Steamed up Corbyn

The thought of Jeremy Corbyn as a dangerous 'spy' is quite ridiculous, not least because in my mind's eye I see the Labour leader more as a poor man's Johnny English than a James Bond.  

But the fact that Jezza met a Czechoslovakian diplomat four times over 18 months does deserves some scrutiny since that suggest more enthusiasm than Jeremy has been able to summon up in 'leading' the Labour fight against Brexit - over a similar time period.

Dominic Lawson hit the nail on the head with his column in The Sunday Times - whatever Corbyn was doing he wasn't getting steamed up about freedom of speech or human rights in this former Soviet client state. 

You can be certain that it was not human rights in the spy’s homeland that Corbyn got steamed up about: a nation where dissenters against its Soviet-installed regime were incarcerated, or, like the playwright Vaclav Havel, put under house arrest.

  

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/comment/jeremy-corbyn-smiles-and-steps-over-marxisms-victims-dk75vgxcl

Jeremy Corbyn smiles and steps over Marxism’s victims

By Dominic Lawson - The Sunday Times

Labour’s leader doesn’t know, or care, about the masses killed by communists


Sometimes an item of news can be both fascinating and completely unsurprising. So it is with the revelation in The Sun (complete with documentary evidence) that as a back-bench MP in the 1980s, Jeremy Corbyn had several meetings with a Czech intelligence officer known as Lieutenant Jan Dymic. At one of these, the man now Labour leader allegedly handed this agent of a communist dictatorship a story about how British intelligence was investigating a suspected “spy” for the East German secret police, the Stasi.

Fascinating, I’m sure you’ll agree — down to the detail that the Czech intelligence service (which during the Cold War was moderately successful at recruiting British Labour MPs) had given Corbyn the code name of Cob. But it’s also entirely unsurprising. Throughout his career Corbyn has made no secret of his sympathies with any regime that calls itself Marxist — and indeed any gang hostile to the West (whether the Islamic Republic of Iran or its favoured terrorist militia, Hezbollah).

For the record, the Labour leader’s spokesman insisted Corbyn had no idea Dymic was a spy, and that he “neither had nor offered any privileged information”. So not so much a useful idiot for the Soviet bloc as a useless one.

Still, Dymic — before being expelled from Britain in 1989 — dutifully filed his impressions of Cob: “Owns dogs and fish. Behaviour is reserved and courteous, however occasionally explosive (when speaking in defence of human rights).” You can be certain that it was not human rights in the spy’s homeland that Corbyn got steamed up about: a nation where dissenters against its Soviet-installed regime were incarcerated, or, like the playwright Vaclav Havel, put under house arrest.

The treatment of IRA terrorists aroused Corbyn’s deepest anger: when Patrick Magee (who planted the bomb that blew up Brighton’s Grand hotel and members of the then Conservative cabinet) faced justice at the Old Bailey, Corbyn picketed the court, claiming this was a “show trial”. The true show trials of the Soviet Union (and indeed the Czechoslovakia of the Cold War) — which resulted in summary executions for imaginary plots — would never have caused Corbyn a flicker of concern.

I had not fully understood just how callous, or catastrophically ignorant, Corbyn is about the victims of state communism until I watched the Labour leader’s interview on the Andrew Marr show three weeks ago. When Marr taxed this opponent of the market economy with the fact that the Chinese economy and people had prospered so much more since the People’s Republic allowed individuals to get rich through private business, Corbyn countered that its economy had “grown massively . . . since 1949 and . . . the Great Leap Forward”. He then gave that little sniff and satisfied smile that we have grown accustomed to seeing from Corbyn in interviews when he thinks he’s made a good point.

Reader, the Great Leap Forward was Mao Tse-tung’s propagandistic term for the policy of forced collectivisation of agriculture from 1958-62. It caused the deaths of an estimated 45m Chinese (or seven-and-a-half times the number of Jews exterminated over a similar number of years in the Holocaust).

As the most respected historian of that period in Chinese history, Frank Dikötter, wrote: “Between 2m-3m of these victims were tortured to death or summarily executed, often for the slightest infraction. People accused of not working hard enough were hanged and beaten; sometimes they were bound and thrown into ponds. Punishments for the least violations included mutilation and forcing people to eat excrement . . . The term ‘famine’ tends to support the widespread view that the deaths were largely the result of half-baked and poorly executed economic programmes. But the archives show that coercion, terror and violence were the foundation of the Great Leap Forward.” And this is what Jeremy Corbyn offers us as an example of successful economic management under communism.

In the extremely unlikely event that the Labour leader experiences any doubt on this, he has at his side someone with exactly the same world view, and who can give him the necessary ideological reassurance: the former Guardian columnist Seamus Milne. That presumably is why Corbyn, on becoming leader, appointed Milne to be Labour’s “chief strategist”. Milne, when a schoolboy at Winchester, stood in a mock election (in 1974, when the grown-ups went to the polls) as a Maoist candidate. A contemporary at that fine private school was the Conservative MP John Whittingdale, who kept a copy of Milne’s manifesto. Thanks to him, we know the schoolboy Milne pledged: “Under a Maoist government, factories and farms will be run by committees of workers, elected by the workers (as in China, where this has proved to work well.)” As in the Great Leap Forward.

Here I confess that as a prep schoolboy I was intrigued by the People’s Republic of China. In 1968, I think it was, when Maoism was high fashion in the West, I wrote (in red ink, and under the assumed name of George Carter) to the Chinese embassy, asking it to send me a copy of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book. It did, and I still have it. But in the intervening years I discovered — by reading histories, and through encounters with people who lived under these tyrannies — what actually happened in the communist dictatorships. You live and learn.

But not Corbyn or Milne, who remains an apologist for Stalinism. They are remarkable cases, at least in fully functioning adults, of arrested intellectual development. Perhaps moral idiocy as well.

I concede it’s probably a waste of time explaining all this to the younger voters who see Corbyn’s life-long distance from “the Establishment” as a decisive virtue in itself, and regard his evident disdain for parliamentary democracy as enlightened. The horrors he embraced as progress were long ago, far away — and might never have happened at all, as far as they are concerned.

That generation has certainly been taught in school about the victims of Nazism: but much less, or not at all, about the victims of communism — which if you add up all the deaths through manmade famine, executions and forced labour, comes to something in the region of 100m extinguished lives.

If a British politician argued: “Say what you like about Hitler, but he put the German people to work and built a great motorway system,” he would rightly be dismissed as an offensive idiot. But when Corbyn, on national television, praises the most barbarous episode in postwar history as a great economic success, no one seems bothered at all.

It’s said that a nation gets the leaders it deserves. So what would it say about us if such a man became prime minister?

dominic.lawson@sunday-times.co.uk