Critical Race Theory, White Privilege and the Rhetoric of Ethnic Cleansing

As readers will have probably noticed, I have very strong objections to Critical Race Theory and particularly its concept of White privilege. Critical Race Theory is a postmodern revision of Marxism, dreamt up in the 1970s by Kimberle Crenshaw and a group of Black Marxist legal scholars in the 1970s. It replaces class as the instrument of oppression with race. ‘Whiteness’ is a bourgeois quality possessed by all Whites which guarantees them social, economic and political superiority to Blacks and other people of colour. Even if the individual White person is not racist. Racism, it also holds, has not declined, but is just better hidden. Whites must be made to know Black oppression and feel guilty about it. Much of the literature of Critical Race Theory and its activism is about deliberately humiliating Whites. For example, several years ago there were student riots at Evergreen College in Oregon. The college was very liberal, and there had been for decades since the 1970s an annual withdrawal of Black students during the summer months to mark the absence of Blacks during a critical phase in the civil rights struggle or so. By the middle of the last decade, this had changed into demands for the White students to absent themselves in favour of Blacks, in order to appreciate Black marginalisation. This was succeeded by a series of aggressive student demonstration in which Blacks and their White allies insisted on forcing Whites into inferior positions. At meetings, for example, Whites were required to sit at the back and not speak. Brett Weinstein, an evolutionary biologist with liberal views, describes it as ‘Black supremacy’. Not all Blacks supported this aggressive demonstration of racial vindictiveness, and one of Weinstein’s students, a young Black woman, shouted at the mob that she wasn’t oppressed. Students of whatever colour, who didn’t conform, were chased by the mob. Peter Boghossian, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay also demonstrated the irrationality and vicious prejudice of this woke pseudo-scholarship in the spoof papers they sent to various woke, postmodern journals, which were eventually collected up and published as Grievance Studies. In one paper, they argued that White male students should be forced to sit on the floor in order to teach them about marginalisation and persecution. They believed this would be too much for the academic journal to which they had submitted it. Alas, no; it was accepted with a reply complaining that they didn’t go far enough: the young men shouldn’t just be forced to sit on the floor, but should be chained up as well.

Part of what worries me about the concept of ‘White privilege’ is that privilege is something usually said of rich minority groups, who haven’t worked for their position, such as the aristocracy. Or the half of the British business elite that has inherited the ownership of their companies, rather than having worked their way up. It also recalls the legal privileges that accompanied the European class system, particularly under feudalism, and the legal restriction placed on Blacks in Jim Crow America and in the White-ruled colonies, like Rhodesia, Malawi and South Africa, until the beginning of Black majority rule. For example, until the establishment of democracy in the 1920s in Britain, women were barred from voting and there was a property qualification on the franchise, so that the majority of working class men did not have the vote either. I also believe that there was a property qualification on serving on juries, which was only abolished by Woy, sorry, Roy Jenkins in his socially liberal reforms of the 1960s. Much of the ire directed at Jenkins from the right comes from his decriminalisation of homosexuality and his relaxation of the divorce laws. One splenetic right-winger- from the Daily Heil perhaps? – once described him as a destroyer of British society comparable to Stalin or some other totalitarian monster. Really? Just Jenkins on his own? With his ‘good claret expression’, to use the words of caricaturist Gerald Scarfe. The last time I looked, Britain’s buildings were all standing rather than reduced to rubble by the rampaging hordes, and Jenkins and the Labour party following him had sent a precise number of zero people to concentration camps or re-education centres. But a certain type of high Tory does want all this back. The Financial Times reviewed one such book, which looked forward to the return of the property qualification for juries so they would protect property rights, and the restoration of the old order before anti-discrimination legislation.

In fact there are very strong arguments against White privilege. For a start, east Asian such as the Chinese and Japanese, perform much better educationally and economically than Whites in America and Britain. In Britain the proportion of Asians in management positions, for example, is identical to Whites. In America, they earn more and occupy superior jobs. And while Blacks are sacked before Whites, Whites are sacked before east Asians. This isn’t because east Asians are superior in IQ. It’s because they seem to work harder and have a particular set of cultural skills that allow them to succeed. And in many instances, they earned their position through very hard work against prejudice and discrimination. One social study found that the Japanese in Canada were the most ‘privileged’ ethnic group. But Japanese Canadians had had a long struggle against punitive discrimination which was worse than that experienced by people of Japanese descent in the US. And immigrants to the US from the British Caribbean earn more on average not just to native Black Americans, but also to Whites. For Black conservatives like Thomas Sowell, Blacks are held back not by racial discrimination in the wider society, though he doesn’t deny this exists, but because the majority Black culture hasn’t acquired the necessary social and economic skills to uplift themselves And he is fiercely critical of multiculturalism because he believes it isolates and ossifies different ethnic groups into separate enclaves and cultural preserves, thus preventing from learning from and acquiring the skills of other, more successful groups. As for White privilege, it is hard to see what privilege a homeless White man possesses compared to tenured and respected Black academics and radicals like Crenshaw.

