The Fellow Travellers: "Liberals" Supporting Dictators

[Kilbarry1]

I'm a 'liberal' by many criteria and I dont believe in supporting anyone who kills or oppresses the innocent, whether its the North Koreans, The US, Venezuala, the Chinese, Russia, the Iranians or the UK. You kill and oppress the innocent, you are a criminal and as such not deserving of anything but scorn and opposition (and justice if that was ever possible)

There is very little point in saying. "I am against evil" and then pointing out (correctly) that no one is squeaky clean. It should be possible to support a democracy against a dictatorship, or a democracy against terrorists without asserting that the former is a paragon of virtue. In some cases it will be necessary to support a less murderous dictator against one who is worse. In the Second World War, the western democracies had to ally themselves with Stalin against Hitler because, although they were equally vile, Hitler was the most dangerous at the time.

It is sometimes said that the most basic kind of morality is "intelligent self-interest". Most ordinary people can understand that. It takes intellectuals like O'Casey and Shaw to denounce the alleged evils of their own societies and to abase themselves before hostile, foreign dictatorships. In Iran the leaders of the Communist Party (the Tudeh) choose to ally themselves with the Ayatollah against the Shah and ended up on the gallows. If their Stalinist dreams had come true, O'Casey and Shaw would probably have come to a similar end. The same applies to the western supporters of Islamic terrorists.

[Kilbarry1]

Me Quoting Myself: "Nowadays in the UK, it is possible for some politicians like George Galloway, to get electoral support by cuddling up to hostile foreign dictators or terrorists. The rot has gone very deep."

I got the following story from Michael Ezra on the Harry's Place Blog in the UK. It illustrates the above point.

The Workers Hammer is the monthly paper of the Trotskyite group Spartacist League. The February 1986 issue of Workers Hammer contained a song, written by one of their comrades, entitled “The Workers Power song.” Workers Power is a RIVAL Trotskyite group. One of the issues they disagreed on was the support given by many leftists - and the Iranian Communist Party to the Ayatollah Khomeini in his struggle to overthrow the Shah of Iran.

These are the first lines of the song :

The Workers Power Song

The Shah was a man
Who ruled in Iran
And we really thought
He really ought to go.
Well, the Ayatollah K,
Had a lot of things to say,
He used to live there,
So he ought to know.
He won’t go very far
But he’s better than the Shah,
So even though he’s quaint,
We really have to say:
He could be a lot better,
He’s not a Trot to the letter,
But he’s out there,
And he’s showing us the way.
He’s leading a mass movement,
Which could do with some improvement,
But it really isn’t up to us to say.
Cos he’s on the front line,
And we’re running out of time,
So we’ll support him anyway.

Supporting the Ayatollah Khomeini was not really wise for leftists, for as the Workers Hammer noted a few years later (December 1988/January 1989):

Reports coming out of Iran point to a mammoth new wave of executions of leftist political prisoners now taking place in Khomeini’s jails. Already, an estimated 1000 to 5000 have been hanged or lined up before the firing squads of the Islamic dictatorship and dumped in mass graves. In some provincial cities, the entire prison population has reportedly been massacred. Virtually every political leader of Iran’s pro-Moscow Tudeh Party has been executed, and supporters of the People’s Mujahedin, the Revolutionary Workers Organisation of Iran (Rahe Kargar), Iranian People’s Fedayeen (Majority) and the Fedayeen Minority are said to have been killed in the thousands.

And yet you will still find plenty of left-wingers who support Hamas and hail its "liberation struggle" against Israel. These are the successors of Stalinist booklickers like O'Casey and Shaw and obviously they will never learn.

"Harry's Place" was out of action for a while. The following is the link to Michael Ezrs'a article:
Harry's Place From the Vaults: Workers Hammer, February 1986

[Kilbarry1]

In post no 61, I quoted Sean O'Casey's interview in "Picture Post" on 11 November 1939 in which he invited the British Government to make peace with Hitler as Stalin had so wisely done (Nazi-Soviet Pact August 1939).

