Anti-Totalitarianism

Blair? He has just died, hasn't he? Or was that the other one? Whereas Ed Miliband is very much alive and 15 points ahead.

On page 30 of Anti-Totalitarianism: The Left-Wing Case for a Neoconservative Foreign Policy, Blair's Cheerleader-in-Chief, Oliver Kamm, calls Ramsay MacDonald, "an underrated Prime Minister whose name even now is reviled within the Labour Party." Well, quite.

And what for a few more minutes remains this week's edition of the Church Times has come across my desk. In it, Giles Udy tells the story of the last time that Holy Trinity, Brompton was famous. Namely, when its Vicar, Alfred Gough, led the global campaign against the Soviet persecution of the kulaks and of religious believers.

Although Udy does not go into it, there was always plenty of anti-Soviet feeling within the Labour Party, and the ILP, dismissed in a single derisory and derisive reference by Kamm, was so much of that mind that the CPGB in fact originated as a secession from it.

Whereas the parent-body effectively became the international heart and mind of the "Right Opposition", although even then it remained open to everything from Temperance Methodism to Burkean Toryism to Catholic Social Teaching in ways unimaginable in POUM or around Marceau Pivert, for example.

That said, the thing about us London Bureau types and Two-and-a-Halfers is that we take each other as we find each other in order to influence each other as best we can. That meant the ICO in its many manifestations taking the ILP as it found it, complete with Temperance Methodists, Social Catholics, Burkean lovers of the organic Constitution and of the organic countryside, the lot.

Indeed, you could make a very good case that the ICO ended up where Fenner Brockway and the ILP were, not the other way round. The ones who did not were in Alsace and in the Sudetenland. If you do not know, then you can guess.

But MacDonald, to the "anti-totalitarian" Kamm "an underrated Prime Minister whose name even now is reviled within the Labour Party" as if that revilement were unjust or unjustified, banned Forces Chaplains from participating in prayers for the victims of the USSR.

MacDonald furiously decried the then Archbishop of Canterbury for interfering in foreign policy when he joined such calls to prayer. And he refused to ban imports of timber from the slave labour prison camps that had been set up for the kulaks and the religious believers in the Russian North West, denying outright that such places existed.

Shades of Thatcher and South Africa.

Shades of Blair and his present lucrative activities in and on behalf of the despotic states of Central Asia, parts of the former Soviet Union. An overrated Prime Minister whose name even now is reviled within the Labour Party. Although still nowhere near as much as it ought to be.

The same goes for the defender both of him and of the Soviet slave-driving MacDonald. The man who denies that Syrian Christians are being torn apart by dogs at the hands of his favoured side there, but who clearly believes that they ought to be. Very much like Holocaust-deniers. Or the deniers, and they still exist, of the crimes against the kulaks and the religious believers.

The man lately lauding Thatcher specifically for her foreign policy. A policy pursued from Santiago to Pretoria, and in no sense anti-Communist so long as the Communists in question were anti-Soviet, from Mugabe, to Ceaușescu, to the Khmer Rouge whom she deployed the SAS to train. All "right and brave," according to that man's blog for The Times. "On foreign policy, she was a world-class statesman."

That man is the "anti-totalitarian" Oliver Kamm.