Following allegations by former Czech agent Ján Sarkocy that during the 1980s he met Jeremy Corbyn several times, the Telegraph declares that the ‘horrors of communism must not be forgotten’ (Comment, February 17).
At the Winter Olympics, the world’s press is fawning over Kim Jong-un’s sister and her amazing bone structure, but the victims of the world’s most savage and repressive Communist regime – not to mention the nuclear arsenal with which the North Korean leader is endeavouring to achieve regional power – are apparently forgotten.
Communists are fond of repeating the claim that religion has been responsible for all the wars in history, but their own religion, atheistic Communism, which only belatedly came on the scene, claimed an estimated 150million victims in the 20th century.
None of this, however, fazes the genuine Communist, who argues that such collateral damage is the fault of foreign capitalistic opposition, and that various ‘socialist’ regimes failed not because they suffered from too much socialism, but because they did not get enough of it.
From the 1950s to the 1980s it was impossible to ignore the horrors of Communism. As the Telegraph said: ‘Most of the Left denounced communism and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with NATO against it.’ Now, however, it is back to business as usual.
Mr Corbyn, John McDonnell and their shock troops, Momentum – who regard Mr Corbyn as their own ‘beloved leader’ – dismiss Kim Jong-un as a harmless eccentric who would be transformed into an advocate of peace if only they held the reins of power. They believe that Venezuela and Cuba suffered from a bad press and the opposition of the rest of the world, terrified by the idea that socialism would be seen to be working; and that the 1970s dictatorship of militant trades unionism was actually a principled blackmail.
It could be that Mr Corbyn is a genuine socialist who really believes all this. But it is debatable whether a politically naive far-Left Prime Minister is more dangerous than a politician posing as one just to gain the votes of the young. He might not have had much to tell an Iron Curtain ‘diplomat’, but his Communist handler evidently thought it worthwhile to establish a friendly relationship with someone who might at some stage achieve real power. And as a Marxist internationalist who saw it as his patriotic duty to criticise his own country – a ‘friend of every country but his own’ – Mr Corbyn would be seen as a valuable source of information on all the strengths of democracy, seen by its enemies as weaknesses: political pluralism and free speech, with the potential of constant criticism to undermine confidence in its institutions, including democracy.
Mr Corbyn, in common with the far Left, has a dangerous weakness for power, evinced in his fondness for violent protests and terrorist groups, and penchant for setting various minority groups against each other and against the majority.
While the idea of Communism as a workable system may be dead, its ghost is proving far more difficult to kill. Now that is no longer seen as a threat, and all warnings against its resurgence are treated by the BBC and the progressive Left as evidence of paranoid delusion, it is more dangerous than ever.