Shaw had a similar - but very much longer - letter in the New Statesman on 7 October 1939 entitled "Uncommon Sense About the War". Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be available on the Internet and it will take me forever to transcribe it. In the meantime here is a flavour of the great liberal's Stalinism - from a recent article in the American Thinker magazine
American Thinker: Nazis And Commies

"This tradition of ignoring Soviet brutality goes back to George Bernard Shaw and 20 other writers and artists who visited the USSR in the particularly murderous 1930s, causing Shaw to write a letter to a British newspaper:

We the undersigned are recent visitors to the USSR. Some of us traveled throughout the greater part of its civilized territory. We desire to record that we saw nowhere evidence of such economic slavery, privation, unemployment and cynical despair of betterment as are accepted as inevitable and ignored by the press as having "no news value" in our own countries. Everywhere we saw the hopeful and enthusiastic working-class, self-respecting and free up to the limits imposed on them by nature and a terrible inheritance from tyranny and incompetence of their former rulers, developing public works, increasing health services, extending education, achieving the economic independence of woman and the security of the child - and in spite of many grievous difficulties and mistakes, which social experiments involve at first (and which they have never concealed nor denied) setting an example of industry and conduct which would greatly enrich us if our systems supplied our workers with any incentive to follow it."

John Charles McQuaid was consecrated Archbishop of Dublin in 1940 - also during the period of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. If, in the course of his life, he had uttered a single sentence in favour of the Nazis, we would be hearing about it still. However O'Casey and Shaw have (literally) got away with murder. And it is probably their anti-clericalism that makes them exempt from the criticism of their modern day counterparts.

[CiaranMc]

In post no 61, I quoted Sean O'Casey's interview

Hello Kilbarry1. In light of your concerted efforts on dozens of websites to deny that any children were ever abused by members of the Catholic church in Ireland - that it's all lies and media propaganda - may I ask you yet again: why are you a former De La Salle brother? What happened to make you leave your order?

Thanking you.

[Kilbarry1]

This is about half of Shaw's letter. However I think it contains all the juicy bits - and I high-lighted those:

UNCOMMON SENSE ABOUT THE WAR
BY BERNARD SHAW
New Statesman and Nation, 7 October 1939

The war in Poland is over. Every person in the country capable of seeing three moves ahead in the game of military chess has known this from the time the first Russian soldier stepped across the Polish frontier. Poland surrendered and laid herself at Herr Hitler’s feet. He was able to say that as Poland’s cause is lost we have no further excuse for continuing the war. Whereupon we threw off the mask of knight erranty and avowed flatly that we did not care two hoots about Poland and were out, on our old balance of power lines, to disable Germany, which we now called abolishing Hitlerism.

This left the Fuhrer in a very dangerous position. The Axis had broken in his hands from the very beginning, Italy and Spain having promptly deserted him. The anti-Comintern Pact had become a danger to him. Turkey was definitely against him: Rumania and the Balkans generally were mortally afraid of him. American neutrality was pro-British just as our non-intervention policy in the Spanish war was pro-Franco. 1918 had proved that Germany although unconquerable and even victorious here and there on the field could be starved into complete demoralisation and defeat by the Allies. The situation was not pleasant even for a leader drunk with success. The encirclement was fairly complete.

Except on one side, where Russia stood with an army of six million men eating their heads off. Those of us who were intelligent and knowedgeable enough to see that the balance of power was in the hands of Stalin had forced our Government to make overtures to Russia and Mr. Duff Cooper, a very favourable specimen of our reighning oligarchy, loosened his old school tie so far as to plead in the Evening Standard that Stalin, though of course a blood-thirsty scoundrel, was perhaps not quite so villanous as Hitler. Herr Hitler, having the tremendous advantage over Mr. Duff Cooper of being a proletarian and knowing something about the world he was living in, courted Russia more sensibly.

