Family being in New York City prior to Xmas means I've been off the airwaves so it looks unlikely my co-author and I will make the requisite 100 posts by year end - however, in another Star Trek entitled post, on a day when the world pondered the end of one of its worst tyrants whilst still in mourning for one of the greatest statesemen of the last three decades , it's worth contemplating their respective legacies.
Friends credit me with a near obsession with the small South East Asian country North of the 38th parallel, so the messages have been flooding in regarding the death of Kim Jong-il. A spat with Guardian journalist Owen Jones will be raised in a latter post, but I'm compelled to write by an extraordinary article by Neil Clark in The Guardian which has provoked a mixture of anger and utter bewilderment across my Twitter colleagues.
The Left is at some pains, (and I include the co-author of this blog)to distance movements such as the soon to be defunct Occupy, UK Uncut, and even Ed Miliband's Renewed Labour Party from the USSR. I am confident thus, we'll see people disavowing Clark and hoping that his truly mindbending article can be attributed to shaaring the same grief we see on the brainwashed citizens of the Korea DPR. Based on my co-author's comment to Telegraph writer Ed West:
'Can Imagine the uproar if a Telegraph comment piece contained the words, fascism, for all it's faults'
which drew:
'I thought that was pretty much what the Telegraph does say day after day'
I'm not that hopefulful. For anyone, thinking I'm exaggerating, please feel free to head to Tallinn, Vilnius, Riga, Warsaw, Budapest, Bratislava, Podgorica, Ljubljana and the rest and translate this piece which you have to reread multiple times to quite take in:
'Or the fact that communism, for all its faults, was still a system which put the economic needs of the majority first.'
And who said Kim Jong- il was the last communist on Earth? - it would appear we have one right here in our midst - 'That which survives'.....
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2 comments:
I agree with your view on the Clark article - it seemed extraordinarily naive. But there are as many apologists for fascism in the cause of "free markets" (e.g. in Chile post-1973, Spain pre-1975 etc) on the right as there are apologists for communism in the name of "equality" on the left.
There were, following the late Pinochet's detention by Mandelson and Straw some pretty grotesque articles (a grisly spectacle according to Max Hastings) which I would agree were difficult, (especially in the wake of corruption revelations) but Pinochet did assist the Uk in the Falklands and the numbers killed under Soviet and Chinese communism (circa 90 million, or the equivalent of the entire Uk population x 1.5) mean I cannot put an apologist for communism higher than one for ANTI- communist regimes. Your central point that both are pretty wretched is a valid one!
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