To me, Critical Race Theory and White privilege tackle the problem of Black poverty and marginalisation from the wrong end. Instead of seeing Black poverty as the anomaly which must be tackled, it sees White success as the anomaly, which must be destroyed if Blacks and people of colour are to take their rightful place in society. Thus White people must be brought down and Whiteness abolished. The Guardian, which promotes Critical Race Theory, as claimed that this doesn’t mean White people but Whiteness as the social quality that gives them their exalted place. But one of the writers anthologised in the collection of papers, Critical Race Theory, states that there is no difference between Whiteness and White people. And one of the fears of CRT’s critics is that after attacking Whiteness, the radicals will indeed move on to attacking Whites.

It seems to me that the Critical Race Theory and White privilege are essentially a continuation of the mindset that Whites enjoy their superior social position through mechanisms of power long after those legal mechanisms had been officially abolished and the ideology on which they were based was discredited. It’s an attempted to explain why, after the victories of the Civil Rights movement, the majority of Blacks are still poor. And the rhetoric of decolonisation over here seems to be a direct transference of the bitterness felt by indigenous Africans to privileged White settlers to mainstream British, White society. And that worries me, because of the brutality of the ethnic cleansing of the White farmers in Zimbabwe by Mugabe’s thugs at the beginning of the century. I also have to say that I’m worried about the trends in Afrocentric and other Black pseudohistory that claims that Blacks are the original inhabitants of the British isles. Simon Webb of History Debunked yesterday put up a post about the claims in a book on African and Afro-Caribbean communities in the UK, that there are folktales of Africans invading Britain before the Romans. Webb has his own racial biases and some the historical claims he makes are also false. But if he’s right about this, then the author of the book, Hakim Adi, a professor at Chichester university, is talking pure tosh. I am aware of no such folktales, not even when I was a member of the Society for Contemporary Legend Research back in the 1990s. The closest I’ve come to it was in the long-running and sadly missed Celtic warrior strip, Slaine, in the zarjaz SF comic 2000AD. This included a race of Black Atlanteans, the Rmoahals, described as giant aboriginals. The strip’s writer, Pat Mills, based them on a legend that the standing stones of the isle of Callanish in the Hebrides were built by Black-skinned giants who dressed in feathers. Aside from that, the only other source for this curious assertion may be a garbled memory of one of the waves of colonisation that swept over Britain and the continent during prehistory. The Neolithic reached Britain from the fertile crescent over two routes. One was directly across Europe itself, the other was across North Africa and then up from Morocco through Spain. But this occurred so long ago that it was lost to memory for millennia. Archaeologists have only now been able to reconstruct it by using genetic data. Has Adi heard a garbled version of this from within the Black community, from people who mistakenly thought this was a Black African invasion? It also reminds me of the claim made a few years ago that the ancient Egyptians settled in Birmingham before the Roman conquest. This appeared in the Independent, but has, I understand, since been discredited. It also seems to me to have a certain kinship to another piece of Black myth-making, that sailors from Mali discovered America before Columbus, but didn’t enslave the Amerindians. If this happened, it would be truly remarkable, as I’ve seen claims that the Malians didn’t have any ocean-going ships. And the Malinka were a powerful slaving nation, so if they did discover the Amerindians, there would have been nothing preventing them from enslaving them as well.

My fear is that this rhetoric and pseudohistory will cause Blacks, or a minority of Blacks, to see themselves as the oppressed, true inhabitants of Britain and attack the White British as colonialist oppressors. Even if, at present, they claim otherwise. When the Black Lives Matter movement broke out, its Bristol branch stuck up posters claiming that ‘We’ve always been here’ – which is hi8storically very debatable, although some Blacks have been present in Britain at various periods from the Middle Ages onwards. Claims of Black presence further back, such as the supposed Black skin colour of Cheddar man, are more conjectural. Webb has claimed that this reconstruction was based on a false interpretation and has since been retracted, but I have not seen him cite his source for this.

Marx himself held some extremely unpleasant racial views. He’s most infamous for his anti-Semitism, as shown by him sneering at his German rival, Ferdinand Lassalles, as ‘the Jewish ni++er.’ But he also had strong prejudices against European ethnic groups. He held that the Celts, Basques and the Slavs were backward peoples who had no intrinsic right to exist and national independence. When the 1848 Revolutions broke out, he was afraid that their bids for independence would stop the class revolution he wished to promote. In a chilling passage, he looked forward to the class war becoming a race war. This recalls the horrific ethnic cleansing and deportations Stalin inflicted on the national minorities in the USSR, including the Holodomor, the artificial famine in Ukraine which killed 7 million people.

Thomas Sowell in his book Conquests and Cultures talks about the ethnic cleansing by Muslim mobs of the Ibo people by Muslims in Nigeria and the horrific bloodbath of the Biafran war. The Ibos had previously been a minor, poor tribe but had seized the opportunities presented by western, Christian missionary education, which the northern Muslims had rejected as against their faith. As a result, Ibos were better educated and held better jobs and positions of responsibility even in the Muslim north. This was naturally resented, and the resentment grew into violence. Sowell notes that these tensions were heightened by the language each side used against the other. He writes

‘The problem was not simply that there were differences of opinion, but that there were not established and mutually respected traditions for airing those differences with restraint and accommodation. Vitriolic polemic in the press and in the political arena became the norm. Epithets like “fascist” and “imperialist stooge” became commo currency, along with unbridled expressions of tribal chauvinism.’ (p. 127). In the West there are respected means of airing such differences, but the insults sound very much like the language used by the woke, radical intersectional left against its opponents.

