The Fellow Travellers: "Liberals" Supporting Dictators

[Kilbarry1]

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."

The following is most of the rest of Shaw's article. Shaw had no problem with consigning the people of Poland to the tender mercies of Hitler and Stalin but he regards the wartime security measures taken by the British Government as "the ineptist Military Communism" and "Military Communism in inexperienced hands". Really skillful Military Communism was the type carried out by the experienced hands of Lenin and Stalin. Shaw supported THAT type - as long as it was applied to the Russians and the Poles and not to intellectuals like himself!

"Meanwhile we are enduring all the vagaries, from mere discomfort to financial ruin and the breaking up of our homes, of the ineptist Military Communism. Powers which no Plantagenent king or fascist dictator have been granted to any unqualified person who offered to assume them,[NOTE] including an enterprising burglar. Whatever our work in life may be, we have been ordered to stop doing it and stand by. Whereever our wives and children are, they have been transported to somewhere else, with or without the mothers. Our theatres and cinemas have been closed; and our schools, colleges and public libraries confiscated by the military bureauracy. We have been bundled out of our hotels into the streets neck and crop, and our own houses simultaneously made into nests of billeted little evacuees, often unofficially described as little hooligans. Our bungalows bought by us after a careful calculation of our ability to pay the mortgage interest and get to our place of business in a Baby Austin, have been put quite beyond our means by an appalling budget, and by a rationing of petrol, that aims at our complete immobilisation just as the blacking-out aims at our being completely blindfolded from sunset to sunrise. When the bungalows and suburbs raise a bitter cry that they cannot pay the new taxes, Sir John Simon replies frankly that if they do not the Government will be forced to resort to inflation, thus reminding us that in Germany, when we forced the Reich to resort to it, a twopenny-halfpenny postage stamp cost £12,000 and the postman’s wage rose to a king’s ransom on which he could barely live, while annuities and insurances, on which unmarried elderly daughters and retired folk used to live in decency and comfort, became worthless. Our incomes depreciated from week to week through the rise in prices which the Government is pledged to prevent and cannot.

Such (and much more) is Military Communism in inexperienced hands, often the hands of fools who come to the top in wartime by their self-satisfied folly though nobody would trust them to walk a puppy in peacetime. When we complain we are told that we must all make sacrifices, and that we had better buy white overcoats, carry our gas masks everywhere, and take wildly impractical precautions against high explosive blast and poison gas."

NOTE: Is he referring to Air Raid Wardens by any chance?

[Kilbarry1]

This is the remainder of Shaw's article. Note how he ridicules the idea that Hitler will invade a string of named countries (including "Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Africa and finally the entire universe".) In fact Hitler DID invade two of the countries on Shaw's list - Holland and Belgium - plus several others that Shaw does not mention - Norway, Denmark, Greece, France, Italy and the Soviet Union itself. Shaw cannot conceive of Hitler invading Russia because that would imply that he had made a fool of Stalin with the Nazi-Soviet Pact. And Ireland's great Stalinist intellectual cannot entertain such a blasphemous thought!

In fact Shaw suggests that if Britain was not careful, Russia might join Germany in a war against Britain - and if that happened, it would be the fault of the British ruling class - plus right-wing Trade Union leaders!

If George Bernard Shaw was a clown he was an evil one!

QUOTE:
"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? But we are told, if we do not send Hitler to St. Helena, he will proceed to annex Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Africa and finally the entire universe and Stalin will help him. I must reply that men who talk like this are frightened out of their wits. Stalin will see to it that nobody, not even our noble selves will do anything of the sort; and Franklin Rooseveld will be surprised to find himself of Stalin’s opinion in this matter. Had we not better wait until Hitler tries to do it, and then stop him with Stalin and Roosevelt at our back?

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. I simply remind the Archbishop that although we can easily kill a hundred thousand quite innocent Germans, man woman and child, in our determination to get at Herr Hitler, we should not finally succeed in lynching him; and the killing of the Germans and our own losses in the process, would produce a state of mind on both sides which would operate as a complete black-out of Christianity and make the Archbishop’s sane final solution impossible. If we won, it would be Versailles all over again, only worse and another war even less than 20 years off. And if, as is desperately possible, we drove Russia and Germany into a combination against us to avert that catastrophe, which is just what our Stalinophobe Old School Ties and Trade Unionists are recklessly trying to do, then we shall indeed need God’s help and not desserve it."

