Tim Newark
supposed superpower status. The Russians and their Soviet dominions were bankrupt after years of economic mismanagement and yet Corbyn still thinks socialism is a good model for us.
This is not that long ago. We’re talking less than 30 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union but Thornberry and her Islington mates want to laugh it off as though it is some quaint period of history not worth referring to. But until the mid1980s, political opponents were still sent to gulag-style prison camps in the Soviet Union.
When Soviet ally Fidel Castro died in 2016, Corbyn praised the Cuban dictator as “an internationalist and a champion of social justice”. Former London mayor Ken Livingstone called Communist Cuba a “beacon of light” in the Caribbean. And yet hundreds of political opponents of Castro during the 1980s were imprisoned, tortured and executed. Between 1959 and 1993 some 1.2 million Cubans – a 10th of the population – fled their supposedly wonderful island.
Corbyn’s acclaim for socialist Venezuela continues despite widespread human rights abuses and economic collapse. Hypersensitive to any supposed crimes of the capitalist West, he always has had a deaf ear to the suffering of those
FOR years Richard Gott was a senior writer and foreign correspondent for The Guardian newspaper until he was exposed in 1994 as a long-time KGB agent, accepting “red gold” from Russian spies for 30 years during the height of the Cold War but keen to laugh off the seriousness of his betrayal as “an enjoyable joke”.
The full extent of Soviet Communist crimes has never fully been appreciated in this country. Even back in 1933, the playwright George Bernard Shaw declared himself an enthusiastic fan of the USSR, saying: “We desire to record that we saw nowhere evidence of such economic slavery, privation, unemployment and cynical despair… Everywhere we saw [a] hopeful and enthusiastic working-class.” At that time between six and seven million people were dying from starvation in Ukraine thanks to Stalin’s enforced collectivisation.
And so this ignorance continues today, thanks to the reluctance of Left-wing academics and teachers to fully highlight the wrongs of Communist Russia and its allies, preferring to focus on Nazi Germany.
But what this latest revelation serves to underline is that Corbyn and his fellow Marxist Labour politicians are unapologetic Cold War dinosaurs who do not deserve to get anywhere close to power.
Their Momentum henchmen and women have all the ruthless fanaticism of old-style Soviet commissars and ordinary Labour party members should unite to throw them out. This nation cannot afford to relearn the dreadful lessons of the Cold War era.
‘These unapologetic Cold War dinosaurs’