And there is anti-White racism and violence. Two decades ago the number of Whites killed in racist attacks was nearly the same as members of Blacks and other ethnic minorities. There have been armed attacks by Blacks on Whites in the past few weeks and months. One was when a man opened fire on the passengers on a subway. Another was when a Black man deliberately drove his car into a parade in a White community. He left behind a manifesto which made it very clear that this was an act of anti-White terrorism. But this was not treated as such by the Biden administration.

I am very pessimistic about the success of affirmative actions schemes in creating a sustainable Black middle class. As I understand it, this was originally intended to be only a temporary measure. Once Blacks had gained entry into education, the sciences, politics and business on a level comparable with Whites, these schemes were to be dismantled as they would no longer be needed. But forty years after the Runnymede Commission recommended ‘positive discrimination’ in which Blacks are to be favoured by offering places with lower grades to universities and colleges, and preferential job offers if they have lower qualifications, the mass of Black Britain still remains poor and marginalised. I don’t, however, know how bad the situation would otherwise be if these policies had not been implemented. It could be they would have been much worse.

Nevertheless I do fear that these policies will continue to fail and that, in their anger and desperation, some Blacks will begin pogroms against Whites, encouraged by the rhetoric and arguments of Critical Race Theory.

Ukrainian Journalist in 2014 Calls for the Extermination of 1.5 Million Superfluous People in Donbass

This chilling video turned up on the ‘Tom’ channel on YouTube yesterday. I don’t know who ‘Tom’ is, but his channel seems to be devoted to supporting Russia’s war. At the moment he’s posting videos casting doubt on the reports of Russian war crimes in Bucha. Some of these are from western sources, others from RT, which, as an instrument of the Russian government, can’t really be trusted.

This is a clip from a Ukrainian broadcaster, Hromadske.tv from 2014. There a journalist states that there are parts of the Ukraine that are severely overpopulated, such as the town of Donetsk. This has a population of 4 million, 1.5 of which he says are ‘superfluous’ and should be exterminated. He also states that the Donbass, one of the most heavily industrialised regions in the country, is Ukrainian and should be exploited for the benefit of Ukraine.

This is clearly being put up now to support the Russian accusation that the Ukrainian government are fascists. They aren’t. The fascists are there, but they’re supported by only a minuscule number of Ukrainians and Zelensky himself is not only a moderate but also Jewish. It wouldn’t surprise if there is, alongside the profound historic ties between Ukraine and Russia, also a deep-seated hatred stemming from the Holodomor. This was an artificial famine created by Stalin during the purges and collectivisation of agriculture in the 1930s. Seven million Ukrainians died. And the real Fascists of the Azov battalion have led Ukrainian armed attacks against the Russian and the Russian-speaking Ukrainian breakaway regions.

I support Ukraine in this war and utterly condemn Putin’s invasion. But I feel there are aspects that we are not being told about in the west. Hence I’m putting up this video. See what you make of it.

The Lotus Eaters on Tommy Robinson’s Film about Telford Grooming Gang and the Counterdemonstration

As I hope I’ve made clear, I’m am very definitely no fan or supporter of Tommy Robinson. He’s a thuggish Islamophobe, with a background in the BNP as well as various anti-Islam groups like the EDL and Pegida UK. He’s got a string of convictions for violence and other offences, and tries to intimidate his critics into silence by doxing them while at the same time telling his supporters not to harm them and taking the details down later. Or he turns up late at night at their house with a couple of his goons demanding a quiet word. He’s been very loose with accusations of paedophilia, which he’s used to smear Mike Stuchbery, a teacher, who has been forced to leave his job. According to the anti-racist, anti-religious extremism organisation, Robinson’s in court today trying to avoid paying damages to a Syrian schoolboy he libelled as a racist bully, whereas the child was in fact the victim.

Robinson has been concentrating on the issue of the ‘Asian’ grooming gangs, which are in reality largely Pakistani Muslim men. He’s made a documentary about the gang in Telford and appeared in Birmingham to show it to the public a few days ago. Meeting him and his supporters on the other side of the police barricades was a counterdemonstration by Stand Up To Racism, who were joined by the Communist Party. Callum from the Lotus Eaters was also up there recording the event, and the right-wing YouTube channel duly put out a video with their own take on it. And really, I know that it’s biased, but the counterdemonstration looks extremely bad. They don’t tackle Robinson on the issue he’s talking about, but simply shout slogans like ‘Fascist scum, off our streets!’ and about welcoming asylum seekers and getting the Tories out. Which would be perfectly fine elsewhere, but when Robinson is talking about the sexual exploitation of White girls, it looks like Stand Up to Racism has either nothing to say about it, or worse, doesn’t care because it’s only racist when Blacks and Asians are victimised.