Stalin, five hundred per cent or so abler and quicker at the uptake than all of the dictators, including the Westminster Cabinet rolled into one, had nothing to consider except which of them he should take by the scruff of the neck. Before deciding, he sent a handful of his six millions to take possession of White Russia, the Ukraine and a substantial bit of Poland. Herr Hitler at once capitulated unconditionally and was duly taked by the scruff of the neck; for Stalin could use Herr Hitler to keep Duff Cooperism out of the rest of Poland. He informed us in effect that since we could not even be civil to Russia, we should not make Poland a gun emplacement for the obvious ultimate aim of our rulers (as far as they are capable of aims) of restoring the Romanoff Tsardom and once more dining happily with the Benkendorffs in Chester Square. And so the diplomatic situation stands. Nothing has happened except that the French, whether after consultation with us or not, I do not know, have most inopportunely started perecuting their communists……..

What in the devil’s name is it all about now that we have let Poland go?

Mr. Chamberlain in a reply states our aim in a peroration. Mr. Winston Churchill echoes it in a broadcast with a certain sense of its absurdity which the microphone betrays. Our aim is first to deliver Europe from the threat and fear of war. And our remedy is to promise it three years more war! Next to abolish Hitlerism root and branch. Well what about beginning by abolishing Churchillism, a proposition not less nonsensical and more easily within our reach? ……..

The Archbishop of York, in the next broadcast, rose finally to the occasion as became a great Christian prelate. Unfortunately he began not as a Christian prelate but as a righteously angry hotheaded Englishman by giving his blessing to our troops as “dedicated” to the supreme immediate duty of lynching Herr Hitler and his associates. Now I cannot go into the question of whether Herr Hitler deserves to be lynched without raising awkward analogies about his case and those of Signor Mussolini, General Franco, Stalin and his associates, and raking up events in India and in Ireland which unfriendly pens have represented as somwhat dictatorial on our part ……

No: it will not do, however thickly we buttter it about bunk and balderdash about Liberty, Democracy and everything we have just abolished at home. As the Archbishop nobly confesses, we made all the mischief, we and the French when we were drunk with victory at Versailles; and if that mischief had not been there for him to undo, Adolf Hitler would have now been a struggling artist of no political account. He actually owes his eminence to us; so let us now cease railing at our own creation and recognise the ability with which he has undone our wicked work and the debt the German nation owes him for it. Our business now is to make peace with him and with all the world instead of making more mischief and ruining our people in the process . …..

[Disabled student]

This is about half of Shaw's letter. However I think it contains all the juicy bits - and I high-lighted those:

UNCOMMON SENSE ABOUT THE WAR
BY BERNARD SHAW
New Statesman and Nation, 7 October 1939

The war in Poland is over. Every person in the country capable of seeing three moves ahead in the game of military chess has known this from the time the first Russian soldier stepped across the Polish frontier. Poland surrendered and laid herself at Herr Hitler’s feet. He was able to say that as Poland’s cause is lost we have no further excuse for continuing the war. Whereupon we threw off the mask of knight erranty and avowed flatly that we did not care two hoots about Poland and were out, on our old balance of power lines, to disable Germany, which we now called abolishing Hitlerism.

This left the Fuhrer in a very dangerous position. The Axis had broken in his hands from the very beginning, Italy and Spain having promptly deserted him. The anti-Comintern Pact had become a danger to him. Turkey was definitely against him: Rumania and the Balkans generally were mortally afraid of him. American neutrality was pro-British just as our non-intervention policy in the Spanish war was pro-Franco. 1918 had proved that Germany although unconquerable and even victorious here and there on the field could be starved into complete demoralisation and defeat by the Allies. The situation was not pleasant even for a leader drunk with success. The encirclement was fairly complete.

