In the aftermath of Michael Foot’s death, Charles Moore gives Oleg Gordievsky’s story of former Labour Party leader Foot’s role as a Soviet agent:
This week, Gordievsky gave me his full account. At the end of the 1940s, he said, when Foot was editor and managing director of the Left-wing paper Tribune (he continued in the latter role until 1974), the KGB decided that he was “progressive”. By this they meant that he was sympathetic to the Soviet Union, at that time run by the mass-murderer Joseph Stalin. Their officers in London, describing themselves as diplomats, approached Foot. He readily agreed to see them in Tribune’s offices. There they chatted to him and praised the paper, which was always short of money. They left a £10 note (about £250 in today’s values) in his jacket pocket.
For nearly 20 years, these meetings continued, roughly monthly. Foot did not conceal them, exactly, but they were not publicly known. He accepted the money, which was slipped into his pocket in a way which allowed him to ignore it, each time the KGB came. Foot freely disclosed information about the Labour movement to them. He told them which politicians and trade union leaders were pro-Soviet, even suggesting which union bosses should be given the present of Soviet-funded holidays on the Black Sea.
A leading supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Foot also passed on what he knew about debates over nuclear weapons. In return, the KGB gave him drafts of articles encouraging British disarmament which he could then edit and publish, unattributed to their real source, in Tribune. There was no protest by Foot to the KGB over the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, and he quite often visited the Soviet Union to a top-level welcome. The KGB classified him as an agent, codenamed BOOT.
In 1968, Foot expressed disquiet at the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and wanted to meet the KGB less regularly. They reclassified him as a “confidential contact”, and this he remained when a Cabinet minister in the governments of the 1970s. The link seems to have been broken off, however, before he became leader of the Labour Party in 1980, and never resumed (although the KGB asked Gordievsky to revive it in 1985, months before he defected).
Under the title “The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged”, the New York Times has a column by Frank Rich in which he risibly tries to tar the tea party movement with the actions of a suicide murderer.
Stack was a lone madman, and it would be both glib and inaccurate to call him a card-carrying Tea Partier or a “Tea Party terrorist.” But he did leave behind a manifesto whose frothing anti-government, anti-tax rage overlaps with some of those marching under the Tea Party banner.
Well yes, it’s true that Stack’s suicide note makes clear that he is no friend of government and it is also true that the tea party movement has campaigned against the spread of centralized governance, especially federal governance. However, a case could just as easily, and just as flimsily, be made that Stack’s anti-government opinions tie in with the anti-Washington sentiments expressed by Barack Obama prior to his election. A narrative of broken, oppressive government is nothing new and it is obvious from the note that Stack is not particularly a man of the right:
Yet at the same time, the joke we call the American medical system, including the drug and insurance companies, are murdering tens of thousands of people a year and stealing from the corpses and victims they cripple, and this country’s leaders don’t see this as important as bailing out a few of their vile, rich cronies.
__________________________
to bring about a much-needed re-evaluation of the laws that allow the monsters of organized religion to make such a mockery of people who earn an honest living.
__________________________
The recent presidential puppet GW Bush and his cronies
Of course the tea party movement is no friend of George W. Bush either and this allows Rich in his article to begin the reclassification of Bush as one of the “no longer politically active Republicans of whom we will speak well in order to favourably compare them with current Republicans”, in the same way as happened to Reagan and Bush I.
The fact that JFK’s killer was a communist hasn’t stopped conservatives being weirdly tarred with responsibility for his death. With this in mind, I present the last lines of Stack’s suicide note:
The communist creed: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed.
From the Guardian of course:
I’m no art critic, but I was fortunate enough to be able to look at this exhibition from an informed, leftwing perspective – and I was very impressed. Named after the Soviet Union’s secret cosmonaut training city, Star City: The Future Under Communism brought together work by artists (from Russia and beyond) inspired by Soviet visions of the future and the space race.
How lucky to have an “informed, leftwing” perspective. Makes one pity those without it….
In one room, Jane and Louise Wilson’s film Star City, shot on location, is shown on all four walls using four projectors. It’s an all-encompassing, smothering experience, symbolising the capitalist state’s suppression of the individual for the sake of profit. There’s an impressive, life-size replica of Sputnik 1, the first satellite to orbit Earth. The US response to Sputnik blew up on its launchpad, earning it the name Flopnik. That made me chuckle.
