The aged Cold War Trotskyists on The Guardian and elsewhere are continuing the work of Denis MacShane against Conservative Friends of Russia, the treatment of which within its own party illustrates the almost complete disappearance of any conservative or Tory sensibility as surely as does the support for the global money markets, for Rupert Murdoch, for the neoconservative war agenda from Bosnia and Kosovo to Syria and Iran via Afghanistan and Iraq, and for the destruction of the most ancient Christian communities in the world and of a civilisation as old as England by extremely recent immigrants who venerate exceptionally vicious anti-British terrorists active within living memory.
My friend Carl Thomson and others need to move beyond such a petty party, even if they, personally, might retain membership of it. They must reach out to everyone who celebrates the fact that Russia is now emerging from the gangster capitalism that has followed
Communism, and she once again recognises herself as pre-eminent among the
Slavs in their mission as the age-old gatekeepers of our
Biblical-Classical civilisation, whether against Islam, against Far
Eastern domination, or now also against the godless, rootless,
stupefied, promiscuous, usury-based, metrosexual, war-hungry pseudo-West
that holds up Israel, Georgia and Taiwan as supposedly plucky and
inspiring outposts.
Attempts to drag Russia into the pseudo-West were not only always doomed, although guaranteed to cause immense pain in being proved so, but they also failed to take account of the seeds of hope even within the Soviet system as such, notably the strong patriotism, and the very traditional system of education, in which teachers who were universally assumed to know more than their pupils stood in front of orderly rows of uniformed young charges and simply imparted their knowledge, with the result that, once the veneer of Marxist vocabulary was stripped away, that system’s products were often significantly better-educated than many of their Western contemporaries.
A strong patriotism, a very traditional system of education, and in consequence a far better-educated and more cultured population, with access to even very high cultural life guaranteed by the State: again, these are potentially cross-party causes in which those of a conservative and Tory sensibility ought to be in the vanguard. But are there any of that sensibility left?
Attempts to drag Russia into the pseudo-West were not only always doomed, although guaranteed to cause immense pain in being proved so, but they also failed to take account of the seeds of hope even within the Soviet system as such, notably the strong patriotism, and the very traditional system of education, in which teachers who were universally assumed to know more than their pupils stood in front of orderly rows of uniformed young charges and simply imparted their knowledge, with the result that, once the veneer of Marxist vocabulary was stripped away, that system’s products were often significantly better-educated than many of their Western contemporaries.
A strong patriotism, a very traditional system of education, and in consequence a far better-educated and more cultured population, with access to even very high cultural life guaranteed by the State: again, these are potentially cross-party causes in which those of a conservative and Tory sensibility ought to be in the vanguard. But are there any of that sensibility left?
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