February 8, 2010
Is my MP as bad as Nick Griffin?
I live in Bethnal Green and Bow. That means George Galloway is my MP.
It was recently suggested to me that Galloway is as bad as BNP leader Nick Griffin. At first I thought this claim ludicrous. But it actually requires more work than one might expect to get a handle on why Griffin is necessarily worse than Galloway.
The first charge is that both Griffin and Galloway have previously been adherents of extremist politics.
Griffin spent the late 1970s and early 1980s in the National Front, an overtly fascist white supremacist organisation. There’s little doubt that the National Front glorified Hitler and the Nazi Party.
Galloway has been a member of the Labour Party since he was 13. However in the early 1980s he supported Communist Party affiliation with the Labour Party. In 2002 Galloway told The Guardian that he had always been a supporter of the Soviet Union:
“Yes, I did support the Soviet Union, and I think the disappearance of the Soviet Union is the biggest catastrophe of my life. If there was a Soviet Union today, we would not be having this conversation about plunging into a new war in the Middle East, and the US would not be rampaging around the globe.”
First, some numbers. Let’s take the Third Reich. It’s estimated that 5.9 million Jews were murdered by Hitler’s regime. In addition, approximately 2 to 3 million Soviet POWs, 2 million ethnic Poles, up to 1.5 million Romani, 200,000 handicapped, political and religious dissenters, 15,000 homosexuals and 5,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses were also killed, bringing the death toll to around 11 million.
In the USSR, under Stalin’s regime alone the numbers of murdered range from between 15 to 30 million (if one includes the deaths of famine victims in the Ukraine).
Numbers alone can’t really paint a full picture of the horror. But on this simple metric, Galloway’s idolisation of the brutality of the USSR is very hard to stomach.
Of course, Griffin now publicly claims that he abhors Hitler and the legacy of the Third Reich, and during that Question Time appearance he made great play of the fact his father was an RAF pilot during WWII. But there are few who believe that Griffin is anything but a closet supporter of Nazi fascism. (It doesn’t help that his protegé Mark Collett was once secretly filmed declaring that “Churchill was a fucking cunt who led us into a pointless war with other whites standing up for their race”).
But here’s an interesting thing. Knowledge of Galloway’s far-left past (and present) doesn’t seem to have the same subjective impact on ordinary people as believing that Griffin is a supporter of Nazi fascism. But why, when the numbers alone seem to put them firmly together?
There are a few fairly bad reasons, appearing to owe more to popular cognitive biases than anything else.
The first is that Sovietism does not agitate the British consciousness the way Hitler does. Our post-war national myths are constructed around the tale of plucky little Britain standing alone, defying the worst monster ever to have existed, and saving the world.
Mostly this is a load of bunk. Hitler lost WWII because he made the idiotic mistake of turning on Stalin before he’d secured his western front. Russia won the Second World War, the end of which was precipitated by the late-arrival of America. Yet in the post-imperial decline of this nation, the bogey man of Hitler has loomed large as a rallying point of (lost) greatness.
Which is not to deny that Hitler was a monster. But Britain didn’t fight the war to save the Jews (indeed, the lack of action taken to save European Jewry before and throughout the war should be a cause of great shame). Despite the Cold War and the subsequent revelations of the true horrors of Sovietism, even Stalin could never replace Hitler as Britain’s national bête noir. The (entirely justified) visceral loathing directed at Griffin is in large measure a product of our collective national myths. But the upshot of those myths is that Galloway can express admiration for a regime as brutal and horrific as the Third Reich and not be subjected to anything like the public hatred Griffin receives. Yet that’s in no way to Galloway’s credit.
The second bad reason is that Galloway has been a political insider for a great deal of time. A long-serving Labour MP before he joined the Respect Party, Galloway has walked the corridors of power without sending innocents to Scottish gulags or orchastrating famines in Bedfordshire to teach his Tory enemies a lesson. By contrast, Griffin is a political outsider and the thought of his gaining office raises the spectre of the democratic rise of Hitler.
Yet this just indicates that we’re used to Galloway, not that he is fundamentally cleaner than Griffin. After all, if Griffin gets elected as an MP he’s hardly likely to achieve anything at all in Westminster (except for being a symbolic presence for the far right, who are a million light-years from national takeover).
The third bad reason is to think that the BNP – and previously the NF – are a source of enormous on-the-ground unrest, and that they provoke trouble and use violence and intimidation to influence elections. Surely there is no parallel with George Galloway? Yet the 2005 election campaign in Bethnal Green and Bow would indicate otherwise.