Except on one side, where Russia stood with an army of six million men eating their heads off. Those of us who were intelligent and knowedgeable enough to see that the balance of power was in the hands of Stalin had forced our Government to make overtures to Russia and Mr. Duff Cooper, a very favourable specimen of our reighning oligarchy, loosened his old school tie so far as to plead in the Evening Standard that Stalin, though of course a blood-thirsty scoundrel, was perhaps not quite so villanous as Hitler. Herr Hitler, having the tremendous advantage over Mr. Duff Cooper of being a proletarian and knowing something about the world he was living in, courted Russia more sensibly.

Stalin, five hundred per cent or so abler and quicker at the uptake than all of the dictators, including the Westminster Cabinet rolled into one, had nothing to consider except which of them he should take by the scruff of the neck. Before deciding, he sent a handful of his six millions to take possession of White Russia, the Ukraine and a substantial bit of Poland. Herr Hitler at once capitulated unconditionally and was duly taked by the scruff of the neck; for Stalin could use Herr Hitler to keep Duff Cooperism out of the rest of Poland. He informed us in effect that since we could not even be civil to Russia, we should not make Poland a gun emplacement for the obvious ultimate aim of our rulers (as far as they are capable of aims) of restoring the Romanoff Tsardom and once more dining happily with the Benkendorffs in Chester Square. And so the diplomatic situation stands. Nothing has happened except that the French, whether after consultation with us or not, I do not know, have most inopportunely started perecuting their communists……..

What in the devil’s name is it all about now that we have let Poland go?

Mr. Chamberlain in a reply states our aim in a peroration. Mr. Winston Churchill echoes it in a broadcast with a certain sense of its absurdity which the microphone betrays. Our aim is first to deliver Europe from the threat and fear of war. And our remedy is to promise it three years more war! Next to abolish Hitlerism root and branch. Well what about beginning by abolishing Churchillism, a proposition not less nonsensical and more easily within our reach? ……..

The Archbishop of York, in the next broadcast, rose finally to the occasion as became a great Christian prelate. Unfortunately he began not as a Christian prelate but as a righteously angry hotheaded Englishman by giving his blessing to our troops as “dedicated” to the supreme immediate duty of lynching Herr Hitler and his associates. Now I cannot go into the question of whether Herr Hitler deserves to be lynched without raising awkward analogies about his case and those of Signor Mussolini, General Franco, Stalin and his associates, and raking up events in India and in Ireland which unfriendly pens have represented as somwhat dictatorial on our part ……

No: it will not do, however thickly we buttter it about bunk and balderdash about Liberty, Democracy and everything we have just abolished at home. As the Archbishop nobly confesses, we made all the mischief, we and the French when we were drunk with victory at Versailles; and if that mischief had not been there for him to undo, Adolf Hitler would have now been a struggling artist of no political account. He actually owes his eminence to us; so let us now cease railing at our own creation and recognise the ability with which he has undone our wicked work and the debt the German nation owes him for it. Our business now is to make peace with him and with all the world instead of making more mischief and ruining our people in the process . …..

Welcome back Kilbarry1 as i haven't seen you for a good while. What's keeping you busy these days??

[Kilbarry1]

You will note that while, they were appeasing Hitler and Stalin, both O'Casey and Shaw sneered at the British conservative politician Duff Cooper. [Posts no. 61 and 74]. This gentleman was a war hero, a friend of Churchill and a strong opponent of Appeasement - he resigned after the Munich Agreement and then helped to bring about Chamberlain's resignation and replacement by Churchill in 1940.

No wonder "pacifists" like Sean O'Casey and G. B. Shaw disliked such a war-monger!

The following are extracts from the Wikipedia article on Duff Cooper.

Following Oxford, he entered into the Foreign Service and, owing to the national importance of his work at the cipher desk, he was excluded from military service until 1917, when he joined the Grenadier Guards. He served with distinction as a lieutenant in the campaigns of 1918, winning a DSO for conspicuous gallantry. Almost all of his closest friends, including Shaw-Stewart, Horner, Asquith and John Manners were killed in the war, drawing him closer to Lady Diana Manners, whom he married in 1919. ..........

