who wrote, in relation to Karol Wojtyla, (The Pope has Blood on his Hands, Guardian April 4 2005 )

"As a prelate from Poland, Wojtyla hailed from what was probably the most reactionary national outpost of the Catholic church, full of maudlin Mary-worship, nationalist fervour and ferocious anti-communism.

Years of dealing with the Polish communists had turned him and his fellow Polish bishops into consummate political operators. In fact, it turned the Polish church into a set-up that was, at times, not easy to distinguish from the Stalinist bureaucracy"

So the Polish Church was a reactionary force no so different from the Stalinist bureaucracy.

Apart from the fact the Catholic Church had not, in fact, retained a role in Polish society by murdering political oppenents as Stalin did to so many of Poland's political elite who had formed part of a wartime resistance, the Home Army,

Such People who had also fought the Nazis, who had fought alongside the British, who had supplied pilots in the Battle of Britain and who were rewarded with very little despite their epic role in fighting Nazism

Then, after Stalin allowed the Nazi repression of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, the execution of its leaders was followed in Poland with the installation of a communist puppet government unelected by the Polish people.

Terry Eagleton's sneering dismissal of Poland as a priest ridden backwater that stopped the Russian Revolution linking with the German one to create a 'United States of Europe' remains a source of bitterness for Marxoid relicts of his ilk.

Whilst Pilger did berate Stalinism and give a certain support to risings like the 1968 Prague Spring, Pilger seldom condemned the hegemony of 'the Party' as such but just the "Stalinist" versions of it.

Nor did Pilger vocally criticise much the notion of one party rule because he believed 'the people' would be able to revivify Communism and make it work for them rather than the state bureaucratic apparatus which existed for that purpose.

Pilger has remained a firm believer in Rousseau's concept of 'direct democracy' and the notion of the majoritarian 'will of the people' with regards his support of Hugo Chavez today in Venezuela.

So, secondly, the same notion of direct democracy lay behind Pilger's hope that the Soviet Union could yet be reformed in accordance with the original precepts as ostensibly laid down by Lenin and which were believed in even by Gorbachev until the last days of the Soviet Empire.

Pilger cites a whole lot of things wrong with US and British foreign policy such as the plots to destabilise Pakistan and Venezuela All that is true but it is post-Cold War politics and The Great Game Pilger elsewhere refers to.

In particular, Pilger focuses on the notion that Russia's invasion of Georgia was somehow 'started' by the USA and uses that to go to provide a thinly veiled retrospective rationalisation for the existence of the USSR, albeit 'reformed'.

"None of this is as potentially dangerous, or more distorted in permitted public discussion, than the war on Russia. Two years ago, Stephen Cohen, professor of Russian Studies at New York University, wrote a landmark essay in the Nation which has now been reprinted in Britain.* He warns of "the gravest threats [posed] by the undeclared Cold War Washington has waged, under both parties, against post-communist Russia during the past 15 years".

What Pilger does not tell you is that Cohen was an advisor to Gorbachev and who tried to advise him on how to reform the Soviet Union.

The absurd notion that the USA is engaging in a 'war on Russia' taps into the rationalisation for the degeneration of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia because it was continually surrounded by imperial plots to encircle and destroy the Soviet regime. Certainly, the USA aims at hegemony in Central Asia. It hardly wants direct war with Russia,

The idea is that Russia was simply only reacting to 'NATO aggression' in the recent conflict between Russia and Georgia and was defending itself is ridiculous. It was reacting the aggression of Mikheil Saakashvili who was not directly order to bomb South Ossetia and kill 15 Russian peaceppers.

NATO itself was not "aggressive": most of its representatives had no intention of backing Saakashvili at all, though irresponsible proponents of NATO expansion caused Saakashvili to believe Cheney and the neoconservatives would back him up. But that's hardly tantamount to a NATO attack.

The Georgian leader initiated the conflict not because he was ordered by NATO to do it but because he hoped that by goading Russia into responding belligerently they would accelerate the accession of Georgia into NATO and get more Western backing to shore up his increasingly unpopular regime.

On the other hand, despite all the equally daft propaganda in the USA about Putin being some 'Neo Soviet' threat, Putin is not interested in starting another Cold War in any way whatsoever.

Putin is only interested in defending Russia's regional geopolitical interests against NATO expansion into Georgia and further into Central Asia and which is crucially concerned on both sides about control over the oil and gas of the Caspian.

Even so, the idea NATO wants to destroy Russian power or has directly aggressive intentions against it is vastly exaggerated, though it seeks to reduce it to the extent that it can control Central Asia

And indeed certain 'Democratic Geopoliticians' do have the messianic idea that by spreading US style market democracy to all these nations, Russia will lose its traditional imperial pretensions and, if it chooses, join 'the West'.

Yet the reason Pilger believes in 'imperialist encirclement' is no less for ideological reasons that bear no resemblance to the reality. For it was precisely this belief in imperialist encirclement that was one of the paranoid justifications for the Bolsheviks concentrating total state power in their hands and this was supported by even the most 'liberal' of them.

For example Nikholai Bukharin, whose glowing biography was written by none other than the very Stephen Cohen, the advisor to Gorbachev, who believed had he succeeded Lenin, the Soviet Union would have not degenerated into totalitarian terror. This is not borne out by the historical record.

In fact, it is now widely accepted by historians, in the light of access to the documents released during Gorbachev's policy of Glasnost, the relaxation of censorship and more open discussion of the past, that it was Lenin who instigated the policy of systematic terror that Stalin inherited.

