An analysis of George Galloway's defence of communism
10th November 2017
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I suppose one really ought to salute his strength, his courage, and his indefatigability. None are so able, so reliable, so tireless in their defense of the indefensible as George Galloway.
Mr. Galloway appeared on the BBC’s Sunday Politics, ostensibly to defend the (second) Russian revolution; the one which saw Lenin take power in what Mr. Galloway’s opponent, Peter Hitchens, calls (rightly) a putsch.
In fact, what Mr. Galloway seemed most keen on doing was making the announcement of his own detachment, and therefore his availability.
The Soviet Union is gone. Saddam let him down. Castro is dead and his country reduced to beggary. Assad and the mullahs of Iran are waning. Chavez lies in his grave whilst his countrymen starve.
In short, Mr Galloway’s list of clients is looking rather thin. He needs a new patron, to move on like a spunk-drunk harlot. And he possesses that trait, found elsewhere in the animal kingdom, of being able to discern the most viable seed. He wanders around, stomach sloshing with the previous suitor’s deposit, looking for a more valuable buck. So we were treated, by way of his defense of the Russian revolution, to his courtship ritual. His target is China, the regime of which he rather likes, as well he would. Not for him the suggestion that President Xi Jinping is an autocrat, that China is an authoritarian state which commits the most grievous abuses against its people on a scale which would make lesser despots blush at their own ineptitude.
China, he says, has festooned itself in the colours of the Russian revolution, and its astounding growth is evidence of its success. (Never mind the old division between China and the USSR, never mind the communist critique of China’s hybrid economy; never mind history.) It is proof of the veracity of the phrase deployed by Jeremy Corbyn in his eulogy for Hugo Chavez: a ‘better’ way of doing things.
It might seem odd that a supposed leftist, like Mr Galloway, parses his praise in the language of economics, singing songs of percentages whilst ignoring the millions of workers who have been starved, tortured and murdered to achieve it.
Capitalists are often accused (and often rightly) of callousness in their treatment of humans, deriving their morality from spreadsheets charting productivity and balance of payments deficits. I do not think it cheap to point out that the German economy grew under the Nazis, a party to which we shall return.
Yet here Mr Galloway borrows their language, only a minor departure from Hobsbawm’s not-famous-enough proclamation that, if 20 million more had to die to create a communist state, then 20 million was a price worth paying.
Too few people recall this episode. We are likewise ignorant of the death toll for which the USSR is responsible.
This ignorance is compounded when otherwise well-intentioned and intelligent people claim that Stalinism was a corruption of the communist ideal, and thereby exculpate communism from the charge of multiple genocides, mass-murders and deliberate famines.
My friend Josh White, one of these otherwise well-intentioned and eminently intelligent people, has proffered by way of a defense of communism that racialist policies do not necessarily follow from its dogmas, doctrines and theories.
They are not innate to communism as they were to National Socialism. Therefore communism, whilst it has overseen many times more deaths than National Socialism, is not itself responsible for the deaths.
Never mind that one could make the same defense of Italian Fascism, of Franco’s Falangism, of Hirohito’s Imperial Way Shintoism. Never mind that no one would mount the same defense of any Fascist regime, a disparity which deserves to be explored and which reveals much when it is.
That communism has invariably led to class being treated as race was by the Nazis, and that it has so-often enabled and justified the pre-existing racialist tendencies of its supporters (a fact which saw Ukranians suffer far more under the USSR than Russians) suggests that communism’s defenders, whilst making much of the people and the workers, are wilfully ignorant of the nature of people and workers except when they wish to exploit them.
George Galloway is as much a symptom as a cause of this resurgent dilemma. Too many naively supposed, during his wilderness years, that he – and those like him – had been confined to the refuse pile of time, thrown out along with their causes. Too many believed that myths, once expunged from the collective consciousness, could never rise again. These people, indolently lounging in Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’, have created the conditions in which the old ideas can flourish, the swamp in which creatures like Galloway can grow and breed and multiply.