Political career
Returning to the Foreign Service, he became principal private secretary to two ministers and played a significant role in the Egyptian and Turkish crises of the early 1920s before winning a seat in Parliament as a Conservative for Oldham in 1924. He gave one of the most acclaimed maiden speeches of the century and became known as a stalwart supporter of Stanley Baldwin, the Prime Minister, and a friend of Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill. He became Financial Secretary to the War Office in January 1928 before losing his seat in the 1929 election when the Conservative Party lost power. ......
Returning to ministerial office as Financial Secretary to the War Office in 1931, then as Financial Secretary to the Treasury in 1934, he was elevated to the Cabinet as War Secretary in 1935 and promoted to First Lord of the Admiralty in 1937. He completed a biography of Douglas Haig during this period. The most public critic of Neville Chamberlain's appeasement policy inside the Cabinet, he famously resigned in 1938 over the Munich Agreement with Adolf Hitler in an act that MP Vyvyan Adams described as "the first step in the road back to national sanity". He later took a prominent role in the famous Norway Debate of 1940 which led to Chamberlain's downfall.

[Cael]

One of the strangest features of the 20th Century was the number of "liberals", "intellectuals", "humanists" or whatever who supported Communist dictators. In any society, at any time, you will find people who make excuses for atrocities committed by their own side. This may be evil but at least it is understandable. The Fellow Travellers justified atrocities committed by the enemies of their own society. This is certainly unusual. Was it unique in human history?

Scratch the surface of a European liberal today, and you will find a fascist. What you talk about is far from unique. Most liberals are moral cowards and will always support the status quo - whatever the status quo is. Today, most liberals support the genocidal "free market," and the mockery of democracy that we see in Europe and the USA. Needless to say, most of them support the rise of the Fourth Reich in Europe - which has already started killing "troublemakers" in the street in Greece, i.e. those who dare to oppose the neo-liberal attacks on the working class.

[Kilbarry1]

This is about half of Shaw's letter. However I think it contains all the juicy bits - and I high-lighted those:

UNCOMMON SENSE ABOUT THE WAR
BY BERNARD SHAW
New Statesman and Nation, 7 October 1939

The war in Poland is over. Every person in the country capable of seeing three moves ahead in the game of military chess has known this from the time the first Russian soldier stepped across the Polish frontier. Poland surrendered and laid herself at Herr Hitler’s feet. He was able to say that as Poland’s cause is lost we have no further excuse for continuing the war. Whereupon we threw off the mask of knight erranty and avowed flatly that we did not care two hoots about Poland and were out, on our old balance of power lines, to disable Germany, which we now called abolishing Hitlerism.

This left the Fuhrer in a very dangerous position. The Axis had broken in his hands from the very beginning, Italy and Spain having promptly deserted him. The anti-Comintern Pact had become a danger to him. Turkey was definitely against him: Rumania and the Balkans generally were mortally afraid of him. American neutrality was pro-British just as our non-intervention policy in the Spanish war was pro-Franco. 1918 had proved that Germany although unconquerable and even victorious here and there on the field could be starved into complete demoralisation and defeat by the Allies. The situation was not pleasant even for a leader drunk with success. The encirclement was fairly complete.

Except on one side, where Russia stood with an army of six million men eating their heads off. Those of us who were intelligent and knowedgeable enough to see that the balance of power was in the hands of Stalin had forced our Government to make overtures to Russia and Mr. Duff Cooper, a very favourable specimen of our reighning oligarchy, loosened his old school tie so far as to plead in the Evening Standard that Stalin, though of course a blood-thirsty scoundrel, was perhaps not quite so villanous as Hitler. Herr Hitler, having the tremendous advantage over Mr. Duff Cooper of being a proletarian and knowing something about the world he was living in, courted Russia more sensibly.

