12 November 2004

UNITED FOR PEACE — 25

I've been ridiculously busy this week: normal service will be resumed as soon as possible. For now, just a quick post to say that I was amused to get a name-check from Rob Griffiths, general secretary of the Stalinist Communist Party of Britain, writing in the Morning Star on Monday under the headline "Spectre of communism still haunts Europe". (The piece, in full here, was a belated puff for a meeting of Stalinist hacks at the European Social Forum.)

"The resurgence of the communists," he opined, "has intensified the anti-communism of the ruling classes and their mass media, assisted, as always, by fake 'left-wing' and pseudo-Marxist intellectuals. This is especially the case in Portugal, Sweden, Cyprus and Greece — but we have seen evidence of it in Britain too, where the CPB has expanded its influence in the trade union and peace movements . . . The resurgence of the international communist movement . . . is the most effective riposte to professional anti-communists like Denis MacShane, Nick Cohen and Tribune columnist Paul Anderson and to the amateur ones who constitute tiny left sects."

How elegantly put, comrade — but I'm afraid to relate that we professional anti-communists will not be deflected from our task by the ever-more-spectacular growth of the CPB, with its dozens of fearless militants working as trade union press officers and its hundreds of newspapers sold every day. You see, we're worried that if we don't keep up a barrage of fake "left-wing" anti-communist propaganda, our paymasters in the ruling classes will stop handing over the wheelbarrow-fulls of cash every week to which we have become accustomed. A truly materialist analysis would demonstrate that we have no choice but to fulfil the pseudo-Marxist role our bourgeois masters dictate.

What a simpleton.

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