Democracy as a suicide pact

It ought to go without saying that no institution should be run by those who hate its core principles.

Could you imagine Hitler at the head of the Committee for Racial Equality? Dr Shipman in charge of care for the elderly? Ian Brady (RIP your throat out) running an orphanage? Kim Jong-un leading a campaign for nuclear non-proliferation?

Utterly preposterous, isn’t it? Yet so many Westerners don’t demur at the sight of communists rising to the political apex. The political essence of communism has remained unchanged since Marx: dictatorship of the proletariat. In practice that means dictatorship of a few cannibals (or just one), which rather goes against the grain of Western polity.

However, France, Germany, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Portugal, Spain all have communists sitting in their parliaments.

That’s what Lenin called ‘legalism’: joining Western institutions to undermine them from within, a conspiratorial stratagem later developed by the Frankfurt School. And yet Western countries play along.

In other words, our parliaments include subversives whose mission in life is to destroy our parliaments. That’s akin to an oncologist injecting himself with cancer cells. My sense of logic is offended.

But then again, those countries are rather… how can one put it without causing offence… continental. What else can one expect from those garlic eaters? That sort of thing could never catch on in Old Blighty, what?

Well, it could and it has. Introducing Andrew Murray, a life-long communist just appointed to run Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign (Jeremy himself needs no introduction: his similar credentials are widely known).

Murray resigned his Communist Party membership only last December, at age 57, no doubt in preparation for entry into mainstream politics. In 2015 he wrote: “Communism still represents… a society worth working towards – albeit not by the methods of the 20^th century, which failed.”

As any reader of Marx will know, those methods are inseparable from the essence of communism. Predictably this has been proved by every communist regime – as it would be in a communist Britain Murray thinks is worth working towards.

Murray and Corbyn are close friends and colleagues. Both were (or rather are) columnists for the communist rag Morning Star, with Murray having first acquired journalistic experience at the Soviet Novosti press agency.

Andrew displays none of the weathervane qualities of so many politicians. He consistently venerates both Lenin (whose portrait hangs above his desk) and Stalin (who, though a bit “harsh”, laudably installed socialism “in a third of the world”). He expresses solidarity with “People’s Korea”, bossed by my candidate to run the nuclear non-proliferation campaign. He supports Hezbollah and other Islamic terrorist groups (a perfect fit with Jeremy there).

What I like about both Andrew and Jeremy is that they can’t avoid speaking the truth from time to time. Thus Jeremy has described Andrew as “a democratic socialist and a member of the Labour Party like me.” That’s exactly right: just like him. Both are democratic socialists in the same sense in which the Soviets preached “democratic centralism”.

(Democratic socialism is an oxymoron in any sense, but I shan’t expand on it here. If you agree, this would be superfluous. If you don’t, a longer format would be required to prove you wrong.)

And Andrew won a place in my heart by declaring that “If credit were given where it is due, the black banners of the Islamic State… would be emblazoned with portraits of Tony Blair and George Bush.”

And there I was, thinking I’d never agree with a communist on anything. True enough, the IS owes its existence to the criminal (or criminally stupid, take your pick) invasion of Iraq in 2003, which both Murray and I oppose, if for different reasons. Of course, he champions the cause promoted under those black banners, and there we diverge.

I’ve often had the occasion to remark that the West seems to be bent on suicide, a death wish masked by the democratic tag attached to it. People see democracy – which is nothing but a method of government – not only as a be all and end all, but also as a blanket indulgence against all sins and an open door to all evil.

This isn’t merely misguided or ill-advised. It’s insane, in the sense in which suicide is insane. In a mentally healthy society, evil dolts like Murray and Corbyn would be charged with treason. In a mentally healthy but slightly soft society, they would at least be kept out of civilised politics.

Yet Corbyn is in with a sporting chance to become head of Her Majesty’s Government on 8 June. In the unlikely event that were to happen, Murray would probably get a high cabinet post. That would effectively spell the suicide of the United Kingdom, all in the name of democracy.

It’s time we stopped thinking of such matters in the largely meaningless Enlightenment terms of right, left and centre. These only have some – very limited – validity within the mainstream of Western politics, not in the sulphurous swamp engulfing it outside. You know, where the creepy-crawlies like Corbyn and Murray live.

And if they are now part of the mainstream, then you know that a suicide pact has been signed, sealed and executed. Or is about to be.