The reds really were under the bed
In the 21st century, new generations have come to idealise communism and the Soviet Union, but fears of Cold War subversion was well founded and the threat was real
The Cold War and the shaping of consciousness
Although I was hardly a sophisticated political observer, my first memories of events which had public significance are all from the 1980s: the Falklands War, the Challenger disaster, the Russian withdrawal from Afghanistan, the fall of the Berlin Wall. I was revoltingly know-it-all enough to write a short piece about the Reyvjavik summit between President Ronald Reagan and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev in 1986 for my prep school magazine, and I recall knowing that “Star Wars” was really the Strategic Defense Initiative, a missile defence system which could have deployed lasers in space. If I do not have the childhood memories my parents did of nuclear war as a real threat, nevertheless the simplistic world view I developed was based upon an East/West bipolarity, and I had no doubt who were the good guys and who were the villains.
Older people often say this sort of thing, but I do think that generations who came after cannot easily understand the starkness of that view and, therefore, the extraordinary sense of relief and joy in the summer of 1989; from the opening of a border crossing between Austria and Hungary in August—fittingly, the idea began as a proposal by Dr Otto von Habsburg, not only a Member of the European Parliament for Bavaria but also (1916-18) the last crown prince of the Austro-Hungarian Empire—to the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November. It was genuinely an epochal movement, all the more remarkable for being achieved mostly peacefully, and if in the north of England we looked on incredulously as the very architecture of the world we knew was brought down, it must have seemed truly a new world to hopeful young Germans and other citizens from behind the Iron Curtain.
(Of course it was not a bloodless revolution. Thank God the East German security organisations did not use the permission to disperse demonstrations they were granted in October. Berlin could have been a bloodbath. It was only in Romania where the president, Nicolae Ceaușescu, tried to suppress the protestors, at a cost of around 1,200 lives before he and his wife Elena were captured, summarily tried and executed by firing squad on Christmas Day 1989. It seemed then a shocking act of violence, though he was a savage dictator with one of the world’s most brutal secret police forces, the dreaded Securitate, and the release of footage of the executions reminded us that the stakes were as high as they could be.)
The main feeling was of relief and of arms opened in welcome to the people of Eastern Europe. The Cold War had sparked into small but bloody conflicts across the world—in Korea and Vietnam, of course, but also in Congo, Nicaragua, Angola, Afghanistan, Laos, Guatemala, Bangladesh, Ethiopia and a dozen other places—but the great conflagration, a full-scale war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, likely to go nuclear very quickly, never arose. Within a few months it was mostly over, even if the Soviet Union limped on, fatally wounded, until December 1991, and there was a feeling that the West had, not just politically and militarily but also ideologically, emerged as the victor. In 1992, the young American political scientist Francis Fukuyama, who had advised the US State Department, published The End of History and the Last Man, which suggested that the final form of political organisation was liberal democracy and that it had more or less been arrived at. Although his argument was more nuanced than that, he caught the optimistic mood of the early 1990s and many of us felt that he had analysed the implication of the previous few years fairly accurately.
Communism loses its power and loses the argument
If liberal democracy was enjoying its victory, then one of its essential ingredients was capitalism. In the UK, the Thatcherite revolution was complete: the Conservative Party won an unexpected fourth election victory in April 1992, and when Tony Blair took over the leadership of the Labour Party in 1994 and began modernising it, he was tacitly accepting that much of Thatcherism was a fait accompli. It was, we felt by then, another part of the rejection of far-left politics, and by then, anyone openly espousing communism looked either like a throwback or someone still willing to back a horse that was already on its way to the knacker’s yard. Communism remained dominant in China, though many thought that the leadership of Deng Xiaoping had put the country on a path to some kind of modernisation and amelioration of the creed, and the only other hold-outs were Cuba, Laos and Vietnam, virtual fortress economies. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea had deleted references to Marxism and Communism in favour of its homegrown ideology of Juche in 1992, though it retained many aspects of a Communist autocracy.
Communist parties remained around the world, of course, but in the West, at any rate, they were drifting into irrelevance if they had ever left it. In Britain, the Communist Party of Great Britain disbanded in 1991 and became a left-leaning think tank, Democratic Left. The term retained some power as an insult in the United States, but in the UK it was an absurdity, an impossibility, an idea that had been tried and had comprehensively been shown to be not only a failure but one that came at a terrible cost in freedom and human lives. Christopher Hitchens, the brilliant but unpredictable American-based English author and journalist, would from time to time affirm that he remained a Marxist, but true believers dwindled to relics of the past and foolish undergraduates trying to shock in student unions and fringe political societies.
