Comment:Why the Left Wing Chattering Classes Cannot Be Trusted With Democracy.

This is the first in a series of articles exploring the links between some elements of the ‘peace’ movement, the far left and foreign intelligence.

While delving through the archives of the Internet-I came across an interesting article buried deep within the BBC.

Vic Allen is a retired Leeds University professor and a former leading member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), from Keighley, North Yorkshire. He told a BBC Two documentary in 1999 that said he had "no regrets" over providing information to the East German Stazi secret police.

He said he considered that perfectly “legitimate” because he belonged to a pro-Soviet, pro-East German faction of the group.

Dr Robin Pearson (Codename Armin) was another academic at Hull University who was used by the Stazi as a recruiter and an agent of influence. According to his handler Berhart Kartheus he “began spying on his fellow British students - reading their dissertations and looking for clues to their politics, as well as supplying the names of former students who got sensitive jobs at NATO and the Ministry of Defence.”. In autumn 1982, he took a job in London where the Stasi is alleged to have asked him to get to know women at the Ministry of Defence.

The highly respected academic on intelligence matters Anthony Glees said “It is quite clear that he was regarded as a long-term bet, alongside Kim Philby and had the Berlin Wall not fallen, he undoubtedly would have been in a position to have done great harm and to have put many people in harm's way."

A former colleague of mine in Amsterdam who was living in East Germany at the time , who’s own family suffered at the hands of the Ministry of Interior, told me after she read her own Stazi file that her family was monitored because of information given to them by ‘informers’ in the West . Her own father was ‘questioned’ by the secret police for three weeks not only because he listened to Voice of America and the BBC World Service but most of all because he had links to ‘peace activists’ in the West. This story is repeated time and again by many who lived under the shadow of the hammer and sickle.

One has to imagine with horror how Dr Pearson and Dr Allen helped the oppressive Eastern Bloc countries in maintaining their regimes of terror. Yet they have never been charged with their crimes.

When one looks at the list of people who would either overthrow the political system in the West or would be traitors to their fellow countrymen, one cannot help but notice a connection.

Let me list some names and you will get the picture: Philby (Codename: Stanley); Blunt (Codename Johnson) ;Burgess (Codename: Hicks); MacLean (Codename: Homer) ; Cairncross, Harry Houghton, Ethel Gee, Gordon Lonsdale; Melita Norwood (Codename: Hola), Tom Driberg MP (Codename: Lepage), Raymond Fletcher MP -all ‘cleaver people’ and ‘artistic people’ willing to sell there souls to the men with the rubber batons in East Germany, Poland or the Soviet Union, all of whom were privileged people who’s arrogance literally killed people.

The in ‘arts’ there have been many voices that have seek to accommodate themselves with despotism and dictatorships-look at the Bloomsbury Group. (and the perennial favorite of the feminist left Virginia Woolf,) and there attitudes towards the Second World War, in particular while the Nazi-Soviet Pact was in effect, and their attitude towards “the proles” in general. John Maynard Keynes himself was friends with many of the “Cambridge Five” and a member of the Apostles; he was close most notably with Kim Philby and Guy Burgess. Other members of this social circle included several other “idealists” including Lytton Strachey, G.E. Moore and Rupert Brooke.

It was none other than George Orwell said what he thought of the left wing ‘peace movement’:

"Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, he that is not with me is against me.”

It has been suggested by many historians of the Cold War that CND’ s change of policy in the late 1960’s from ‘multilateralism’ to ‘unilateralism’ was ‘helped’ in no small part by the Stazi and KGB after it recognised the success of the Committee of 100. It is rumored that Bruce Kent was possibly an unwitting ‘agent of influence’ by the Stazi, a claim which he is ‘untrue’. Leading members of the Labour Party are thought to mentioned in the Stazi archives but remain hidden by the German Government due to their political nature and possible embarrassment to the Government.