Pilger wants to believe that a state founded on lies and deception only degenerated because of imperialist machinations in 1919, a myth that has been repeated over and over again and is factually incorrect.

Not least by those like George Galloway who use the idea of imperialist encirclement to justify Castro's retention of power and the suspension of democracy in Cuba. As well as taking money from the Iranians for his Press TV programmes. Pilger opinies that Galloway is a principled politician. But he is not.

Now though the Soviet Union is history, Pilger is not being completely honest about his position that everything would be better had not the Soviet Union not collapsed.

The fact the Soviet Union was a one party state that, at least, benefited more working people than what came later cannot really be compared with the fact that both political parties in the USA and UK share a consensus on the state not controlling the economy in the way Pilger believes it should.

What Pilger is objecting to is the rule of money and corporate interests and advertising in politics in Britain which makes party political differences seem to be meaningless. This is a legitimate criticism But this is hardly news. And it does not require specious analogies with the Soviet Union.

Huxley predicted growing resource wars and authoritarianism as a conservative. Peter Oborne, another conservative has criticised British foreign policy and the drive to War in Iraq in The Rise of Political Lying without making 'Ostalgic' comments about the Soviet Union's capacity for "reform".

To criticise this whilst having a nostalgia for the one party rule of the Soviet Union just because it was not dominated by the rule of money is actually beyond hypocrisy. It's the Orwellian doublethink he thinks other use but not himself. Pilger is an atrocious hypocrite for using Orwell to make the case for the continued existence of the Soviet Union.

It means effectively rationalising the imperialism of the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe whilst criticising the USA for being imperialist in Latin America. And Pilger wrote little about life behind the Iron Curtain.

Yet Pilger has an important and formidably strong case when he mentions what is all too often omitted from triumphalist neoliberal narrative about the collapse of Soviet Communism when he writes how Stephen Cohen,

"......describes a catastrophic "relentless winner-take-all of Russia's post-1991 weakness", with two-thirds of the population forced into poverty and life expectancy barely at 59. With most of us in the West unaware, Russia is being encircled by US and Nato bases and missiles in violation of a pledge by the United States not to expand Nato "one inch to the east".

The consequences that Cohen draws attention to with regards the living standards of the Russian people are undeniable but that should translate into a criticism of IMF ideology and not that NATO expanded into places like Poland which had every obvious reason to feel threatened by the continuation of the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991.

Like it or not Poland wanted to be part of it as a final security solution to their age old strategic vulnerability between what often an indifferent West and an imperialist Soviet Union that treated like an colonial outpost that was part of its 'sphere of interest'.

Pilger is conflating the eastward expansion of NATO necessarily with neoliberal capitalism in order to retrospectively justify aspects of Communist rule and ignoring the fact that the vast majority of people in Poland never wanted it.

Such feelings are common to those like Seumas Milne who also habitually refer to 'Eastern Europe' when moaning about Poland's accession into NATO when it is more correct to write of Central Europe as Milan Kundera, a Czech dissident Pilger is fond of quoting, rightly called it.
The expansion of NATO beyond Poland, indeed beyond Europe into Georgia is the real problem.

To that extent there is a curious irony that the US neoconservatives have acted like Trotskyists believing that the spread of US style market democracy can be achieved by co-ordinating and choreographing 'regime change' in former territories of the Soviet Union like Georgia, Ukraine and Belarus.

The irony is that they are acting somewhat like the Communists once did in believing that their system was the only possible one that people could and must live under. Pilger gets that but glides over the realities of the Soviet Union's atrocious environmental record as evidenced at Chernobyl which helped bring down the Soviet Union.

The result, writes Cohen, "is a US-built reverse iron curtain [and] a US denial that Russia has any legitimate national interests outside its own territory, even in ethnically akin former republics such as Ukraine, Belarus and Georgia. [There is even] a presumption that Russia does not have fully sovereignty within its own borders, as expressed by constant US interventions in Moscow's internal affairs since 1992 . . . the United States is attempting to acquire the nuclear responsibility it could not achieve during the Soviet era."

"This danger has grown rapidly as the American media again presents US-Russian relations as "a duel to the death - perhaps literally". The liberal Washington Post, says Cohen, "reads like a bygone Pravda on the Potomac". The same is true in Britain, with the regurgitation of propaganda that Russia was wholly responsible for the war in the Caucasus and must therefore be a "pariah".

Pilger was correct about the propaganda parroting simplistic tropes about "Russian aggression" and "Russia's attack on Georgia", but the rest of his ex-post facto rationalisation for the existence of the USSR is craven. It also reaches levels of potty surrealism when he opines that the USa was serious about attacking Russia,

Sarah Palin, who may end up US president, says she is ready to attack Russia. The steady beat of this drum has seen Moscow return to its old nuclear alerts. Remember the 1980s, writes Cohen,"when the world faced exceedingly grave Cold War perils, and Mikhail Gorbachev unexpectedly emerged to offer a heretical way out. Is there an American leader today ready to retrieve that missed opportunity?"

Pilger then histrionically adds "It is an urgent question that must be asked all over the world by those of us still unafraid to break the lethal silence". But back on Planet Earth two facts remain essential to understand.

Firstly, there is no way that the USA would have attacked Russia in 2009. This is a lunatic and unhinged assertion because not even Palin nor McCain would have launched a nuclear weapon and World War Three. Pilger in still living in the past. He has no conception of post-Cold War realities.

Secondly, there was no way out of the Soviet Union's implosion and few, not even most Russians, wanted it's continuation, though they were to only in retrospect find out that the USA was simply uninterested in the fate of ordinary Russians when it imposed IMP shock therapy.