According to Robinson, the Telford gang comprised 200 suspects, of whom 11 were charged. One girl identified three men as her rapists – two Muslim and one Sikh. One of the Muslims fathered a child on her, and foetal DNA links him to her and the baby. But he was not charged, only the Sikh. There was also the allegation that a police inspector also took bribes from the gang to look the other way. Robinson tried to interview the inspector and the three suspected abusers. They either said ‘No comment’ or denied the accusation.

During the showing of the film a football hooligan firm, the Chelsea Headhunters, turned up looking for a fight. They were disappointed and so left again. They supposedly had nothing to do with Robinson, but Stand Up to Racism claimed they did. Then, when the film moved on to the girls telling the story how they were raped and abused, the counterdemonstrators left. Which gives the impression that they have no interest in protecting the White victims of horrific racial abuse.

This is not the impression they want to give. Callum went up to speak with them and asked them if they condemned the grooming gangs. Of course they did. But tribal politics prevented them from making common cause with Robinson. But I don’t think they need to have gone as far as that. What the anti-racist movement needs to do is assimilate protests against anti-White racism into their campaigning alongside prejudice, abuse and violence against Blacks and Asians. This would have the result of taking away at least some of Robinson’s ammunition, and demonstrate a much needed broader anti-racism that recognised it was more complex than simply Whites against people of colour.

I was so annoyed by the deeply mistaken conduct of the counterdemonstration that I sent this email off to Stand UP To Racism:

‘Dear Sir,

I regret that I am writing to you to express my extreme dissatisfaction with the apparent conduct of your Birmingham branch and their counterdemonstration at the public showing of Tommy Robinson’s wretched documentary about the Telford Muslim grooming gang. I have absolutely no regard whatsoever for Robinson: he is indeed an islamophobe and a violent criminal with a history of far right involvement. But the conduct of the counterdemonstration appeared so mistaken in its focus and arguments to seem apparently indifferent to the suffering of the grooming gang’s White victims, that in the hands of right-wing YouTube channels like the Lotus Eaters they actually looked worse than Robinson.

The major failing was that the counterdemonstrators did not tackle Robinson on the same issue. While Robinson talked about Muslim grooming gangs and their depredations on White girls, your counterdemonstrators shouted slogans against anti-immigrant racism and general condemnations of Fascism. But ‘refugees in, Tories out’, however well-meant – and would that the Tories were out! -, wasn’t the issue. It gave the impression instead, which I’m sure was not your intention, that you are not concerned about racism when its victims are White, and that you have nothing to day against that issue. Or, worse, that you and your organisation somehow feel that the sexual exploitation and abuse of White girls isn’t racism and indeed it is actually racist to protest against it. This is the attitude of some anti-racist activists, unfortunately. Last year there was a report in the Guardian that three BAME representatives at an anti-racist meeting had complained about the inclusion of anti-White racial incidents in government statistics. As this was the reason the police forces and local authorities around Britain did not tackle the gangs the counterdemonstrators therefore seem to present themselves as holding the same attitudes that allowed the gangs to escape justice for so long.

It could also be considered that the counterdemonstrators also did themselves no favours by including the Communist party. For many people the Communist Party will forever be tainted with the horrors of the Soviet state and particularly Stalin’s gulags. Stalin’s regime was also responsible for the mass deportation of whole nations to Siberia and the Holodomor, the artificial famine in the Ukraine, as documented in Robert Conquest’s book The Nation Killers. I do not feel that such people have anything to say about racism without being hypocritical.

The counterdemonstrators also made themselves look extremely bad by marching off when the film moved on to the girls telling their side of the story. This looks like a gesture of contempt and again another demonstration that you are not interested in anti-White racism or its victims.

I realise that this is not the impression you wanted to give and that you are sympathetic to the plight of the abused girls. But this is certainly the impression many people will get.

I feel very strongly that, rather than covering up anti-White racism, it needs to be included in mainstream anti-racist activism and scholarship. Robinson has been able to exploit the issue of Muslim grooming gangs because they are ignored by mainstream, genuine anti-racist organisations. This has to change. I do remember how other anti-racist organisations did accept that Whites could also be victims of racism back in the 1990s, when the CRE published its report on Black and Asian anti-White racism. But this attitude seems to have changed. There is a fear to acknowledge that such racism exists in case it is exploited by racists and Nazis like Robinson and the BNP. But I believe it is disastrous not to include anti-White racism. If ‘silence is violence’, then the silence of the mainstream anti-racist organisations is a form of complicity with the criminals. I therefore feel that the best way to deal with this issue and others like it is to hold multi-faith, multiracial demonstrations against it, as you would against White racism, abuse and violence against Blacks and Asians. There should be no reason why Blacks and Asians wouldn’t join such a demonstration provided it is done in good faith by an organisation such as your with a proven record of genuine anti-racist action. Whites have been marching under the banner ‘Black and White, unite and fight’ against racism for decades. Now it seems to me that it should be the time for Blacks and Asians to do the same. The counterdemonstrators could therefore have marched under a banner showing White, Black and Asian victims of racist abuse saying, ‘Support All the Victims of Racism, Not the Fascists’ or something like it.

Here is a link to the Lotus Eaters video: The Bad Man’s Telford Documentary – YouTube

I hope you will give my criticisms and suggestions proper consideration. I would be very grateful indeed for a reply from you on this matter, as I am intending to put this up on my blog.