[FutureTaoiseach]

You can't really be a liberal while approving of a dictatorship that violates the most basic of human freedoms such as speech, assembly, the press, of religion etc. The reality is that such persons as claim to be "liberals" who do so are actually Socialists or Left-Liberals. Those illiberal regimes whom they do support tend to be anti-Western, and therefore comply with the self-hating Western Left's own anti-Westernism in general, and anti-Americanism in particular. Hence their trenchant defence on this forum of the Chavez and Morales regimes in Venezuela and Bolivia - even - as was the case in the latter country - when the killing of an Irish citizen by police was involved. The Left's willingness to take the word of the Morales regime as Gospel underlines their own national self-loathing with respect to Irishness in particular, and Western-culture in general.

[Kilbarry1]

You can't really be a liberal while approving of a dictatorship that violates the most basic of human freedoms such as speech, assembly, the press, of religion etc. The reality is that such persons as claim to be "liberals" who do so are actually Socialists or Left-Liberals. Those illiberal regimes whom they do support tend to be anti-Western, and therefore comply with the self-hating Western Left's own anti-Westernism in general, and anti-Americanism in particular. Hence their trenchant defence on this forum of the Chavez and Morales regimes in Venezuela and Bolivia - even - as was the case in the latter country - when the killing of an Irish citizen by police was involved. The Left's willingness to take the word of the Morales regime as Gospel underlines their own national self-loathing with respect to Irishness in particular, and Western-culture in general.

I agree with nearly all of the above. However just to be pedantic I will repeat the list of countries that Shaw "sarcastically" claimed that the British expected Hitler to annex:
"Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Africa and finally the entire universe". If we ommit the entire universe, that leaves TEN countries/areas. So let's see how Shaw's sarcasm worked out in practise:

The Nazis invaded and annexed Holland, Belgium and part of North Africa - that's THREE

They bombed Great Britain (England, Scotland) with a view to invading it. If they had succeeded, Ireland would certainly have been next - that's 3 more a total of SIX

Germany's ally Japan bombed northern Australia. If the Axis powers had won the war, New Zealand would certainly have been threatened by Japan - That's 2 more a total of EIGHT

If the Axis powers had won, there is no way that Switzerland, alone in Europe could have maintained its independence - a total of NINE countries that would have been threatened/annexed by Germany or Japan.

Canada is the only country on Shaw's list that might NOT have been threatened by a German/Japanese victory.

Shaw was an idiot as well as being morally corrupt.

[Kilbarry1]

So here is the FULL text of Shaw's article in praise of the Nazi-Soviet Pact and urging the British Government to make peace with Hitler as Stalin had so wisely done. Emphasis and Notes are mine.

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, [1] 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 Cabiner 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 possesion 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 [2] 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 [3] …….. [4]

Meanwhile we are enduring all the vagaries, from mere discomfort to financial ruin and the breaking up of our homes, of the ineptist Military Communism. Powers which no Plantagenent king or fascist dictator have been granted to any unqualified person who offered to assume them, including an enterprising burglar. [5] Whatever our work in life may be, we have been ordered to stop doing it and stand by. Whereever our wives and children are, they have been transported to somewhere else, with or without the mothers. Our theatres and cinemas have been closed; and our schools, colleges and public libraries confiscated by the military bureauracy. We have been bundled out of our hotels into the streets neck and crop, and our own houses simultaneously made into nests of billeted little evacuees, often unofficially described as little hooligans. Our bungalows bought by us after a careful calculation of our ability to pay the mortgage interest and get to our place of business in a Baby Austin, have been put quite beyond our means by an appalling budget, and by a rationing of petrol, that aims at our complete immobilisation just as the blacking-out aims at our being completely blindfolded from sunset to sunrise. When the bungalows and suburbs raise a bitter cry that they cannot pay the new taxes, Sir John Simon [6] replies frankly that if they do not the Government will be forced to resort to inflation, thus reminding us that in Germany, when we forced the Reich to resort to it, a twopenny-halfpenny postage stamp cost £12,000 and the postman’s wage rose to a king’s ransom on which he could barely live, while annuities and insurances, on which unmarried elderly daughters and retired folk used to live in decency and comfort, became worthless. Our incomes depreciated from week to week through the rise in prices which the Government is pledged to prevent and cannot.

Such (and much more) is Military Communism in inexperienced hands, often the hands of fools who come to the top in wartime by their self-satisfied folly though nobody would trust them to walk a puppy in peacetime. When we complain we are told that we must all make sacrifices, and that we had better buy white overcoats, carry our gas masks everywhere, and take wildly impractical precautions against high explosive blast and poison gas.