The surprising return of communism
All of this made it shocking when, in July 2018, Piers Morgan was goading Novara Media’s Ash Sarkar on Good Morning Britain over her views on President Barack Obama. While discussing protests against President Donald Trump’s visit to the UK, Morgan contended that Obama was Sarkar’s hero. Irritated by his talking over her, she responded “He’s not my hero. I’m a communist, you idiot.” He continued the performance, until she told him “I’m not pro-Obama. I’ve been critic of Obama. I’m a critic of the Democratic Party because I’m literally a communist.”
Five years later, it seems a mild enough statement: but then it was electrifying. Talking to Michael Hogan a few days later in The Guardian, Sarkar joked that Morgan had “accidentally rehabilitated communism”, explaining that “lots of us have been plugging away, building a platform to talk about libertarian communism and post-scarcity economics”. She added that Novara were now selling T-shirts with the slogan “I’m literally a communist”.
Sarkar’s Twitter biography described her as a “luxury communist”. It was partly, she said, to mock those who used the same platform to accumulate labels and ideologies, as if piling them together represented an identity or a coherent ideological platform. But she was not a communist in the tradition sense, familiar from the Soviet Union and the Cold War.
My communism isn’t about authoritarian bureaucracy, suppressing freedom or everyone wearing burlap sacks. It’s about the desire to see the coercive structures of state dismantled, while also having fun. It’s not about driving everybody down to the same level of abjection, but making aesthetic pleasures and luxuries available to all.
She accepted that this was inevitably a long-term goal, and, perhaps showing her lack of factionalism which had made Western communists a laughing stock for decades, she freely admitted that supporting Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party was a way to achieve objectives which would be stepping stones to her ultimate objective, including the redistribution of wealth through taxation and the public ownership and management of housing, railways and healthcare.
There were people who suggested that what Sarkar was espousing was not really communism. Suzanne Moore, yet to leave The Guardian over a row about trans rights and whether they conflicted with women’s rights, took issue with the definition. Reminding her readers that she had once worked for Marxism Today, the journal of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and criticised “today’s young self-declared communists who fetishise automation as the ultimate liberation”. Moreover, she argued, to ignore the evils of real communism in the 20th century was not only immoral but self-defeating.
The glossing-over of what communism is, of who it killed, and seeing that as a moral equivalence with the deaths caused by capitalism, is idiotic ahistoricism. The idea of talking about communism with no centralised state is just that: an idea. The refusal of parts of the left to criticise Putin, or see the misery of Cuban peasants, Chinese workers, or those starving in Venezuela is sickening.
In fact, Moore suggested, the belief system which Sarkar portrayed as “communism” was actually anarcho-syndicalism, or “participatory local democracy”; radically different to the political system then in place, certainly, but not analogous to the teachings of Marx or the interpretation of Lenin. What Sarkar and fellow-travellers espoused, Moore said with pinpoint accuracy, was a rather performative and undergraduate style of contrarianism, attention-seeking and designed to shock.
This fun kind of communism is a lovely commodity indeed. All I see is people saying: “Get with the project or you are persona non grata.” Same as it ever was. Comrades: at least read your own history.
Moore was not the only sceptic. The following year, 2019, saw the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and brought a degree of reflection and fresh analysis of what had really happened and what had become of communism. Andrew Anthony, let another Guardian scribe but moonlighting for GQ, examined contemporary communism and its adherents. He observed that after 1989 “communism was effectively expunged from progressive politics. The dream was over, because almost everyone knew that it had in fact, been a nightmare”. Anthony pointed to the increasing trend of anti-capitalists to identify something they called communism as the only alternative societal and economic model, and the celebrity endorsements it was attracting. Bobby Gillespie, the lead singer of Primal Scream, interviewed on Newsnight (a depressing development in itself), cited Karl Marx as his hero, and had joined Brian Eno, once of Roxy Music, and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, at an event in honour of a young Croatian philosopher and political activist called Srecko Horvat.
Horvat, a friend of Yanis Varoufakis, the popular and stylish former Greek foreign minister who had, the year before, founded the European Realistic Disobedience Front (MeRA25), had just published a book entitled Poetry from the Future: Why a Global Liberation Movement Is Our Civilisation’s Last Chance, drawing the inevitable praise of an increasingly cranky Noam Chomsky. Horvat’s parents had left Yugoslavia in the 1980s, but he had come full circle by rejecting the free-market capitalism and democracy which had come to his homeland in the 1990s, and proposed a vague form of communalism and various other alternative lifestyles. But his real inspiration was the communist-led National Liberation Army, better known as Tito’s Partisans, who had resisted German occupation of Yugoslavia during the Second World War.
