FT258

On the BBC News website on 24 November, Ahmed Rashid wrote of “dozens of satellite news channels” in Pakistan, the viewers of which “will be bombarded with talk show hosts… trying to convince viewers of global conspiracies against Pakistan led by India and the United States”. In America, dozens of radio and TV commentators are offering conspiracy theories about President Obama and plots by the Democrats to turn America into a Communist society.

In one sense, nothing new is going on here: this is the return of the witch-hunts of the post-WW2 era, when the House Un-American Activities Committee and Senator Joe McCarthy hunted for commie ‘witches’, an activity whose template was the witch-hunts which erupted across Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Even though the combined membership of socialist parties in Britain wouldn’t fill a Northern Premier League football ground, the hunters of red witches are back. Chapman Pincher, doyen of the red-hunters a generation ago, has a new book out in America restating the case that Sir Roger Hollis, Director General of MI5 from 1956 to 1965, was a KGB agent, something Pincher first alleged in his 1981 book Their Trade is Treachery. On her first day in office, Baroness Ashton, the new European Union High Representative for Foreign Affairs (EU foreign minister in all but name), faced questions about her possible Soviet links because of her role as treasurer of CND in the early 1980s. (A section of the right has always assumed that CND was a Soviet front, though no evidence has ever been found to support this view.)

Essays by Pavel Stroilev and Peter Oborne in the Spectator [1] presented evidence – from the recently translated diaries of former Soviet official Anatoly Chernyaev and KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky – which they believe shows that the Labour Party of the pre-Tony Blair/Gordon Brown era was being manipulated by the KGB. The big name in these stories is the late Jack Jones, former General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union. Peter Oborne tells us: “We know that the Transport and General Workers Union leader Jack Jones – who received effusive praise from prime minister Gordon Brown when he died in April this year – was a paid agent for the USSR, and in receipt of cash handouts from his Soviet handler Oleg Gordievsky as late as the 1980s.”

However, in Professor Christopher Andrew’s 2009 official history of MI5, The Defence of the Realm, and using the same source, Andrew writes: “Oleg Gordievsky later reported that Jones had been regarded by the KGB as an agent from 1964 to 1968.” (p536; my emphasis).

Regarded as an agent? Is that the same as “was an agent”? Clearly not.

Peter Oborne tells us: “Anatoly Chernyaev’s diaries… indicate that, by the 1970s, an alternative government was in place, handpicked by Moscow to take over the apparatus of the British state once the Cold War was lost.”

An “alternative government”? Well, that sounds impressive. Except, there’s nothing in the Spectator pieces based on Chernyaev’s diaries to justify such a claim.

Journalist Melanie Phillips, who started off at the Guardian before making the traditional political journey from left to right and is now a columnist for the Daily Mail, is much given to witch-hunting. In the last five years, she has seen Muslim fundamentalism as the big threat. 2  But in November 2009 she returned to the red menace, finding evidence of a different kind of conspiracy.

“As Communism slowly crumbled, those on the far-Left who remained hostile towards Western civilisation found another way to realise their goal of bringing it down. This was what might be called ‘cultural Marxism’. It was based on the understanding that what holds a society together are the pillars of its culture: the structures and institutions of education, family, law, media and religion. Transform the principles that these embody and you can thus destroy the society they have shaped.” [3]

Derived from Antonio Gramsci’s notion of the left making a ‘long march’ through the institutions of capitalist society, this theme is also common among the American right at the moment as it seeks ways of portraying Barack (friend-of-American-bankers) Obama as a Communist. Gramsci’s strategy, Philips tells us, “has been carried out to the letter”.

What does this witch-hunting tell us? In general terms, perhaps simply that in times of trouble people need someone or something to blame for their misfortunes, and scapegoating is always easier and more gratifying than thinking. Or is it just that a general elect­ion is due in this county in the coming months and anything which might damage Labour is grist to the Spectator/Daily Mail mill? Either way, I feel positively nostalgic in welcoming back the hunt for the ‘red menace’.


Notes
1 Pavel Stroilev: “Reaching through the Iron Curtain”, Spectator, 7 Nov 2009, and “Kinnock and the Kremlin”, Spectator, 14 Nov 2009; Peter Oborne: “A poisoned legacy from which Labour has never quite recovered”, Spectator, 4 Nov 2009.
2 Summed up in her 2006 book Londonistan.
3 Phillips’s essay (D.Mail, 11 Nov 2009) bears a striking resemblance to Linda Kimball’s “Cultural Marxism” (American Thinker, 25 Feb 2007).