The hard left have shown their true colours following Gorbachev's death
The reaction of the hard left to the passing of former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has once again underlined the poor nature of the hard left, but also the silent tolerance of such behaviour in the media, writes Paul Horgan.
One thing about which we can be quite certain is that, sooner or later, Jeremy Corbyn is going to die.
When Corbyn dies – almost certainly of natural causes – there will be such a marking of his life that will eclipse that of the passing of Tony Benn, whose death was occasioned by what was effectively an unofficial state funeral. What will not happen on Corbyn's death is an outpouring of glee from his political opponents. Any celebration of a negative event concerning Corbyn has already taken place following him leading to the Labour Party's worst defeat in nine decades.
It is in this context that certain elements of the hard left in British politics, such as the Young Communist League, showing how glad they are that the elderly Mikhail Gorbachev has now died of natural causes, should be viewed. Everyone dies, and most people do so at an advanced age when their body simply stops working properly in one way or another. Death is an inevitable consequence of human life. Celebrating that someone of advanced age has breathed their last is utterly tasteless, but is also typical of the hard left in the UK.
This is not the first time that such celebrations by the hard left of an elderly person dying of natural causes have taken place. When Margaret Thatcher died in 2013, the hard left in this country saw the evidence of her mortality as something akin to a political victory, as if somehow their ideology had been vindicated. An elderly women has died – next stop, Downing Street, comrades! The tastelessness extended to thousands of people filling the coffers of a couple of large music corporations by purchasing streams of a certain song from The Wizard of Oz that lasted less than a minute.
The worst part of this was how in the weekend following Margaret Thatcher's death every single summary on BBC News 24 had the newsreader mentioning the title of the song when they reporting on how well it was selling. It is reasonable to believe that it is only the BBC's traditional anti-conservative bias that made online sales of a music track worthy of headlines outside of the usual speculation over the Christmas number 1. Successful releases of tracks by Beyoncé or Taylor Swift are never worthy of mention by newsreaders in the same way.
This once again demonstrates the true colours of hard left politics and also the consequent behaviour of socialism's useful idiots. The conduct of the hard left towards British Jews is merely one aspect of its poisonous political culture whereby any form of evil expression or action is always self-justified in advancing the establishment of an irreversible socialist one-party state.
The behaviour of the hard left is largely silently tolerated in mainstream politics. The Labour Party's open-ended left wing is a feature not seen in any other mainstream British party and this open-endedness has cost Labour victory in numerous general elections, not least Labour's 2019 landslide defeat. Even The Guardian has its moments, as when the newspaper sought to trivialise David Cameron's loss of his son Ivan because of the former Prime Minister's wealth. It was only when this opinion article was posted online and attracted adverse comment that it was hastily deleted. Its Soviet-like excuse was that this editorial comment had not actually been through a proper editorial process.
The complaint of the hard left against Gorbachev is that he oversaw the collapse of the USSR, which was once the hard left's bright hope to help overthrow capitalism in the West. However this overthrow could only come through force of arms by direct or proxy conflict, and not by diplomacy or trade. By the 1980s, the USSR was a pariah state and a quite poor example to the wider world as a model of governance.
Populations of countries were mostly unenthusiastic that Soviet-style socialism would solve their problems. The mistakes and disasters of communism were clear for all to see, despite the censorship and misdirection. It is likely that no other leader would have saved the USSR, succeeding where Gorbachev failed. The economic damage was already too severe. A hardliner would have tried to ramp up the military budget to in a failed attempt to compete with the USA, while presiding over a societal collapse that even the KGB could not hold back.
The last line of defence for the hard left in the UK about the Soviet Union is to state that the USSR wasn't actually socialist but was instead state capitalist. As such, it cannot be associated with them despite the similarities of policy with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. This is an old argument, first postulated in the late 1940s by leftists who wanted to distance themselves from Stalin. But if this is the case, it makes no sense for the same hard left who now deny that the USSR was socialist to be so disgusting by gloating over its last-ever leader dying of natural causes.
All this demonstrates how left-wing ideology causes its practitioners to be not only appalling, but inconsistent as well. The hard left have sided with Moscow over the Ukrainian war. When the Stop The War Coalition held a demonstration against the Russian invasion, they started outside the premises of the Ministry of Defence, rather than the Russian embassy. This is despite the fact that modern Russia is anything but socialist, but is arguably the most anti-USA state in the world. Or perhaps the second-most, after Iran, whose religious repression, such as with the execution of homosexuals, is not seen by the hard left as a reason to condemn the Islamic Republic.
The hard left will not go away or admit they are wrong. Whether celebrating Gorbachev's death, opposing Western support for Ukraine against Putin, ignoring the excesses of Iran towards its minorities, the hard left's contrarian nature remains deplorable. What is concerning is how too few people in the media point this out.