If all of this sounds complicated and factional, so is the history of the ideological left. But it was against this backdrop that, as Anthony noted, “A new generation of activists are trying to throw off its miserable connotations and return the subject of communism to acceptable conversation”. Sarkar’s clash with Piers Morgan and her reverse auto-da-fé in declaring her communism had become a viral internet sensation and catapulted her to extraordinary fame. She had given an interview to, of all publications, Teen Vogue, and had then been sought by the BBC for Question Time and Have I Got News For You?, for which she was an ideal fit, forthright and confident. Her employer, Novara Media, had been set up in 2011 by James Butler, who claimed to come “from a tradition of communism that got buried”, and Aaron Bastani, a left-wing writer, activist and gadfly, and the latter had coined the phrase “fully automated luxury communism” to describe the platform he, Novara and Sarkar were all promoting.
Was this a real ideology, or a provocative shtick to expound less disastrous left-wing and progressive politics? Bastani’s definition, set out in 2019 in Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto, proposed the use of technology, a universal basic income and free public services to create a post-capitalist society which would liberate the people from the burden of labour, and foresaw the use of solar energy and the mining of asteroids for rare minerals. But Anthony identified the kind of “sassiness” that Sarkar displayed as a critical ingredient of the new ideology’s appeal, especially to the youth.
Rewriting history: ‘proper’ communism has never been tried
Some commentators found Bastani’s manifesto superficial, based on a thin understanding of history and blind to the threat posed by climate change. The point of history is an important one. Anyone openly espousing fascism would be challenged by the horrifying antecedents of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and their lesser acolytes; how, therefore, did “fully automated luxury communists” deal with the mind-bending death toll and dark deeds of Stalin, Lenin, Mao and others? Sarkar, with characteristic boldness and lack of caution, was happy to go into bat for the communist figures of the 20th century.
One of the things that we need to remember about the Soviet experiment is that within the space of a single generation of Russians, it went from serfdom to space exploration. And that period of industrialisation was unlike anything that had ever been seen in history, before or since.
One of her missions, she went on, was “trying to recover the word ‘communism’” from its historical associations. Not an easy task: it is notable that she used the word “Russians”, which might rankle the Ukrainian relatives of the five million people who died in the Holodomor, the famine which devastated Ukraine in 1932-33 and was caused by the rationing of grain by Stalin’s government. It was also a glib and foolish prioritising of the Soviet space programme over the brutally repressive régime and widespread mass murder which came along with the communist era.
Inevitably, Sarkar fell back on the argument that the Soviet Union had not implemented communism properly. Lenin and his successors had “remembered everything that Marx had to say about the need for dictatorship to fast-track collectivisation and forgot everything that Marx had to say about freedom and human flourishing”. The problem was that we simply were not yet ready for the kind of communism she supported. This idea of getting it right next time was also put forward by Bastani.
I think communism in the 20th century was impossible. And it’s impossible today, but it’s something we’ll be able to think of if the technologies we’re now seeing emerge are as disruptive as the industrial revolution in the late 18th century.
One could be forgiven for seeing this as a perpetual process of “jam tomorrow”. Sarkar tried to spin this positively, saying “I’m a long-term communist but a short-term pragmatist”. And she attempted to bring a degree of historical inevitability to her notion of communism.
Communism is the only thing which says all things should be brought into the hands of commons to benefit all people. In the past, you’d call that communism. I think in the future, we’ll have to call that common sense.
This was not an easy balance to strike, promising a collective utopia for those who will keep the faith while dismissing the mass murder of previous communist régimes as aberrations from the true ideology of Marx or simply a failed but sincere attempt to implement Marxism.
A surprising Labour leader changes the atmosphere
It was bolstered greatly by the fact that it coincided with the leadership of the Labour Party of Jeremy Corbyn; the veteran Islington North MP was associated with a number of far-left movements and groups, but in 2015 the journalist Andrew Marr had asked him explicitly whether he was a Marxist. In the world before his leadership, that kind of question would have been potentially fatal for a Labour politician, redolent of factionalism, myopic obscurantism and impractical policies from the past, but Corbyn, as ever struggling with a combination of honesty and an attempt at presentational nuance and cunning, stopped a long way short of denial.
That is a very interesting question actually. I haven’t thought about that for a long time. I haven’t really read as much of Marx as we should have done. I have read quite a bit but not that much.
He did, however, later agree with the statement of his shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, that there was “a lot to learn” from Das Kapital, and praised Marx as “a great economist”. For many voters, this reinforced the image of Corbyn as a tired and outdated Wolfie Smith figure, but for many younger voters it gave him a defiant and counter-cultural edge, signifying an unwillingness to play the game of politics within the system they had come to despise.
