Almost anyone who makes it to 90 will have outlived his own world.
The splits between Trotskyists and what were once Stalinists, plus their respective fellow-travellers and spheres of influence, had seemed to be long gone, and in fact irrelevant to anyone below a fairly high age.
The anti-war movement since 2001 and the anti-austerity movement since 2008 had seemed to have dispensed with all of that.
The anti-war movement since 2001 and the anti-austerity movement since 2008 had seemed to have dispensed with all of that.
But then Fidel Castro went and died.
And it all came out again.
But this time, on Facebook and Twitter.
Trotskyist influenced American policy towards the Cuban Revolution drove Cuba into the arms of the USSR, yet that occasional student Trot from the olden days, Peter Hitchens, still believes in it after all these years. He dines out on being "a veteran of the left" but he was briefly a hanger on of a fringe faction a long time ago, nothing more than that.
ReplyDeleteA lot of that generation will tell you that they were veterans of the Left because they voted Labour in 1970, and in 1966 if they were old enough (which he wasn't). But that's it, pretty much. The first time that they ever voted, they voted for one lot of Keynesian Cold Warriors rather than the other.
DeleteWhether Hitchens even did that, I don't know. What the IS was instructing its people to do, I have no idea. That it was telling them to vote for Harold Wilson is comically believable, but I honestly don't know.
His refusal to admit who brought down apartheid is because he was a Trot. He can't give the Tankies the credit.
DeleteThe idea that they were waiting for Britain and America to give them some kind of green light because the Soviet Union had collapsed is side-splittingly funny.
DeleteThe anti-apartheid movement was particularly strong in Britain, which was in many ways its global centre. But that was no thanks to British Governments of either party.