It’s not just Corbyn

This revolting creature is very much in the news. A former spy claims that back in the ‘80s he ran our PM-to-be as an asset of the StB, the Czech branch of the KGB.

The only thing that surprises me in this utterly plausible story is that Corbyn is supposed to have taken money for his services. One would think he’d be happy to serve his ideology free of charge.

This awful word is often confused with other, good ones, such as convictions, religion or philosophy. That potentially damaging misapprehension must be straightened out before it’s too late.

Ideology is virtual faith without God, virtual rationalism without reason and virtual morality without morals. As such, it’s always pernicious, regardless of its declared aims, slogans or institutional symbols.

While always clear on what they hate, ideologues are often hazy on what they love – and hazier still on what they’ll do if their ideology emerges victorious. That is, after they’ve sorted out their enemies, destroyed the institutions they detest and ditched the policies they dislike.

An ideologue may be a fire-eating patriot. But in deed, rather than word, he’ll remain one for only as long as his country conforms to his ideology. If not, he’ll side with his co-ideologues even if they are his country’s enemies.

If accused of treason, he’ll be righteously indignant, as Corbyn is now. He, and only he, wants what’s best for his country. If a push from the country’s enemies is needed to get it on the right track, he’ll collaborate with the enemies while remaining a patriot in his own eyes.

In that spirit Corbyn has collaborated in various ways with just about everyone seeking to subvert Britain or, more broadly, the West: the IRA; Hamas; Hezbollah; obvious Soviet fronts, such as the World Peace Organisation or the CND; Chavez and his heirs.

Reclaiming Falklands was a “Tory plot”; the killing of bin Laden was “a tragedy”; Nato is “a threat to world peace”. Thus his acting as a communist asset looks natural. He himself was – and remains – a communist, loving everything other communists love and hating everything they hate.

There’s no past tense to ‘communist’. Espousing that evil ideology in one’s mature years takes a certain temperamental predisposition, which doesn’t change with age. Communism isn’t an opinion. It’s a character trait.

That’s why I’m always suspicious of ‘ex-communists’ who see the conservative light late in life. Changing one’s hat doesn’t change one’s head.

To Corbyn’s credit, he doesn’t even pretend to be anything other than what he is. Any member of the British Communist Party would happily sign his name to every policy Corbyn proposes and will act on in the tragic, and eminently possible, event he becomes prime minister.

Lest this might be construed as an attack specifically on communism, note what I said above: all ideologies are pernicious. If they aren’t, they’re not ideologies but something else.

That’s why it’s worrying to observe typological similarities between our hard left, as exemplified by Corbyn, and hard right, people who upset me by calling themselves conservatives.

British hard right overlap with Corbyn in his hatred of Nato. He hates it because Nato’s raison d’être was collective security in the face of Russia’s communist threat. They hate it because Nato’s raison d’être is collective security in the face of Putin’s kleptofascist threat.

Like Corbyn, the pseudo-conservative hard right are driven by an ideology. Hence they, like him, support Britain’s enemies, in their case Putin’s Russia.

Corbyn loved communist Russia because it was animated by hatred of the same things he hated. The hard right love Putin’s Russia because it seems to be animated by hatred of the same things they hate.

Blinded by their ideology, they don’t realise that, though Putin may hate all the same things, he hates them for a different reason, which makes all the difference in (and for) the world.

Putin does loathe both Nato and the EU, but not because they may be internationalist threats to Britain’s national identity. He loathes them because they’re obstacles in the way of his kleptofascist ambitions, prime among which is the restoration of the Soviet empire in a different guise.

I’m astounded every time I hear hard right ideologues advocate leaving not only the EU but also Nato. The EU is a wicked, mendacious contrivance, and Britain should get out for any number of rational and moral, which is to say non-ideological, reasons.

But Nato is the only reason communist Russia didn’t overrun Europe, including Britain, in the post-war years. This doesn’t mean that Nato is pristine in every sense.

That Nato is also an instrument of American imperialism is beyond question. But then the help Britain gratefully received from America in the two world wars wasn’t offered for altruistic reasons either.

It’s just that the goals of US imperialism coincided with Britain’s interests then, as they do now. Surely those hard right ideologues don’t think Britain is now capable of defending herself on her own?

Or do they realistically think that any British government will ever be able or willing to increase the defence budget exponentially? The point is, they don’t think about anything realistically. They think about everything ideologically.

In the name of his ideology Corbyn is willing to excuse the hideous crimes committed by his co-ideologues. What’s a mountain of corpses if ‘social justice’ sits atop?

In the name of their ideology, the hard left are just as willing to excuse the hideous crimes committed in Putin’s Russia. What does it matter as long as he professes to hate all the same things they hate, be it the EU, Nato or the Muslims?

None so blind as those who won’t see. The British hard left denied the Soviet threat, and the British hard right deny Putin’s threat.

So what, they say, if Putin attacks Nato’s Baltic members. That only threatens us if we remain in Nato. If we’re out, we’re safe.

One eagerly awaits their referring to Putin’s geopolitical ambitions as “a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing”. Paul Valéry was right: history teaches nothing.

Some of it is sheer ignorance. For example, though the hard left correctly identify the Islamisation of Europe as an existential threat, they incorrectly see Putin as an ally.

In fact, his most trusted and sinister lieutenant is Ramzan Kadyrov, appointed by Putin to run the Muslim Chechnya – and much of Moscow’s organised crime, spilling over into the West. Kadyrov is implicated not only in the 2015 murder of the opposition politician Nemtsov, but also in the 2013 attack on the Boston Marathon.

Yet ideologues are ignorant ideologically. They don’t know because they don’t want to know.

Hence they closed their eyes on the unspeakable crimes committed by Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao and Pol Pot. The information was available, but they didn’t want it lest it might compromise their ideology. Similarly, they either deny or claim ignorance of Putin’s crimes – the kind of ideology doesn’t matter.

They should all come together under the slogan “Ideologues of all kinds unite. You have nothing to lose but your minds.”

5 thoughts on “It’s not just Corbyn”

  1. “The only thing that surprises me in this utterly plausible story is that Corbyn is supposed to have taken money for his services. One would think he’d be happy to serve his ideology free of charge.”

    Give him the money if only for cab fare and then get him to sign the receipt. Typical. “We go you now boy!”

  2. Mr. Boot, I have been reading some of the works of Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn and in a journal called the Modern Age, he wrote this about ideology in the Summer of 1977:

    “Indeed, no human being, except a child or an imbecil, is without a personal outops or a social-political-economic utopia which even might have geographic ramifications. Nor do we know of an intelligent, adult person without an ideology, though in most cases it will not be carefully thought through; it will lack a sharp profile; it will not be entirely free of certain inner contraclictions.”

    Is he talking about something different than what is meant today by “ideology?”

    1. Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn appears to be conflating ‘ideology’ with ambition. Ambition can include a desire to implement (or impose in Corbyn’s case) an ideology but not all ambition, whether “social-political-economic” or “geographic” will be governed by an ideology.

      Ideology: 1. a system of ideas and ideals, especially one which forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy.
      2. the science of ideas; the study of their origin and nature.

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