Corbyn was not the only senior Labour figure to flirt with communism or at least grant it a generous hearing. To some surprise, he had promoted Diane Abbott, MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington and the UK’s first black female Member of Parliament, to the shadow cabinet when he had become leader in 2015, and she had spoken on international development (2015-16) and health (2016) before becoming shadow home secretary in October 2016. Although she had been on Ed Miliband’s front bench from 2010 to 2013, she had eventually been sacked for her tendency to say the wrong thing or veer dramatically off-message, a legacy of her beginnings as a radical left-winger when she entered Parliament. It was not so much the individual beliefs—opposition to the renewal of the nuclear deterrent, criticism of the UK’s relationship with Saudi Arabia, voting against the Treaty of Maastricht, proposing the extension of GB-only abortion laws to Northern Ireland—as their accumulated effect and the vehemence with which they were expressed.
Abbott, however, had form when it came to communism. In 2008, as a regular guest on the BBC’s This Week, presenter Andrew Neil had posed the reasonable question “Why is it right to wear a Maoist T-shirt, but obviously wrong, because it is, to wear a Hitler T-shirt?” This was not a trick question, and any one of a thousand answers would have put it to bed and allowed the show to move on. Abbott, however, presumably after a moment’s thought, had delivered a quite extraordinary response.
I suppose that some people would judge that on balance Mao did more good than harm; you can’t say that about the Nazis… He led his country from feudalism, he helped to defeat the Japanese, and he left his country on the verge of the great economic success they’re having now.
Obviously realising that she had raised eyebrows, she ended by saying “I was just putting the case for Mao.” It is difficult to imagine that sentence being delivered with the name “Hitler” substituted. And however much “good” Mao Zedong had achieved, it had come at an almost unimaginable cost. The Land Reform Movement of the earliest days of the People’s Republic had seen at least hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of China’s landlords killed or starved to death; the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries in 1950-53 had seen probably a million political opponents murdered; the anti-capitalist and anti-corruption purges of 1952 and 1953 had seen hundreds of thousands of “suicides”; the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957-59 had seen the persecution of at least half a million people, with penalties ranging from hard labour to execution; the Great Leap Forward (1958-62), Mao’s attempt to industrialise much of China’s agrarian economy, caused famines which killed anywhere between 15 and 55 million people; and the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76 was responsible for another death toll of between a few hundred thousand and 20 million. So Mao had the blood of something like 50 million people, perhaps many more, on his hands. Yet Abbott felt able to defend him and conclude that he had done more harm than good.
It was also true that there were several people surrounding Corbyn who had roots in the far left or out-and-out communism. His director of communications, former Guardian journalist Seumas Milne, had long been an apologist for communist crimes, not only claiming that the death tolls had been inflated but that they had been allowed to obscure the economic and social progress which communist states had allegedly achieved. This was not a youthful passion: in 2006, he had written an article in The Guardian which had argued:
For all its brutalities and failures, communism in the Soviet Union, eastern Europe and elsewhere delivered rapid industrialisation, mass education, job security and huge advances in social and gender equality. It encompassed genuine idealism and commitment… Its existence helped to drive up welfare standards in the west, boosted the anticolonial movement and provided a powerful counterweight to western global domination.
In an interview in 2012, he had spoken almost nostalgically of the former Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union, saying “there was a sense throughout the twentieth century that there were alternatives—socialist political alternatives”. And in 2015, in the foreword to Stasi State or Socialist Paradise?, a history of the German Democratic Republic, he had argued that the DDR had offered “social and women’s equality well ahead of its times, and greater freedom in the workplace than most employees enjoy in today’s Germany”. It is common to cherry-pick a few positive aspects of life under communism, especially in the DDR, but it is an open question whether these mitigate a totalitarian régime with closed borders and guards who would shoot to kill, no free press, a suffocating system of informants run by a brutal secret police, the imposition of what was effectively a one-party state with no real electoral freedom and a dismal economy supported by inefficient industry and poor customer choice.
Milne was not the only sympathiser around Corbyn. Andrew Drummond-Murray (he did not use the “Drummond”), an aristocratic, public school-educated Scotsman, had worked in Labour Party headquarters during the 2017 general election before being appointed as senior political adviser to Corbyn in 2018. First a journalist and then a trades union official, he had joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1976 and had become identified with the Straight Left faction, a loyally pro-Soviet group which opposed any reform of communism and supported the USSR’s suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968 and the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. He had met and befriended Seumas Milne while part of Straight Left, as well as writing for The Morning Star and had worked briefly (1986-87) for the Soviet news agency Novosti. When the CPGB was disbanded in 1991, he led a communist liaison group which merged into the Communist Party of Britain in 1995. Murray did not join the Labour Party until 2016.