Yours faithfully,’

I’ll be very interested to see what reply I get back, if any.

Two Soviet Anti-Fascism Posters

The threat of Fascism in the years leading up to the Second World War and the Nazi invasion of the USSR also brought forth a number of propaganda posters from the Communist authorities. Several of these are collected in the book The Soviet Political Poster 1917-1987. Most of these are very much of their time, intended to encourage and strengthen the Soviet people’s resistance to the invaders.

But I thought I’d select a couple to put up here, because their message, like that of the anti-war posters I discussed in my last post, has become intensely relevant yet again. Fascist regimes have seized power in Europe. There are genuine Nazis in the coalition governing the Ukraine, while the Hungarian government is also intensely nationalistic and anti-Semitic. And in the former Czech republic many of the parties are bitterly anti-Roma, and, like the Hungarian government to their south, anti-Islam.

In Germany the Nazi Alternative Fuer Deutschland has entered the German parliament, while the Marine Le Pen’s Front National in France has been challenging the last few French presidential elections. And in America there’s the Alt-Right propping up Donald Trump’s government, led by Richard Spencer and Steve Bannon, and including figures like Milo Yiannopolis and Katie Hopkins.

All promise their countries’ citizens a future of prosperity and stability, if they purge the country of migrants from the Developing world, Blacks, Jews, Muslims and Roma. And women are to be encouraged to give up their careers, and return to the home and raising children.

The poster below shows the reality behind the Fascist rhetoric. It shows a grieving woman and child while Nazi forces goose-step around them.

The slogan translates at

Fascism spells hunger
Fascism spells terror
Fascism spells war.

I realise this is another piece of historical hypocrisy, as Stalin’s collectivisation of agriculture was partly achieved through the creation of an artificial famine which killed millions of Soviet citizens. In Ukraine, the Holodomor, as this mass genocide is known, killed 8 million people. It created an atmosphere of bitter hostility to the Soviet state, which resulted in many Ukrainians greeting the invading Germans as liberators. In fact, the Nazis were anything but, and swiftly started persecuting the Ukrainians as ‘subhuman’ Slavs.

But apart from the horrors of Stalin’s Russia, the poster does show the reality of Fascism: poverty, terror and war for its victims and ordinary people at the bottom of the Fascist hierarchy.

The poster below is an attack on Hitler’s invasion of the USSR in breach of the Nazi-Soviet pact. This treaty divided up eastern Europe between Germany and the USSR. Stalin was taken by surprise by the Nazi invasion. The German forces were able to advance hundreds of miles into the USSR in a very short time because for a few days Stalin forbade his armed forces to shoot back. Eventually Stalin recovered, and pushed the Nazis all the way back to Berlin. Historians have said that it was the Red Army that broke back of the Wehrmacht. They’re the reason why we don’t have a Europe dominated by the Third Reich today, with Jews and Gypsies extinct, Poles, Ukrainians and Russians cleansed from a large section of their homelands, and the survivors degraded to a poor, uneducated class of peasant producers raising food for their Aryan masters.

The poster shows Hitler, mask now fallen off, bursting through the Molotov-Soviet pact, being skewered by the bayonet of a squaddie from the Red Army. I put it up because I thought how great something like this would look if you just replaced Hitler with Richard Spencer.

Vox Political on the Government’s Claim of Low Unemployment

Earlier this even I reblogged Tom Pride’s piece on the claims by the Tories that unemployment for several years. It’s an entirely spurious claim, as the government has been comprehensively falsifying the unemployment figures for years. People on certain long term benefits are not counted, as aren’t those poor souls, who’ve been sanctioned. Mike over at Vox Political has this article extensively critiquing the new claims. It’s entitled Unemployment figures are a sanction-based stitch-up, research shows, and begins

The Coalition government will be crowing about the latest drop in unemployment today – according to official statistics. What a shame it’s all a load of bunk.

New research by Oxford University and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine has shown that only around one-fifth (20 per cent) of people who have been sanctioned off of Jobseekers’ Allowance have actually found work, leaving 1.6 million in limbo; they’re off the benefits system but researchers can only surmise that they are relying on food banks.

(Isn’t the Coalition government desperate to discredit food banks? Are ministers determined to drive the out-of-work population to starvation?)

This suggests that official Office for National Statistics figures are inaccurate. The latest batch – out today (January 21, 2015) – claim that unemployment dropped by 58,000 in the three months to November last year, when it totalled 1.91 million.

How can we trust these figures when it has been claimed there’s a sanction-based stitch-up going on?

Just as significant, but far more horrifying, Mike’s piece covers the finding by Debbie Abrahams, a member of the House of Commons select committee on Work and Pensions, that the DWP is well aware of the harm to health through starvation and poverty the sanctions regime does to those upon which they are inflicted. They’re a recognised, built in part of the system. Johnny Void has also blogged on this, a piece which I also reblogged earlier this evening.