Naturally we cry “Sacrifice”! Yes but what for?” You tell us to be resolute and determined; but we cannot be resolute and determined in the air about nothing. What are we suffering for? Upon what are we resolved? What have we determined? 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? But we are told, if we do not send Hitler to St. Helena, he will proceed to annex Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Africa and finally the entire universe and Stalin will help him. I must reply that men who talk like this are frightened out of their wits. Stalin will see to it that nobody, not even our noble selves will do anything of the sort; and Franklin Rooseveld will be surprised to find himself of Stalin’s opinion in this matter. Had we not better wait until Hitler tries to do it, and then stop him with Stalin and Roosevelt at our back?

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. I simply remind the Archbishop that although we can easily kill a hundred thousand quite innocent Germans, man woman and child, in our determination to get at Herr Hitler, we should not finally succeed in lynching him; and the killing of the Germans and our own losses in the process, would produce a state of mind on both sides which would operate as a complete black-out of Christianity and make the Archbishop’s sane final solution impossible. If we won, it would be Versailles [7] all over again, only worse and another war even less than 20 years off. And if, as is desperately possible, we drove Russia and Germany into a combination against us to avert that catastrophe, which is just what our Stalinophobe Old School Ties and Trade Unionists are recklessly trying to do, then we shall indeed need God’s help and not desserve it.

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 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 thr 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. [8]

References:
[1] Alfred Duff Cooper (born 1890) was a Conservative politician and Cabinet Minister. He was a decorated hero of the First World War in which most of his closest friends were killed – including John Manners whose sister, Lady Diana Manners he then married. He became a friend of Winston Churchill in the 1920s and a prominent opponent of Appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s. After the Munich Agreeement in 1938 he resigned as First Lord of the Admiralty in protest. He then worked with Churchill to secure Chamberlain’s resignation and the latter’s replacement by Churchill (1940).

[2] Benkendorffs – a prominent Russian family of German origin. Count Benkendorff was Russian Ambassador to Great Britain up to 1917.

[3] After the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in August 1939, the French Communist Party opposed the “imperialist war” with Germany and were banned. Rather than face conscription into the army, its leader Maurice Thorez went to live in Moscow.

[4] Part of Shaw’s original article seems to have been cut by the editors here.

[5] Shaw seems to be referring to Air Raid Wardens and the enforcement of blackout regulations!

[6] Sir John Simon was Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Chamberlain government.

[7] The Treaty of Versailles (1919) after the First World War laid heavy penalties on Germany and is sometimes blamed for facilitating the rise of the Nazis to power.

[8] In January 1939, the IRA Army Council declared war against Britain, and a bombing and sabotage campaign began a few days later.

[Kilbarry1]

If you Google "George Bernard Shaw" AND "Nazi-Soviet Pact", this thread is the first thing you will come across. It seems to be the ONLY place on the Internet where you can get the text of Shaw's article in the New Statesman defending the Pact. However I also found an article in the Daily Telegraph dated 18 June 2003 entitled "How Shaw Defended Stalin's Mass Killings"
How Shaw defended Stalin's mass killings - Telegraph

"......An extraordinary document to be auctioned at Sotheby's in London next month reveals that Shaw continued to defend the Russian leader's excesses despite growing doubts on the political Left in Britain. Shaw, who became an apologist for Stalin after being invited to visit the Soviet Union in 1931, was sent a typewritten questionnaire about one of the early show trials by the journalist Dorothy Royal.

The author of such works as Major Barbara, Androcles and the Lion and Pygmalion gave brief replies, some of them handwritten, to Miss Royal's questions. It is not known whether they were subsequently published. His replies to the questionnaire, which is expected to fetch £3,000 to £4,000 at Sotheby's on July 10, provide a shocking insight into the naivety of Soviet sympathisers among the British [!!] intelligentsia. ........

Miss Royal said that leaders of the Independent Labour Party, a Left-wing anti-communist group in Britain, had written to Stalin arguing that either the charges against veteran Bolsheviks were untrue or the Russian Revolution had "degenerate" leaders. Asked whether he believed that the revolution had "attracted degenerate types", Shaw replied: "On the contrary it has attracted superior types all the world over to an extraordinary extent wherever it has been understood."

He continued: "But the top of the ladder is a very trying place for old revolutionists who have had no administrative experience, who have had no financial experience, who have been trained as penniless hunted fugitives with Karl Marx on the brain and not as statesmen. They often have to be pushed off the ladder with a rope around their necks," wrote Shaw, apparently justifying Stalin's execution of many of those who had led the Bolshevik revolution in 1917.