So an exhibition about the Soviet Union symbolizes the capitalist states suppression of the individual? It takes a special kind of derangement for somebody to compare the Soviet Union with the free world countries of the same period and to conclude that it is capitalism that suppresses the individual.
The space race wasn’t about getting to the moon: it was about who might get control of space, and what that might mean for peace on Earth. The exhibition’s main theme is escapism – both through the space race and science-fiction. I took this to be symbolic of the escape from capitalist barbarism that the Soviet system as a whole achieved.
The Soviet Union was an escape from barbarism? Gulags and secret police are an escape from barbarism? Time for an image methinks.
That’s an image from the Ukrainian terror famine of the early 30s. An “escape from capitalist barbarism”.
One Polish artist, Pawel Althamer, has dressed residents of his former Soviet tower block in gold spacesuits. What this shows, like all the works, is that life under the Soviet Union wasn’t the grey, backward stuff of US propaganda: it was full of life and colour.
That’s right, because naturally everyone wore gold flippin’ spacesuits under the Soviets.
What stayed with me most was a quote from the critic Boris Groys, reproduced on one of the gallery walls: he says that socialism can both liberate and control the forces of nature, taking humanity far beyond the miserly alleyways of commodity production. I walked away from this exhibition with a sense of the artists’ overwhelming conviction that socialism and communism are still the future. We’ve had the Soviet experiment. We’ll get it right next time.
Over my dead body, although of course one dead body, or millions of them, are never a disincentive to those inclined to experiment on human societies.
Just remember, they’ll get it right next time….
I have fallen in love with American names,
The sharp names that never get fat,
The snakeskin-titles of mining-claims,
The plumed war-bonnet of Medicine Hat,
Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat.
Seine and Piave are silver spoons,
But the spoonbowl-metal is thin and worn,
There are English counties like hunting-tunes
Played on the keys of a postboy’s horn,
But I will remember where I was born.
I will remember Carquinez Straits,
Little French Lick and Lundy’s Lane,
The Yankee ships and the Yankee dates
And the bullet-towns of Calamity Jane.
I will remember Skunktown Plain.
I will fall in love with a Salem tree
And a rawhide quirt from Santa Cruz,
I will get me a bottle of Boston sea
And a blue-gum nigger to sing me blues.
I am tired of loving a foreign muse.
Rue des Martyrs and Bleeding-Heart-Yard,
Senlis, Pisa, and Blindman’s Oast,
It is a magic ghost you guard
But I am sick for a newer ghost,
Harrisburg, Spartanburg, Painted Post.
Henry and John were never so
And Henry and John were always right?
Granted, but when it was time to go
And the tea and the laurels had stood all night,
Did they never watch for Nantucket Light?
I shall not rest quiet in Montparnasse.
I shall not lie easy at Winchelsea.
You may bury my body in Sussex grass,
You may bury my tongue at Champmédy.
I shall not be there. I shall rise and pass.
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.
by Stephen Vincent Benét
h/t Jay Nordlinger
Lytil Jhon and Robyne Hude
Wayth-men ware commendyd gude
In Yngil-wode and Barnysdale
Thai oysyd all this tyme thare trawale.
Orygynale Chronicle (1420), Andrew of Wyntoun.
The city’s full of cheddar like a cheese pizza
known for senoritas and Inglewood Familias
The landmarks in the ‘hood is legendary
the fabulous Forum, the Court and the Library
Inglewood Swangin (1997), Mack 10.
John Derbyshire at the Corner:
In my own days as a math undergraduate (old British system: no nonsense about majors and minors, we just did math) it was a running joke that when invited to the room of a female Humanities student, we’d browse her textbooks while she was making coffee; but when they came to our rooms, they never browsed our books.
The Planster’s Vision
Cut down that timber! Bells, too many and strong,
Pouring their music through the branches bare,
From moon-white church-towers down the windy air
Have pealed the centuries out with Evensong.
Remove those cottages, a huddled throng!
Too many babies have been born in there,
Too many coffins, bumping down the stair,
Carried the old their garden paths along.
I have a Vision of The Future, chum,
The worker’s flats in fields of soya beans
Tower up like silver pencils, score on score:
And Surging Millions hear the Challenge come
From microphones in communal canteens
“No Right! No wrong! All’s perfect, evermore.”
by Sir John Betjeman
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