So there’s less to differentiate Galloway and Griffin, when carefully considered, than might be presupposed.
There is, however, one important difference. Galloway may be unrepentant about his far-left politics and his Soviet apologism. But he can always claim that the millions of deaths in the USSR were an unfortunate by-product of mistakes, corruption, external pressure and the failure of a fundamentally good dream. Now, I don’t think we should take that as an excuse. When something produces as much tragedy as the USSR did, it’s time to completely repudiate it. Galloway must be severely chastised for his failure to do so.
By contrast, Griffin cannot claim that he formerly admired Hitler and Nazi policies but that this was somehow separate from the fact the Third Reich murdered millions of people purely on the basis of their ethnicity. Persecution of European Jewry and other minorities was a constituent part of the Nazi policy to promote the “Aryan Master Race”.
For sure, modern Britons are more sensitive and attuned to ideologically driven racism than to indiscriminate mass-murder by Communist apparatchiks. That’s partly a product of the Hitler-orientated national myths, but also of the important and highly welcome rise of race equality since the 1950s. But whereas Galloway can claim (however myopically) that there is a difference between Sovietism-the-Communist-Ideal and Sovietism-the-Real-World-Disaster, Griffin and the far right cannot divorce their racial politics and (closet) Hitler adoration from the fact of the Holocaust.
So on that metric, I’m willing to grant that there is some tangible difference between Galloway and Griffin, however thin and qualified I think that should ultimately be.
But that’s not the whole story. We have the little matter of Saddam Hussein to consider.
Whatever Griffin says now, given his past and his party’s racist policies there are few who doubt that he secretly admires Hitler (and indeed fancies himself as the Führer’s reincarnation).
George Galloway went one better than mere adoration. He flew to Iraq to shake hands with a very living neo-fascist tyrant, who had previously emulated Hitler by gassing Iraqi ethnic minorities.Indeed, Galloway was happy to salute Saddam’s “courage, strength and indefatigability“.
Galloway may claim that he was maneouvred into expressing more support than he strictly desired, that he was opposing the “worse evil” of American imperialism, or whatever. But there simply is no excuse. I opposed the war and history has proven myself and others correct to do so. Yet there is a huge distance between opposing an illegal war based on lies, and defending and celebrating a vicious tyrant like Saddam Hussein.
Nick Griffin can only idolize Hitler in the abstract. George Galloway went one better, and paid tribute to a vicious murdering dictator in the flesh.
Which forces one to ask: Perhaps George Galloway isn’t as bad as Nick Griffin. Perhaps he’s worse?
Dave Semple said,
February 8, 2010 at 9:34 am
I can’t help but feel this is a wind up.
Paul Sagar said,
February 8, 2010 at 9:39 am
Dave,
It is meant to be provocative.
But if you can give me solid reasons why there’s more daylight between Galloway and Griffin on the “really nasty piece of work” scale, I’d honestly be glad to hear them.
I know the above conclusion is counter-intuitive (and worse, it’s Nick Cohen-esque). But I’ve been thinking it over, and those were the conclusions I came to.
Genuinely, if you can give me better reasons I’ll be glad to accept them.
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Rob said,
February 8, 2010 at 11:38 pm
There seem to be two things to be said here. The first is that judgments of the comparative evil of Hitler and Stalin, rather than of the comparative horror of what they did, should surely be sensitive to opportunity. Stalin ruled over more people for longer than Hitler did, and had far fewer constraints on action as far as the population at large was concerned: it’s unimaginable that Hitler’s political career would have survived orchestrating a famine which killed millions in Germany in peacetime. So sheer numbers may not be all that matters.
The second is that it seems a little odd for you to be criticizing a political figure merely for adopting an ‘he may be a bastard but at least he’s our bastard’ attitude towards genuine bastards. Stalin was undoubtedly a bastard, and probably a worse one than Saddam, yet presumably we could dig up quotes from all kinds of people, some of whom we’d generally think were OK – Labour members of Churchill’s War Cabinet, for example – praising him in similar terms to those which Galloway (who is clearly also a bastard, although not in the same way) used about Saddam. Would we condemn them? Galloway is surely a fool and much worse for thinking that he needs to pick sides as far as Saddam and anyone else goes (or that anyone does: part of what’s so offensive about it is the hideous self-aggrandisement), but it’s that that you criticize him for, not the epiphenomenon of the praise that goes with acting on that judgment. Note that this isn’t the attitude Griffin has to Hitler: Griffin presumably thinks of Hitler as the ideal statesman, which is obviously worse than thinking that at least Saddam’s our bastard (for various reasons, one of which is that Saddam, so far as I know at least, was just a particularly effective common or garden tyrant, whereas Hitler was vile in more world historical terms).