This is vile. It puts Cameron, Iain Duncan Smith and the rest of the Tories in the same class as Stalin. As I pointed out in my comments to Mr Void’s article, Stalin used artificial famines as a tool to destroy opposition to his reign and the collectivisation of agriculture in the Soviet Union. In Ukraine alone, 8 million people died in agenocide the Ukrainian people have termed the Holodomor. The number of Soviet citizens murdered in this way, along with the numerous victims of the purges, is 30-45 millions.

This magnitudes larger than the numbers, who have so far died of starvation and neglect from benefit sanctions. So far, 45 + people have died of starvation after being sanctioned. Nevertheless, there is a return to mass starvation in this country, as the poor are forced onto food banks. As recent quotes from the government shows, Tory ministers would deny them even that if they could, just as Soviet apologists denied that there was a famine and mass starvation in Russia.

This government is engaged in a crime against humanity. And Iain Duncan Smith and his vile boss, Cameron, are guilty of culpable homicide. At the very least.

Food Banks: Geordie Greig’s Duranty Journalism

One of the most notorious cases of a journalist collaborating with a murderous, tyrannical regime is that of Walter Duranty and the Soviet Stalinist regime of the 1930s. Duranty was a journalist with the New York Times during Stalin’s forced collectivisation of agriculture. This resulted in a famine of truly horrific proportions in which millions died, particularly in the Ukraine. Ukrainians now commemorate it as the Holodomor, an act of genocide against them by the Soviet authorities.

The existence of the famine was denied and very carefully hidden by the Soviet authorities. Foreign observers to the USSR, such as George Bernard Shaw, were shown fake ‘Potemkin’ villages of well-fed, happy and prosperous peasants. All too many were taken in, including Shaw and Duranty. Duranty wrote a series of articles denying the existence of the famine and maintaining the fiction that instead of mass starvation, the USSR was a land of agricultural abundance. He afterwards admitted that the famine had existed, but excused it by saying that ‘they were only Russians’.

American Conservatives have used Duranty’s notorious complicity in hiding the famine and its suffering as proof of the mendacity of the ‘Left-wing media’, and in particular the New York Times. In actual fact, various Left-wing and Liberal commentators in America have noted that the New York largely, and unsurprisingly, has a Right-wing bias.

Now it seems that the Mail on Sunday under its editor, Geordie Greig, has followed Duranty’s example and tried to deny the existence of starvation in this country for purely political reasons. The Mail on Sunday today printed a piece by one of its journos, Ross Slater, demonstrating that it was possible to get food at a food bank without a voucher. All that was necessary, according to Slater, was that the person obtaining the food should give a plausible ‘sob story’. The article then goes on to allege that the rise in food banks is not due to increased poverty and starvation due to the Tories’ austerity programme. No! Following the official Tory line, it claims that people are going there simply because they’re there, offering free food.

Mike over at Vox Political has given a detailed demolition of this claim, which I’ve reblogged here today. It also seems that Greig’s paper has scored an ‘own goal’ according to the Guardian. The article has aroused such indignation that there has been a massive upsurge in donations to the Trussel Trust, amounting to almost £19,000.

As for Slater, there is a petition on Change.org requesting that Slater be sacked. Mike has advised his readers to use their discretion about this, as Slater was only journalist following the orders set for him by his editor. The ultimate responsibility for this disgusting and shameful attack on the only thing that stands between thousands of British citizens and starvation is the editor of the Mail on Sunday, Geordie Greig.

Geordie Greig, the editor of the Mail on Sunday, who doesn’t want you to believe in mass starvation in Britain.

Greig’s editor-in-chief is Paul Dacre, who, according to Private Eye, has the nickname ‘Mugabe’. This is quite appropriate, as Mugabe has similarly reduced a prosperous people to poverty and starvation while clinging on to power – much like Dacre’s Tory masters.

Paul Dacre, with appropriate comment on the high standards of British journalism. Image by John Mangan.

Greig and Dacre deserve the strongest possible censure for their lying, poisonous journalism in the service of their corrupt political masters. Thousands are dying of poverty every year due to this government’s austerity programme. You can go to Stilloaks’ blog for the names and cases of only a few. And yet, like Duranty, a man Greig and Dacre would despise because of his Communist beliefs, the two Mail on Sunday editors are quite prepared to the same and deny the existence of such massive suffering.

Stalin, Ian Duncan Smith and Terror as Corporate Management Technique

Iosip Vissarionovich Djugashvili, aka Stalin: Thuggish Dictator of the Soviet Union

Ian Duncan Smith: Thuggish Dictator of the Department of Work and Pensions

One of the other books I’ve been reading lately is Alex De Jonge’s biography of Stalin, Stalin and the Shaping of the Soviet Union (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins 1986). During his career Stalin is estimated to have killed at least 30 million Soviet citizens – though the real figure may be a high as 45 million or over – through a series of purges and artificial famines as he transformed the Soviet Union into the military and industrial superpower that was to dominate half of Europe and challenge America for world mastery for the next fifty years. From his boyhood Stalin was a thoroughly nasty piece of work.