Murray’s views were off-the-peg communism: an apologist for Stalin (Tom Watson, then deputy leader of the Labour Party, called him “an avowed Stalinist”), he credited the Soviet dictator with the defeat of Hitler and bringing “socialism” to a third of the world but admitted he had used “harsh measures imposed by a one-party regime”. In 2008, he praised the USSR for “the cultural, linguistic and educational development of each ethnic group, no matter how small or how historically marginalised”, which might have been a surprise for the Tatars of the Crimea, and accused David Miliband as foreign secretary of standing in favour of “the US empire”. In 2003, he reacted to what he saw as American intentions to bring about régime change in North Korea by reminding the Communist Party of Britain’s executive committee that “Our Party has already made its basic position of solidarity with Peoples’ Korea clear”.
In 2017, at the Cheltenham Literary Festival, Dame Stella Rimington, director-general of MI5 from 1992 to 1996, who had worked for the service in counter-subversion, mischievously noted the tenor of some of Corbyn’s advisers.
I now see in Momentum some of the people we were looking at in the Trotskyist organisation of the Eighties, now grown up and advising our would-be prime minister Mr Corbyn on how to prepare himself for power. Looking at it from the outside now, that’s quite an ironic turn of events.
She was too diplomatic to point fingers at specific individuals, but remarked wryly, “Certainly their names are familiar, shall we say that much?”
New communism, new audience?
There was, then, about five years ago, a strange coincidence of several factors which pushed discussion and perhaps reevaluation of communism to the fore. The unlikely election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party—unlikely because 10 minutes before nominations closed he still did not have enough supporters on his nomination form—destabilised everything by placing in the heart of UK politics a man who did not, arguably could not, play by the conventions of the system, had self-belief as dogged and unshakeable, in its own way, as Tony Blair’s, had been steeped in the left-wing nostrums of the 1970s and had never really revised them, and had not the first idea how to run a political party.
This gave Corbyn a degree of freedom, though in the long run it would also contribute to his downfall. Although he was 66 when elected leader, he was able to present himself as a new start, or different direction for Labour; in fact he almost shrugged off the “Labour” identity, focusing instead on groups like Momentum and the Stop the War Coalition, evidently much happier talking to a supportive crowd of demonstrators in Parliament Square than he ever was at the despatch box in the House of Commons (or upstairs on the Committee Corridor at meetings of the Parliamentary Labour Party). But his advisers made a major appeal to young voters and those who did not usually vote, hoping that Corbyn’s novelty would attract them to participate and boost Labour’s support. This was exemplified in 2017 when, a few weeks after a stronger than expected performance at the general election, Corbyn spoke from the Pyramid Stage at the Glastonbury Festival and the crowd chanted his name. Such was the power of that image of youthful support that the Oxford English Dictionary chose “youthquake” as its word of the year, though examination of the data indicates that in fact there was no surge in Labour support among young people. But sometimes legend is printed in preference to fact.
One obvious reason for the rise in popularity among the young of communism, or something calling itself by that name, is the passage of time and the de-linking of communism with the Cold War and the USSR. Those with memories of the 1980s—realistically, my lower end of Generation X and those above—associate communism with the repression and militarism of the Warsaw Pact states and China, while millennials and those below simply see it as another economic system. Given that many young people are now deeply sceptical of capitalism and globalism, despite ample evidence that it is the free market system of the post-war period which has increased prosperity and living standards around the world to a quite astonishing degree, it is easy to see the attractions of a system which promises equality but has no practical demonstrations of its efficacy (apart from those interpretations of communism, like China and Vietnam, which communists themselves dismiss as unrepresentative). It might work, it might work: and imagine what it would be like.
I have argued before that we are losing our intellectual curiosity, despite the ready availability of information which is unparalleled in human history. Similarly, our younger generations are becoming much more indifferent to what has happened in the past, a narcissistic attitude, I think, fuelled by an idea that nothing is as important or momentous as what they are experiencing. This ignorance of history means that arguments against communism on the grounds of its past failures—its blood-reeking reality—simply no longer have the traction they did. It set back the fragile economy of Ethiopia between 1976 and 1991? OK, Boomer! That was years ago. Where even is Ethiopia?
A useful stick to beat America
There is another element of communism, I think, which has chimed with a strand of modern thought, which is anti-Americanism. Communism has, of course, been the antagonist of the United States ever since the beginning of the Cold War in the mid-1940s, crystallised by Winston Churchill’s speech in Fulton, Missouri, in March 1946 in which coined the phrase the “iron curtain”. But it was, I would argue, the Vietnam War which changed everything. Vietnam was not only a war against communism, its explicit purpose being to defeat the incursions of the North Vietnamese into South Vietnam and stop the fall of what might be the first domino in the “domino theory”, first proposed by President Harry Truman in relation to Greece and Turkey in the late 1940s but popularised by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1954 in relation to the growth of communism in South East Asia.
