I’ll see your al-Assad and raise you one Stalin

The astute David Lindsay on last night’s Question Time:

George Galloway had David Aaronovitch bang to rights on Question Time. The old Stalin-worshipper has never said that that position had been wrong at the time, any more than his friends such as Michael Gove have ever said that their very active adoration of apartheid South Africa and of Pinochet’s Chile had been wrong at the time.

It is worth note that here, as for the Blairites there, the original neoconservatives (Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer and so forth) were, whilst not necessarily Stalinists, still very much orthodox Marxists.  After a brief period of flirtation with neoconservatism, Francis Fukuyama denounced the ideology as a form of Leninism, energised by the belief (tragic in its first Russian incarnation and farcical in its later American one) ‘that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will’.  Before Dr Fukuyama, there was Dr Gary Dorrien, an esteemed historian of the neoconservative movement, who made careful note of the Trotskyist and American New Left origins of the movement in his early work The Neoconservative Mind.  It is little wonder that worship of naked power and will, rather than the worship of truth and beauty which energised the antique and religious forms of socialism, comes to dominate such ideologies.

Mr Lindsay drives home the point that the Blairites are even less reconstructed than the American neocons are, if indeed they left the Soviet sphere of influence much later than their American allies had.  And they are therefore as greatly, if not more, to be treated with suspicion.