Shaw argued that what he called "this Russian trial" had been exaggerated and he rejected suggestions that the accused had only pleaded guilty because they had been drugged or tortured. At least 720,000 people were executed in the terror that followed. Millions more died from hunger and ill-treatment in concentration camps.

I know some people will be cynical about the Daily Telegraph. However I have often tried to start a discussion with my left wing friends (well acquaintances) about the Stalinism of O'Casey and Shaw. The discussion never gets very far because most of them do not even KNOW that these gentlemen were supporters of Stalin - much less that they justified the Nazi-Soviet Pact.

John Charles McQuaid was consecrated Archbishop of Dublin in 1940 - also during the period of the Pact. If, in the course of his life, he had uttered one word in support of Hitler, our liberals would be ranting about it still. Yet the actions of our Stalinist intelligentia have been dropped down the Memory Hole. This is beyond hypocrisy; it is what George Orwell referred to as "Doublethink".

[Kilbarry1]

I am repeating O'Caseys article in favour of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in order to keep it close to Shaw's article on the same subject. Both were published in the British press at a time when Britain was at war with Germany! I have added Explanatory Notes. Emphasis is also mine.

To Picture Post 11 November 1939

What Are Our War Aims –
Sean O’Casey, the Irish Playwright in a Statement to Picture Post

Our first aim ought to be an immediate peace bringing to a sudden and unprovided end to the pitiful struggle that is now going on for what is called the destruction of Hitlerism. Forever the Versailles treaty has vanished and [Polish leader] Smigly-Ridz [1] and his hencemen who laboured in the wealthy lord’s vineyards are bygones by this time.

Why do they want to destroy Hitler when according to the words of their own mouths, Hitler has been destroyed already? By Stalin – Churchill has said so much already in a broadcast; Punch has shown Hitler, the man and Stalin, the master in a cartoon; and J.L. Garvin has bellowed it out in the wide spaces of the Observer. Mr. Eden has said that Russia blocks Hitler in the east and Turkey blocks him in the south-east; and the Maginot Line surely blocks him in the west. Then what prevents us making peace with him and all the world? Even if he would, he can’t bear the world on his back, so the yell of world domination is simply sunshine.

The world must get together to end this curse of world domination everywhere. With England no less than with Germany; in India no less than in Czecho-Slovakia; and in all places where there is a Rajah, white, brown or black. With forces as they are there can be no victory – only senceless destruction. France will destroy Saarbrucken, Germany will destroy Mullhouse; France will destroy Carlsruhe, Germany will level Strasburg – so said Hitler, but we refuse to believe the devil even when he speaks the truth. Like the last war all the mouths are open again, spraying boast and bombast all over the world. Hore-Belisha boasted that 150,000 men were carried to France without a single casualty. But will this 150,000 be brought back to England without a single casualty? That is the point that concerns these men, their relatives, their friends.

The only war aims that can ever be are the aims of the guns and we know what they are.

Peace at once and than war. War to throw down the barriers to keep us from the practical things being done in the USSR and to force us into the madness of the impractical things they want us to do here; peace communism instead of war communism; war on the sham hypocrisies and the stupidities in high places; war to drive the rotteness out of our children’s blood and bones; war for citizenship for our young men who are good enough to die, but not good enough to vote; war on the cant of physical fitness for a half starved nation; war on Mr. Duff Cooper’s [2] schoolboy essay that “The German people should be given every assistance in finding for themselves a form of government which will create confidence in their future determination to pursue peaceful methods.” See the sign of it? Blather. Receive every assistance from whom? Mr. Duff Cooper and the rest of them. The God-sent wisdom of the English governing classes is over and done with; away with them, and him; peace abroad and war at home against these things, here and now.

(from “The Letters of Sean O’Casey – On the Run from London to Devon, 1938-39”, pages 820/21)

Explanatory Notes:
[1] Edward Rydz-Smigly (1886-1941) was a Polish military and political leader as well as a painter and poet. He served as General-Inspector of Poland's armed forces during the invasion and conquest of that country by Germany and the Soviet Union at the outset of World War II. On September 18, 1939, following the fall of his country, he entered Romania, where he was interned for slightly more than a year, during which time he renounced his command of the Polish military. In December 1940, he crossed from Romania into Hungary, and from there into Slovakia and then back into Poland, where he volunteered as a common soldier in the Polish resistance movement. He died of heart failure in Warsaw in December 1941. He was buried in Warsaw under his alias "Adam Zawisza". His tombstone at the Powązki Cemetery bore that name until 1991. A new tombstone was erected by the people of Warsaw in 1994.