It was also a war which dramatically forfeited general public support from around 1965 onwards, becoming a symbol of opposition to the government, to democratic norms, to the dominance of the “Greatest Generation” (to use Tom Brokaw’s phrase) who had lived through the Depression and fought in the Second World War, to the very structures of contemporary society. That year, 1965, saw the dramatic escalation of US involvement in Vietnam, including the extension of strategic bombing of North Vietnam and neighbouring Laos; a substantial increase in personnel drafted under the Selective Service Act of 1948; the abolition of the marriage deferment without warning in August; the self-immolation of 82-year-old Alice Herz on a street in Detroit in protest against the war; and in November the announcement that US troop numbers in South East Asia would rise from 120,000 to 400,000.
If the war had not already been lost by the end of 1965—and there were some who, mostly in private, thought that it had—it was unrecoverable in terms of public opinion. It coincided not only with the febrile atmosphere of protest and counter-protest in which President Lyndon Johnson, that most unlikely champion of equality and dignity, was attempting to build the Great Society, with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Immigration and Nationality Services Act of 1965 and, in time, the Civil Rights Act of 1968; it was also a time of unprecedented student activism, much of it overseen by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee which had emerged from the sit-in movement in 1960. Everyone seemed to be protesting, and Vietnam become one focus of dissent, a conflict which had no apparent course to victory yet into which the administration was pouring young men by the hundreds of thousands.
Under these circumstances, the principle of “my enemy’s enemy” popularised communist heroes as symbols of anti-Americanism, anti-imperialism and, by default, icons of progressive politics, equality and fairness. By 1967, the iconic image of Argentinian Marxist revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara, taken in 1960 by Cuban photographer Alberto Díaz Gutiérrez, better known as Korda, was being used as a universal totem of left-wing rebellion. Guevara’s popularity soared and he became more legend than man when he was executed in Bolivia in October that year. The first major figure to employ the icon of Guevara was his friend Fidel Castro, prime minister of Cuba, who himself was already well on his way to becoming an avatar of anti-Americanism. Sebastian Balfour, a biographer of Castro, described him as “a symbol of defiance against the continued economic and cultural imperialism of the United States”.
The same veneration, in some degree, would be accorded to other communist leaders: Hồ Chí Minh, the president of North Vietnam until his death in 1969; Mao Zedong, the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party until his death in 1976; the murdered Spartacist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, shot by right-wing Freikorps paramilitaries in 1919; and the man who had, in truth, started it all by being hustled by the Imperial German authorities from Zürich to Petrograd in February 1917. Their lives became unimportant. What mattered was their symbolism, their defiance of the established order, their revolutionary fervour.
Why do these long-dead Marxists matter? We live in an age in which opposition to the United States is substantial, if not universal. America’s military, diplomatic, economic, technological, commercial and cultural reach is so great that almost any ill can be ascribed to its influence. There was an outpouring of goodwill after the al-Qa’eda attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001, and even many countries in the Middle East, where American policy had supposedly been the motivation for the attack, expressed support. Even the US’s traditional foes and sponsors of terrorism, Iran and Libya, condemned the attacks.
(An exception was Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, where the Ba’athist régime’s official newspaper al-Iraq carried the headline “America Burns” and went on to say that “what happened in the United States yesterday is a lesson for all tyrants, oppressors and criminals”. A later statement from the government said “The American cowboys are reaping the fruit of their crimes against humanity. It is a black day in the history of America, which is tasting the bitter defeat of its crimes and disregard for people’s will to lead a free, decent life”.)
This solidarity, which is hard to remember now, was reflected in the invasion of Afghanistan. The US administration had rapidly identified al-Qa’eda as the culprits and Afghanistan as their safe haven, and President George Bush was adamant that the Taliban, at that point in charge in Kabul, had to assist the US. Addressing a joint session of Congress, he instructed them to:
Deliver to the United States authorities all the leaders of al-Qaeda who hide in your land… The Taliban must act, and act immediately. They will hand over the terrorists, or they will share in their fate.
The day after the terrorist attacks, the UN Security Council issued a resolution authorising the use of force against Afghanistan, and the following month, the North Atlantic Council agreed to invoke Article V of the Treaty of Washington, which provided for collective defence of NATO member states. It is the only time that Article V has been invoked, and that decision, combined with the UN Security Council demonstrate how extensive was sympathy for the US.