Beyond this there has been the work of the Workers' Revolutionary Party (UK) under the leadership of Gerry Healy from the 1950’s to the 1980’s. When he conducted his ‘purge’ of the ‘less educated’ members of ‘his’ party in the late 1970’s the leading Inquisitor was none other than Vanessa Redgrave who it is alleged ‘questioned’ one poor woman (against her will) for being a ‘closet capitalist’. She herself has paid £50,000 in December 2002 to bail Akhmed Zakayev the Chechen separatist leader to come and live in the UK. This act and the subsequent Alexander Litvinenko poisoning has encouraged the Russian Government to step up its espionage and military activities towards the UK in particular, to the extent that MI5 now has to channel resources to cover this activity rather than concentrate on Islamic fundamentalism.

But it does not stop there. The WRP and fellow travellers positively identified themselves with both the Saddam and Gaddafi Governments in an expressed policy of supporting ‘Arab Nationalism’ without any conditions. That Baathism is based on fascism is over looked by the Trotsky left of the WRP.

In the early 1980’s the BBC’s Money Programme accused the WRP of receiving money from Jamahiriya el-Mukhabarat (Libyan Intelligence) including a possible £1,000,000 that had been received by the group from Libya and several Middle Eastern governments, between 1977 and 1983.The left wing publication Solidarity claimed also that the WRP was also involved in monitoring anti Saddam protestors and taking pictures back to the Iraqi Embassy in London to be examined by IIS in the 1980’s. The WRP also had sympathies with the IRA and INLA as well as other ‘anti-capitalist’ groups such as the Rote Armee Faktion, Japanese Red Army, ETA, the Red Brigades in Italy and our very own Angry Brigade.

Then there is”Respect - The Unity Coalition”. George Galloway needs no introduction, being a firm friend of Saddam Hussein and a possible benefactor of the Oil for Food programme but it is interesting to note that fellow travellers within Respect are Ken Loach , Harold Pinter, George Monbiot and Salma Yaqoob who are also high brow members of the intelligentsia and the cultural elite. Ironically the extremist group al Ghurabaa a takfiri group now banned in the UK has threatened Respect members and it believed in security circles that these prominent left wingers may themselves be a target of the extremists that they have so far sought to provide political cover.

That they seem so blind and so willing to get into bed with fascists (although the brown skinned ones to give a sheen to their politically correct dogma) shows the utter stupidity of their claims to be ‘progressive’ and ‘radical’ while at the same time their panache for infighting over the finer points of left wing ideology is breathtaking. Time and again these people glamorise the violence that they supposedly oppose, for example Ken Loach and his admiration for the leftist wing of the IRA in the 1920-21 Irish Civil War (see the film ‘The Wind that Shakes the Barley’).That they are all wealthy people who should know better seems to escape the likes of the BBC, who regularly promotes them.

All of the above have been involved in the Stop the War Coalition and CND , the two organisations that have a ‘patchy’ track record regarding their democratic credentials. Although there are some members of these organisations who are genuine anti-war advocates, I suspect that Mr Pinter, Ms Redgrave or Mr Galloway is not seeing the violent language that they regularly use with policies they don’t agree with, especially their poisonous Anti Americanism . That they keep ‘unhealthy’ company is the subject of these essays.

Not only should the Government be subject of public scrutiny but so should the opposition. Sadly for too long the ‘peace movement’ has been largely exempt from this scrutiny because many independent journalists, artists and academia are afraid of being ostracised from their peers in the left wing. That recruitment for extremist ideologies takes place in schools and colleges, and that the chattering classes seem to turn a blind eye is not acceptable in any democracy. It is now time to address this issue.

This is the first in a series of investigative pieces looking into the peace movement and possible links with foreign intelligence services and anti-democratic movements. The Wikipedia entries are for general reading but for further links and references see:

Hallas, Duncan. Cult comes a cropper
Healy, Gerry. Some Reflections on the Socialist Labor League
Higgins, Jim. Suppose He Had Been Enthusiastic: Review of Harry Ratner, Reluctant Revolutionary
Pitt, Bob. The Rise and Fall of Gerry Healy
North, David. Behind the split in the Workers Revolutionary Party
W.P.Snyder, The Politics of British Defense Policy, 1945-1962,
Christopher Driver, The Disarmers: A Study in Protest