The son of a drunken, abusive father, who used to challenge his son to knife him when beating him and a hard mother, Iosip Vissarionovich Djugashvili, grew up dirty poor in the village of Gori in Georgia, one of the countries in the Caucasus that had been absorbed into the Russian Empire. The family lived in one room of a two-room house. The other was occupied by their landlord. He was short, only 5’4” tall, with an elbow left permanently stiff through a childhood accident. The second and third toes on one of his feet were conjoined from birth, and his faced had been left pockmarked through smallpox. This and his family’s poverty gave him strong feelings of inferiority. He soon developed a deep hatred of anyone in authority above him, and his need to dominate and utter lack of any feeling for others were commented on by his fellow students at the Orthodox Christian seminary in Tiflis, in which his parents had enrolled him. One of them remarked on how he was never known to cry, and greeted the joys and misfortunes of his fellow students alike with a sarcastic smile. Most of all, the young Stalin already was alien to basic human altruism. He could not understand how anyone could act kindly or generously to another out of the sheer goodness of their heart, without some ulterior motive. At the seminary he joined a secret Marxist discussion circle set up by some of the other students. He managed to split this between his supporters and opponents through his absolute insistence that only his interpretation of Marx’s doctrine could ever be correct.

He was also already an advocate of absolute, ruthless personal government. One of the stories about Stalin’s time at the seminary is about an essay he wrote on the fall of Julius Caesar. The history teacher had set them the question ‘Why did Caesar fall?’ Stalin’s essay looked at the question from the perspective of the organs of state power, identifying weaknesses and filling in the gaps where these could be strengthened. He stated that Rome’s greatest dictator fell, because he had allowed another source of authority and resistance, the Senate, to continue uninterrupted. The provincial governors opposed him, because they feared his power more than that of the Senate. He also made the mistake of relying on the support of friends, rather than managers, who depended on him for power and who could be relied on to do his bidding. As a result, he was assassinated by his two friends, Brutus and Cassius. When he was asked if his essay was recommending absolute monarchy, he responded by saying that it did not. Absolute monarchy was the control of the state by a single personality. In Stalin’s view, his recommendations were the exact opposite: the strengthening of state power through a single personality.

Stalin was eventually thrown out of the seminary for reading forbidden
books, like Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and Marx. He demanded that the other members of the Marxist discussion circle should likewise resign, so that they could concentrate on revolutionary activities and propaganda amongst the people. They refused, offering the excuse that they didn’t want to disappoint their parents. So Stalin denounced them all to the seminary authorities, who threw them out anyway. On their expulsion, Djugashvili told them that they were now free to pursue their revolutionary activities amongst the people. After this, the young revolutionary became a kinto, the Georgian term for a semi-criminal street hustler. His revolutionary activities included a series of bank robberies used to fund the Russian Social Democratic Party, the parent Marxist organisation which produced the Bolshevik faction, that later became the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

So the pattern of Stalin’s personality and rule were present from his childhood: feelings of inferiority, hatred of authority, utter ruthlessness and a need to dominate others, with a predilection for absolute power and the willingness to use violence to obtain it.

I can’t remember if it was De Jonge’s book, but I do remember that in the 1980s the Sunday Express reviewed one of the biographies of the monster. This was done as yet another of the ‘real truth about an icon of the Left’ that the Right-wing press runs every now and again in order to discredit anyone, whose views are to the left of Maggie Thatcher. In fact, Stalin had been discredited long before the 1980s. He had been out of favour in the Soviet Union ever since the ‘Secret Speech’ of 1953, in which Khruschev denounced his ‘cult of personality’. Moreover, the old thug’s fiercest critics included not only non-Communist democrats, but also dissident Marxists like Roy Medvedev, an historian and author of Let History Judge, which exposed not only Stalin and his crimes, but also his henchmen. The book’s Russian title is, if I can remember correctly, B Dvortse Istorii, which literally translated means In History’s Court, which might have a slightly different shade of meaning. Medvedev was a democrat. He presented to Brezhnev a 12-point plan drawn up by himself and other leading Soviet dissidents like Andrei Sakharov. Nevertheless, he was a Marxist, who founded the Socialist Party of Russian Working People in 1991 in opposition to the banning of the Russian Communist party after the coup against Gorbachev.

At first sight, there appears to be very little in common between Ian Duncan Smith and Stalin. Stalin was, after all, essentially a poor street thug, who cleverly manipulated others to make his way to the very top of Soviet hierarchy. IDS is like the rest of the cabinet, a creature of privilege, who owes his position to the British class system. Nevertheless, the two share certain psychological traits in common and their management styles are very similar. In the introduction De Jonge discusses Stalin’s style of government, and rebuts the suggestion that it is somehow strange or unusual in the West. It is in the traditions of democratic government. However, it is much less unusual, and even common, when it is compared with the aggressive and ruthless management style of some company directors. These also rule by fear, though this is simply that of being sacked, rather than being sent to a forced labour camp or shot in the back of the head by the NKVD. Such chairmen are also unwilling to take advice, capricious, and surround themselves with sycophants willing to do and say anything to gain promotion, including stabbing each other in the back. And like Stalin, these company directors can turn their corporations into highly efficient, successful companies. De Jonge states

