Potentially Prey

Peter Hitchens reiterates his opposition to Trident, although he still cannot bring himself to say that it is this or nothing, as it obviously is.

Moreover, his Trotskyist-rooted Cold War hawkishness is once again in evidence, despite everything that has now been known conclusively for more than 20 years, and which the Old Right on both sides of the Atlantic always said, about the true situation during that period.

Yes, those things looked real. But they weren't. That is just a fact. A long-established fact. In continuing to perpetuate these proven falsehoods, Hitchens is giving aid and succour to the Russia-hating partisans of Trident.

Trotskyism, as much as the belligerent New Right, lost its defining enemy when the Soviet Union collapsed exactly as and when clearer heads had always predicted that it would.

A section of Trotskyism, and most of the New Right, have since latched on to almost any alternative. Although they have always come back to Russia eventually. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the persecution of many of their ancestors by the Tsars is what really lies behind all of this.

And since America appeared to have won the apparent Cold War, that section of Trotskyism has joined the New Right in treating it in the way that the Soviet Union used to be treated by much, though not all, of European and, especially, American Communism.

Although there are others, Hitchens has been a notable exception to all of this. Yet he remains potentially prey to it, since, based on nothing more than his own anecdotal experience, he remains convinced that Thatcher and the Trots were right about the USSR at the time.

But they weren't. They simply weren't.