The guys from the Triggernometry channel more often than not manage to achieve their aim of ‘fascinating conversations with fascinating people’. I don’t always agree with those who they have on but the guests that they have are always worth listening to. However, there has been one recent interview that Triggernometry have carried out with the historian Giles Udy.
Mr Udy has engaged in a long study of what life was like in the Soviet Union and has concluded that it was rotten to the core. This rottenness didn’t come from some misreading of Marx but because Marxism was followed to its logical conclusion. Mr Udy said that because Marx said that violent revolution was the way to create a utopia then violence became acceptable as a method to bring about change. Mr Udy outlined the horrors that Communism visited on Russia and demolished some long held beliefs of the western Left that whilst Stalin was bad Lenin was not so bad, by saying that the vast majority of the horrors of Stalinism had their roots in the actions of Lenin who also had no qualms about killing to aid the Party.
Even if you know a lot about the Soviet Union or grew up with it as a big threat in the background as many of people of my age did there are still things on here that you will find enlightening. Things such as the extent which the Labour party in the late 1920’s and early 30’s made excuses for the Soviet Union even though there were tales coming out about massive human rights abuses. Or how it was the much maligned (unfairly in my view) House of Lords and the Church of England that provided the driving force behind getting the public to understand how bad the Soviet Union really was. The Labour Party, the party that should represent the working classes found that they could not criticise a Soviet state that was treating those same working classes like dirt or worse.
We now know so much about the disaster that is Communism and what it did to the people who it ruled over not just in the Soviet Union but elsewhere, that I feel that there is no excuse for anyone to be a Communist today. Communism in my view should be treated with the same disdain as Nazism is treated as both were awful and horrific regimes. Unfortunately that is not the case. It is worryingly socially acceptable to go out wearing a hammer and sickle tee shirt whereas the reality should be that wearing such a garment should invite the same social opprobrium as wearing a swastika tee shirt.
This is an hour and a quarter interview but it is well worth taking the time to watch and listen to. It is possibly one of the most informative interviews I’ve seen from the Triggernometery guys and one I have no hesitation in recommending.
Meanwhile one of the “luminaries” on SAGE is avowed and unapologetic member of the British Communist Party, the appalling “Professor” Susan Michie who is using the virus as a method of economic destruction and societal subversion.
During the Cold War a lot of British institutions ranging from the Civil Service through to the BBC had specific procedures in place to prevent Communists from advancing through the organisation and damaging it or turning it into a tool of the Soviets. The problem is the state dropped its guard when it came to Communists who have not gone away even though the Soviet Union is no more. I was reading recently about Hobsbawm who wasn’t allowed certain jobs in the BBC because the BBC’s link with MI5 said that he was a dodgy Communist. Shame we are not so keen on preventing Communists entering institutions today.
To add on the subject of Michie. I do wonder about her moral compass as I find it difficult to believe that anyone would actively want to be a Communist knowing what we know now about Communism. It’s increasingly worrying that someone of her age and experience should still be a Communist.