Now they march again, sometimes pulling at and sometimes hanging on the coattails of their creed.
I could close with Santayana, but I doubt many of my generation would remember him.
Mr. Galloway appeared on the BBC’s Sunday Politics, ostensibly to defend the (second) Russian revolution; the one which saw Lenin take power in what Mr. Galloway’s opponent, Peter Hitchens, calls (rightly) a putsch.
In fact, what Mr. Galloway seemed most keen on doing was making the announcement of his own detachment, and therefore his availability.
The Soviet Union is gone. Saddam let him down. Castro is dead and his country reduced to beggary. Assad and the mullahs of Iran are waning. Chavez lies in his grave whilst his countrymen starve.In short, Mr Galloway’s list of clients is looking rather thin. He needs a new patron, to move on like a spunk-drunk harlot. And he possesses that trait, found elsewhere in the animal kingdom, of being able to discern the most viable seed. He wanders around, stomach sloshing with the previous suitor’s deposit, looking for a more valuable buck. So we were treated, by way of his defense of the Russian revolution, to his courtship ritual. His target is China, the regime of which he rather likes, as well he would. Not for him the suggestion that President Xi Jinping is an autocrat, that China is an authoritarian state which commits the most grievous abuses against its people on a scale which would make lesser despots blush at their own ineptitude.
China, he says, has festooned itself in the colours of the Russian revolution, and its astounding growth is evidence of its success. (Never mind the old division between China and the USSR, never mind the communist critique of China’s hybrid economy; never mind history.) It is proof of the veracity of the phrase deployed by Jeremy Corbyn in his eulogy for Hugo Chavez: a ‘better’ way of doing things.
It might seem odd that a supposed leftist, like Mr Galloway, parses his praise in the language of economics, singing songs of percentages whilst ignoring the millions of workers who have been starved, tortured and murdered to achieve it.
Capitalists are often accused (and often rightly) of callousness in their treatment of humans, deriving their morality from spreadsheets charting productivity and balance of payments deficits. I do not think it cheap to point out that the German economy grew under the Nazis, a party to which we shall return.
Yet here Mr Galloway borrows their language, only a minor departure from Hobsbawm’s not-famous-enough proclamation that, if 20 million more had to die to create a communist state, then 20 million was a price worth paying.
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Too few people recall this episode. We are likewise ignorant of the death toll for which the USSR is responsible.
This ignorance is compounded when otherwise well-intentioned and intelligent people claim that Stalinism was a corruption of the communist ideal, and thereby exculpate communism from the charge of multiple genocides, mass-murders and deliberate famines.
My friend Josh White, one of these otherwise well-intentioned and eminently intelligent people, has proffered by way of a defense of communism that racialist policies do not necessarily follow from its dogmas, doctrines and theories.
They are not innate to communism as they were to National Socialism. Therefore communism, whilst it has overseen many times more deaths than National Socialism, is not itself responsible for the deaths.
Never mind that one could make the same defense of Italian Fascism, of Franco’s Falangism, of Hirohito’s Imperial Way Shintoism. Never mind that no one would mount the same defense of any Fascist regime, a disparity which deserves to be explored and which reveals much when it is.
That communism has invariably led to class being treated as race was by the Nazis, and that it has so-often enabled and justified the pre-existing racialist tendencies of its supporters (a fact which saw Ukranians suffer far more under the USSR than Russians) suggests that communism’s defenders, whilst making much of the people and the workers, are wilfully ignorant of the nature of people and workers except when they wish to exploit them.
George Galloway is as much a symptom as a cause of this resurgent dilemma. Too many naively supposed, during his wilderness years, that he – and those like him – had been confined to the refuse pile of time, thrown out along with their causes. Too many believed that myths, once expunged from the collective consciousness, could never rise again. These people, indolently lounging in Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’, have created the conditions in which the old ideas can flourish, the swamp in which creatures like Galloway can grow and breed and multiply.
Now they march again, sometimes pulling at and sometimes hanging on the coattails of their creed.
I could close with Santayana, but I doubt many of my generation would remember him.
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