[2] Alfred Duff Cooper (1890-1954) was a Conservative politician and Cabinet Minister. He was a decorated hero of the First World War in which most of his closest friends were killed – including John Manners whose sister, Lady Diana Manners he then married. He became a friend of Winston Churchill in the 1920s and a prominent opponent of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s. After the Munich Agreeement in 1938, that handed over part of Czechoslovakia to Germany, Duff Cooper resigned as First Lord of the Admiralty in protest. He then worked with Churchill to secure Chamberlain’s resignation and the latter’s replacement by Churchill (1940).

[Mouroux]

damn liberals --exactly as bad as the right. Whoopee... is that what they mean by equality... we are all equally evil, or gullible, or hypocritical...

[Kilbarry1]

damn liberals --exactly as bad as the right. Whoopee... is that what they mean by equality... we are all equally evil, or gullible, or hypocritical...

Too cynical. Did you read my Explanatory Notes on the Polish leader Rydz-Smigly and the British politician Duff Cooper - and how they tried to deal with the barbarians. Both were right-wing (and G B Shaw ALSO sneers at Duff Cooper). However in no way, are they in the same moral category as our Irish Stalinist "intellectuals"!

[Kilbarry1]

On January 21, 1977, Mrs Shirley Williams, the Secretary of State for Education and Science in James Callaghan’s UK Labour government, delivered a major speech in Derbyshire. This speech was published the following day in the Guardian. Below is an extract from that speech as publishedd in the "Harry's Place" Blog:
Harry's Place From the Vaults: Guardian, January 22, 1977

"Trotskyism and Democracy" by Shirley Williams

We hear a lot about “Trotskyism.” But what is it?….

Leon Trotsky, himself, cared nothing for individual liberty; he cared nothing for parliamentary democracy. His actions in the 1920s as one of the leaders of the Soviet state – for example his part in the crushing of the Kronstadt rising – make this clear. So do his voluminous writings.

Trotsky is not amusing to read. He is verbose and dogmatic; his writings are full of personal vilification of the most unpleasant kind. But some of us recently have felt forced to go back and have a look at them…. What they reveal makes one deeply uneasy about Trotskyism – and, I regret to say, about people who call themselves, or permit themselves to be called, Trotskyists.

I could recite quotation after quotation making clear Leon Trotsky’s profound and total disdain for individual liberty and the processes of parliamentary democracy….

And as anyone can discover who reads Trotsky’s writings from the 1930s, his views hardly changed, even in his years in exile. As late as 1940, not long before his death, he rounded on a group in the American Socialist Workers’ Party, who demanded the right to appeal to the masses over the head of the party. Trotsky dismissed the right to appeal to the masses as a “monstrous pretension.” I do not regard it as a monstrous pretension. I agree with Tawney in regarding the appeal to the masses – in other words, democracy – as an essential condition of the socialist commonwealth.

Nor is there any reason to suppose that Trotskyists ideas have changed recently. A year or so ago, a book was published called The Labour Party and the struggle for socialism. It was by a member of the Trotskyist “International Socialists,” David Coates. In his book, Coates, in language worthy of Trotsky, abuses the Labour Party for being over concerned with the national interest, for being wedded to the parliamentary system. Coates complains that the Labour Party has seen parliamentary democracy as a goal in itself instead of regarding it as only one means – and not necessarily the most desirable – of achieving socialism. According to Coates, we in the Labour Party have been dogmatic about the parliamentary system.

If that is the Trotskyist charge I, for one, plead guilty to it. What is the alternative? Coates in his book does not really spell it out; but here are some of the phrases he uses: “revolutionary upheaval;” “armed seizure of state power;” “revolutionary and violent road to socialism;” “violence of class to class;” “open (and doubtless bitter and bloody) class war.” In other words, modern Trotskyism, like the Trotskyism of Trotsky himself, holds liberty and democracy in total contempt….

Freedom and democracy must never be taken for granted. In a world where they are being challenged and sometimes destroyed, it is for us in the Labour Party to defend them.

Today, some of the remants of the Trotskyite movement in the UK are joining up with the supporters of Islamic terrorism and of Islamic dictators. Presumably this would have amazed Trotsky, but it would not have surprised Shirley Williams. If Stalinist intellectuals like O'Casey and Shaw were alive today, they would be doing the same. They were motivated by hatred of their own society and of the Catholic Church - certainly not by love of the working class.