‘At first sight the country over which he and they ruled strikes Western observers as alien, as indeed it is when judged by the standards and practices of Western political democracy. However, when considered from a different point of view, much that may seem strange at first sight will strike the reader as surprisingly familiar. My interest in Stalin began many years ago, when I was in a position to compare what I knew of him with the atmosphere in a large British corporation, ruled by a chief executive who believed in management by terror. Everyone, fr4om the board of directors to the lift man, existed under the continuing threat of dismissal without warning, while sackings appeared to occur on a virtually random basis. The chairman set ambitious targets based on his intuitions, seldom listened to advice and never admitted he had made a mistake. He was surrounded by an entourage of sycophants who passed his management style down the line, subjecting their own subordinates to the same kind of bullying, with the result that the corporation operated in a terror-laden miasma of politicking, backstabbing, misrepresentation of personal achievement and the sophisticated ‘management’ of company news. Nevertheless, the technique got results, and while the chairman’s intuitive methods produced some spectacular failures, they could also be spectacularly successful. It was a world in which the dangers were colossal, but in which the rewards were commensurate with the risks.

For many years I had supposed this style of management to be unique and that those who had had the misfortune to know it were exceptionally unfortunate. However, I have come to understand that in the world of the nontenured, administration by fear, with the firing squad replaced by instant dismissal, is closer to the rule than the exception. Indeed, it appears to be the norm for any organization in which the administrators are not accountable to those under their authority and in which there is no job security. Academics tend to tr4eat STalin’s Russia as a savage and alien society that requires sophisticated analytic techniques to understand it, because tenure protects them from that perpetual threat of job loss that, with all its attendant office politics, drawn daggers and smoking guns, is part of the fabric of most peoples’ daily lives. They fail to appreciate that Soviet reality ‘begins at home’.

Now this reminds very strongly of IDS’ DWP. Let’s see, run by a bully, who governs by his own intuitions untrammelled by facts? Check. An atmosphere of fear of dismissal, with the subordinates passing this down the line to those under them? Check. Carefully managed news? Definitely check. Backstabbing? Absolutely. Furthermore, like Stalin the ultimate use of terror is the benefit sanction, in which the victim is denied state support. You can compare this to the artificial famines Stalin and his subordinates created during collectivisation, and which devastated the Ukraine in what has become known as the Holodomor. And people are similarly starving in Britain through Smith’s policies, and have died as a result. See the blog entries by Stilloaks, Mike, The Void, DEAP and Jayne Linney for this.

As for the personal psychology of the two, like Stalin IDS also appears to have an inferiority complex. There is, after all, considerable doubt whether he was actually an officer in the British army. IDS also seems to share Stalin’s intellectual vanity. Stalin became General Secretary of the Communist Party as the other Bolsheviks thought that he was too thick to present much of a threat. They believed that a Napoleonic dictator would arise after the Revolution to rule by fear. Unfortunately, they looked in completely the opposite direction, and thought it was Trotsky. Trotsky was, after all, the head of the Red Army during the Civil War, and was a far more sophisticated thinker than Stalin. And so they were looking in completely the wrong direction, while Stalin was under their noses carefully using his position to throw out anyone, who was not absolutely loyal to him. From being a thicko, who didn’t properly understand the niceties of Marxist doctrine – in the 1930s he was still supposed to be taking lessons in Dialectal Materialism – Stalin suddenly became the greatest genius of all time and all humanity, who not only understood Marx thoroughly, but had also personally solved certain problems in Plato. IDS similarly claims an intellectual ability he doesn’t possess. He has, after all, claimed to have a degree from an Italian institute of higher education, which actually doesn’t issue them.

As for spin and backbiting, it was IDS, who appears to have blamed one of his subordinates for his own mistakes. He regularly refuses to release the figures on how many people have died after being declared ‘fit for work’ by ATOS, and delayed appearing before the Work and Pensions Committee for as long as possible. Like Iosip Vissarionovich from Georgia, he also believes himself to be above the law.

And like Stalin, IDS personally likes to appear surrounded by armed thugs. When he appeared before the parliamentary Work and Pensions Committee, he was surrounded by bodyguards and armed policemen, who kept their guns trained on the public gallery, including disabled visitors and their carers. So IDS also has the old brute’s absolute contempt for the poor and most vulnerable in spades.

There are, however, some differences between the two. So far, Ian Duncan Smith and Cameron are not following Stalin in demanding mass arrests, and deportations to forced labour camps, although there are extremely ominous signs of something like them in Osborne’s plans to expand workfare. But the main difference is in success. Stalin was ruthless, but he turned the Soviet Union into the world’s second superpower. During the 1930s the country had an economic growth rate of something like 30 per cent. Vast industrial combines, such as those in the Donbass, virtually appeared overnight. The Tories, on the other hand, have consistently wrecked Britain’s industrial, manufacturing base. Osborne is claiming that we are well on the way to recovery, but this is only through a very clever manipulation of the statistics.

So IDS and his Tory party comrades have all of Stalin’s defects – the murderous ruthlessness, with absolutely none of the old psychopath’s capacity for turning the country into an industrial giant. And this is the man, who, as head of the Department for Work and Pensions, is in charge of the lives of millions of the poorest and most vulnerable.

Way back in the 19th century liberal Russians cried ‘Who can be happy in Russia?’ Under Cameron, the question can be put this side of the Baltic. ‘Who can be happy in Britain?’