Hate America, and you hate all the world

Sarah Cundy has been a bit of a silly girl. She’s the chairman of the Canterbury branch of the grassroots far-left movement Momentum who tweeted that she stood in “solidarity” with the North Korean regime and incorrectly blamed America for the 1950 Korean War. Miss Cundy’s remarks were asinine and historically illiterate. Even Momentum distanced itself from them. She asks us to excuse her on the basis that she is only 18, which is fair enough in one sense. She belongs, after all, to a generation which does not remember the Cold War and a world divided by the Iron Curtain. But this also means that a great many young people ignore the supposedly minor historical detail that everywhere socialism has been tested it has been a monumental failure. It spawned backward impoverished police states in Cuba, Venezuela and Romania and provoked genocidal mania and famine in the Soviet Union, Cambodia and Ethiopia. In his 1999 work The Black Book of Communism, French historian Stephane Courtois inventories how acts perpetrated in the name of creating paradise on earth meant that more than 100 million people were systematically murdered or starved to death over the course of the 20th century. So what is it that whips so many apparently intelligent people – Miss Cundy is a Simon Langton grammar school girl – into a religious fervour for socialism? The answer is hatred of America. In 2003 French journalist Jean-francois Revel wrote in his book, AntiAmericanism: “The principal function of anti-americanism has always been, and still is, to discredit liberalism by discrediting its supreme incarnation.” In other words, what the rabid left hates most is the thumping success of nations whose commitment to freedom and democracy entails a rejection of socialism, a system whose primary achievements Boris Yeltsin observed in 1992 had been to “spread everywhere social strife and animosity and unparalleled brutality, [and] instil fear in humanity”. For more than a century-and-ahalf the adherents of socialism preached that their system promised abundance and prosperity. But following the demolition of the Berlin Wall and the death of Soviet communism, leftwing intellectuals redefined abundance and prosperity as sins of consumerism since they are the fruits of free market economies operating in open and pluralistic societies. Socialism, we are told, must only be judged on what it promises, not on what it delivers. The USA, on the other hand, is the most astonishing success story in history. If you hate America and Americans, then quite simply you hate the world and its people.