Stalin, five hundred per cent or so abler and quicker at the uptake than all of the dictators, including the Westminster Cabinet rolled into one, had nothing to consider except which of them he should take by the scruff of the neck. Before deciding, he sent a handful of his six millions to take possession of White Russia, the Ukraine and a substantial bit of Poland. Herr Hitler at once capitulated unconditionally and was duly taked by the scruff of the neck; for Stalin could use Herr Hitler to keep Duff Cooperism out of the rest of Poland. He informed us in effect that since we could not even be civil to Russia, we should not make Poland a gun emplacement for the obvious ultimate aim of our rulers (as far as they are capable of aims) of restoring the Romanoff Tsardom and once more dining happily with the Benkendorffs in Chester Square. And so the diplomatic situation stands. Nothing has happened except that the French, whether after consultation with us or not, I do not know, have most inopportunely started perecuting their communists……..

What in the devil’s name is it all about now that we have let Poland go?

Mr. Chamberlain in a reply states our aim in a peroration. Mr. Winston Churchill echoes it in a broadcast with a certain sense of its absurdity which the microphone betrays. Our aim is first to deliver Europe from the threat and fear of war. And our remedy is to promise it three years more war! Next to abolish Hitlerism root and branch. Well what about beginning by abolishing Churchillism, a proposition not less nonsensical and more easily within our reach? ……..

The Archbishop of York, in the next broadcast, rose finally to the occasion as became a great Christian prelate. Unfortunately he began not as a Christian prelate but as a righteously angry hotheaded Englishman by giving his blessing to our troops as “dedicated” to the supreme immediate duty of lynching Herr Hitler and his associates. Now I cannot go into the question of whether Herr Hitler deserves to be lynched without raising awkward analogies about his case and those of Signor Mussolini, General Franco, Stalin and his associates, and raking up events in India and in Ireland which unfriendly pens have represented as somwhat dictatorial on our part ……

No: it will not do, however thickly we buttter it about bunk and balderdash about Liberty, Democracy and everything we have just abolished at home. As the Archbishop nobly confesses, we made all the mischief, we and the French when we were drunk with victory at Versailles; and if that mischief had not been there for him to undo, Adolf Hitler would have now been a struggling artist of no political account. He actually owes his eminence to us; so let us now cease railing at our own creation and recognise the ability with which he has undone our wicked work and the debt the German nation owes him for it. Our business now is to make peace with him and with all the world instead of making more mischief and ruining our people in the process . …..

I have just done the LAST two paragraphs of Shaw's hymn of praise to Stalin and Hitler. (There are still some missing paragraphs in the middle). Note the self-pity - and also the dishonesty that usually goes hand in hand with it. Whatever he wrote, Shaw did not BEHAVE as if he and civilisation would be extinct within a few months!

"I write without responsibility, because I represent nobody but myself and a handful of despised politically powerless intellectuals capable of taking a catholic view of the situation. One of these unhappy outcasts is my friend H. G. Wells. He has written a vitally important letter to the Times, of which nobody has taken the slightest notice. I disagree with him on one point and would fain comfort him on it. He warns us that we are risking not just military defeat, but the existence of civilisation and even of the human race. Dear H.G. let us not flatter ourselves. The utmost we can do is to kill, say twenty-five millions of one another, and make the ruins of all our great cities, show places for Maori tourists.

Well, let us. In a few months we shall matter no more than last summer's flies. As two of the flies we naturally depreciate such an event.; but the world will get on without us; and the world will have an immense gratification of the primitive instinct that is at the bottom of this mischief and that we never mention: to wit pugnacity, sheer pugnacity for its own sake, that much admired quality of which an example has just been so strikingly set for us by the Irish Republican Army."

[FutureTaoiseach]

Socialists have usurped the mantle of "liberalism" by fraud. You can't be a liberal if you seek to impose limits on political-debate. You are not a liberal if you seek to deny consumers the freedom to choose from whom they acquire goods and services through the imposition of monopolies.