The invasion of Iraq in 2003 changed the global situation. Although I was in favour of the war, still think it was justifiable and believe the Left is unhealthily obsessed with its details 20 years on, I have to accept that a great many people were passionately opposed to the US intervention, and it damaged America’s reputation in the international community. The reasons for opposing the war were and remain many and varied, and here is not the place to rehearse them, but I do think one failure on the part of the Bush administration was the attempt to link the Iraqi régime with al-Qa’eda; Saddam’s Ba’athist government was determinedly secular and had hardly anything in common, apart from a hatred of the West, with Islamic religious extremism.
Some European countries were extremely critical of intervention. In Spain and Italy, polls suggested as much as 90 per cent of the population opposed military action, while in France and Germany, almost 70 per cent of people, polled in the months immediately after the collapse of the Iraqi régime, thought the war had not been justified. Disapproval grew more marked as it became clear that there would be a long and arduous task of pacification and reconstruction after the initial phase of military action. The UK remained more positive than other countries, perhaps because we were actively engaged in the conflict, and in Eastern Europe Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia had higher levels of support than their neighbours.
In the wider global community, the war in general and in particular the decision to press ahead with military action without the authority of a specific UN Security Council Resolution was deeply unpopular (though some, and I would stand with them, have argued that a specific resolution, while desirable, was not necessary). And there was condemnation from senior high-profile figures. The former South African president Nelson Mandela had already, before the invasion, described the US as “a threat to world peace”, and had singled out Vice-President Dick Cheney for particular condemnation as a “dinosaur”. Shortly after the outbreak of hostilities in March 2003, Pope John Paul II had commented that "violence “can never resolve the problems of man”. In 2004, the secretary-general of the UN, Kofi Annan, declared in an interview that “I have indicated it [the war] was not in conformity with the UN charter from our point of view, from the charter point of view, it was illegal”.
Two decades on from the invasion of Iraq, it is possible to overstate the unpopularity of the US. The data suggest that America still retains support and affection in many parts of the world, and is still a sought-after partner and ally. What the Iraq war did do was deepen the hostility of those who already disliked the US, and gave them an intellectually and politically respectable rationale for doing so. Moreover, it became another thread in the web of “offences” of which the US was guilty in the eyes of many Muslims, especially in the Middle East: America supported Israel, the hated Zionist state; military action in Afghanistan and Iraq were motivated by anti-Islamic sentiment; for Iran, America remained “the Great Satan”, with reasons stretching back to the CIA- and SIS-backed overthrow of the progressive prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, support for the oppressive government of the last Shah and intermittent trade embargoes and economic sanctions; and—this was a major grievance of Osama bin Laden’s—the presence of “infidel” US service personnel in Saudi Arabia, the home of two of Islam’s holiest sites, Mecca and Medina.
Opposition has not just developed in the Muslim world, however. In the UK, at least, the brief success of Jeremy Corbyn demonstrated the popularity and mileage of a very tired world view, dating from the 1970s if not earlier, which saw American imperialism as by default a baleful influence in world affairs, and, in a very binary and simplistic view, judged anyone who opposed America as being on the side of the angels. This made some on the Left accepting of unlikely allies: Corbyn has always been quick to emphasise the wrongs done to Iran by the West, equate human rights abuses with other such offences around the world, and was paid to appear on Press TV, an Iranian state-owned and state-approved broadcaster.
In the same way, the notion of communism as an anti-American movement is an easy and attractive way to indicate opposition to the US, Israel and imperialism. It also opens a back catalogue of American misdeeds which can still be deployed in a modern setting. Just as apologists for the Tehran government still frequently make play of the 1953 coup, and the unfair treatment of Iran in terms of oil rights, so those with communist sympathies can point to covert and direct economic action against Cuba, involvement in the overthrow of the Allende government in Chile in 1973, action against a range of of governments in Central America, support for the suppression of communism in Indonesia under President Sukarno, at the cost of perhaps a million lives, and, of course, the unhealing wound on the American psyche of the Vietnam War.
One last issue I want to touch upon briefly, of which I am reminded by the opening of a production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible at the Gielgud Theatre (which I previewed for CulturAll). The “Red Scare” of the late 1940s and 1950s, when American politicians seemed obsessed by the idea of communist subversion, is now seen as a classic example of political hysteria and persecution, fired by the activities of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). Miller, of course, wrote his play about the witch hunts in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692-93 as an allegory of the search for communists and the blacklisting of many leading showbusiness figures. Undoubtedly the movement was marked by paranoia, and McCarthy himself is now a discredited figure; indeed, he was discredited in his own time, censured by the Senate in 1954 , and he died in 1957 after a steep decline into alcoholism. Many innocent people were smeared and professionally ruined by the Red Scare, and it remains an inglorious period in US politics. It is, therefore, a useful cudgel for the Left, and particularly for communists, to take up if America is felt to need a beating.
All of that said, it is often overlooked now that there was substantial communism penetration of many walks of life, not only in America but elsewhere in the West. In the UK, of course, we had the Cambridge Spy Ring, five well-placed Soviet agents in the political and diplomatic establishment who passed secrets to the USSR from the 1930s until the 1950s. The spies were not junior functionaries: Donald Maclean was head of the American Department at the Foreign Office; Guy Burgess was second secretary at the British Embassy in Washington; Kim Philby was SIS head of station in Washington; John Cairncross was a middle-ranking Treasury official who had worked at the Foreign Office and at the code-breaking station at Bletchley Park (and his brother, Sir Alec, would be head of the Government Economic Service from 1964 to 1969); and Sir Anthony Blunt, after serving with MI5, became Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures and director of the Courtauld Institute of Art.
In the US, the “reds under the bed” were not all fictitious. In 1948, Alger Hiss, a former State Department official, was accused os spying for the Soviets during the 1930s; he appeared before HUAC and, although the statute of limitations on espionage had expired, and he maintained his innocence until his death in 1996, there is substantial evidence that he was indeed guilty. In 1951, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted of espionage on behalf of the USSR, having supplied classified information on radar, sonar, jet engines and nuclear weapons; they were executed in 1953. From 1959 to 1989, the Communist Party of America received substantial funding from the USSR and was a centre for both espionage and disinformation such as Operation INFEKTION, a KGB measure to spread the idea that HIV/AIDS had been developed by the US government as part of a biological weapons research project at Fort Detrick, Maryland.
While there was initial hysteria, therefore, it is quite clear that there was extensive espionage undertaken in America by the Soviet state, and that the Communist Party of America was intimately involved in it. So modern-day communists should not be allowed to run away with the idea that the US, or any other Western power, was unhealthily or falsely obsessed with communist infiltration and subversion. It was happening, and it was serious.
Is a revived quasi-communist movement a genuine force in modern politics? At the moment, it is hard to reach a firm conclusion. Certainly the ideology, or some understanding of it, has been revived; it is increasingly free of the associations with repressive dictatorship that it wholly deserves; it is being reimagined as a way to personal freedom from work and responsibility; and it has an appeal to those disenchanted with capitalism and free-market economics; and it can draw on a history of revolution, opposition to established norms and institutions and an antithesis to so-called American imperialism which finds receptive audiences in a number of political and ideological constituencies around the world.
The task of rehabilitation is by no means complete. There are no senior UK politicians who would declare their adherence to communism, though a recent leader of the opposition has spoken warmly and with interest of Marxism. But we have reached the stage where an activist can say “I’m literally a communist” on national television and become a viral sensation rather than being treated as a pariah or a laughing stock. It might still only be a “red perturbation” rather than a full-on scare, but it has come a long way in just a few years, and there is no reason to assume it cannot or will not make further progress. Those who regard it as a failed and baleful ideology should be on guard.
Thank you for sharing for free an essay which could have amply filled three or four posts, or even serve as the basis for a book.
Ms Abbott's defence of Mao is extraordinary, essentially: yes, there was collateral damage, but they won their war and now enjoy economic might. The only difference I can see between Mao so described and Hitler is that the latter lost. Had he won, the parallel argument would run something like, "well, he killed millions of Jews, but at least now everyone has a free Volkswagen."
Of course, had Hitler won, Diane Abbott would not be the one in position to make that argument; but then, there are quite a lot of ethnic minority (i.e. non-Han) Chinese equally unable to make their case, on account of suffering from a slight case of death.
The modern Left, or at least the McMarxist luxury cuckoos who have usurped the old Left's nest, has few qualms about collateral damage for the achievement of their aims. Their utter indifference to unborn children, right up to the moment of birth (q.v. Scotland's First Minister), is indicative of a wider indifference to human life as a whole. "Never kiss a Tory" is, I fear, a euphemism for "kill a Tory." The Rainbow allies are certainly not averse to death threats against their foes. Closing bank accounts, getting people fired and indoctrinating children behind their parents' backs are only the first seeds of the revolution, and mercy is not a revolutionary sentiment.
The trouble with the rehabilitation of Communism is that sauce for the goose is good for the gander. Until recently, it has been whispered only in the shadows of the internet's nastier corners, but the riposte is sure to come more and more to light: that just as there's never been any "real Communism," there's never been any "real Fascism," and now is the moment to give it another chance.
God help us.