Have been thinking about the why never a Tory post. May get round to writing something about it.
Paul Sagar said,
February 9, 2010 at 12:05 am
Rob,
On your first point, I agree with the structure of your argument and its internal conclusion – that Stalin not only killed more people than Hitler, he was better at getting away with it and was favoured by circumstances that Hitler didn’t have – but I don’t see why this would lend support to a counter-position to mine whereby Griffin is somehow worse than Galloway. In fact, the opposite seems the case: Galloway appears to be an apologist/gloryist of a regime that not only killed more than Hitler’s, but was better at doing it too. I don’t see why that makes Galloway more praiseworthy/less blameworthy.
On your second point, I agree. Indeed, your argument about Galloway being able to divorce support for Saddam specifically on a enemy-of-an-enemy-is-a-friend versus an I-specifically-support-this-particular-brutal-dictator-and-his-deeds approach is a move not open to Griffin vis-a-vis Hitler. Indeed, I make a structurally identical move in the OP, so I’m happy to accept your point here and jetison my original conclusion.
Indeed, I like your second point because it adds bolster to my existing intuition that however much of a bastard Galloway is, he’s not as much of a bastard as Griffin – and it’s nice to get some arguments to support that intuition and for it not to be based purely on cognitive biases and lazy acceptance of orthodoxies.
Paul Sagar said,
February 9, 2010 at 12:09 am
p.s. on the Tories post.
Please do bear in mind that what I’m trying to put across in that post is an investigation into my personal, primal, anti-rational emotions directed towards the Tory Party.
By anti-rational I mean that they are motivated purely by “passion”, on e.g. a Humean or Hobbesian schema. I’m quite willing to accept that my passions (of hatred) may be spurred by misapprehensions, cognitive biases and misunderstandings. But those are my passions.
Of course, I can also provide rationally-argued and supported reasons why I dislike the Tory party, on a policy-by-policy, MP-by-MP, blow-by-blow basis. But that’s a different thing – at least, in some part – from my deep-seated emotive reaction against the party.
All i was trying to do in the previous post was get a handle on the deep-seated emotional stuff. Not least because I reckon that sort of stuff drives an awful lot of real-world politics.
Rob said,
February 9, 2010 at 1:50 pm
What I meant with the first thing was to try and drive a wedge between the consequences of some regime or other and the character of it and its leaders. Usually, when we make assessments of character, we don’t just sum the consequences of action. Even if you told more lies than me, we might think you were more honest because I never could have got away with lying or was never put in a position where I could only protect other important things by lying, say. On that basis, we might say that Stalin and the USSR, despite having done more harm, are less bad than Hitler and Nazi Germany (or indeed even worse than the harm would suggest). I’m not making a case either way, it just seems that as it stands, your case for that aspect of their equivalence is incomplete.
I realise that about the Tory post; I was more interested in trying to explain why I have a visceral hatred of them in similar terms. I may not get round to it.
Duncan said,
February 9, 2010 at 3:51 pm
Paul,
Genuinely, if you can give me better reasons I’ll be glad to accept them.
I know this was directed at Dave but I’m happy to oblige.
The important contrast between the earlier political histories of George Galloway and Nick Griffin is what they amounted to. Galloway and Griffin both seem to have offensive opinions about historical events but Galloway’s flirtation with the far left in his youth amounted to having a soft spot for the old Communist Party and viewing the Soviet Union through rose-tinted specs.
This was by no means an unusual position for Labour MP’s of a certain vintage as the old CPGB wasn’t particularly radical (even by the standards of official communist parties) and the USSR was far away. Moreover, as noted in the your post, any activity on Galloway’s part to bring about the sort of totalitarianism he admires abroad in this country has been noticeably absent. In fact, he spent much of his political career as a not particularly left Labour MP.
Nick Griffin, on the other hand, spent years as a leading member of organisations which were committed to violent confrontation with a whole range of people they identified as opponents and tried to deliver that commitment. Whatever his stated politics now, a large part of his adult life was spent as an eager would-be participant in racial warfare. He wasn’t a founding member of a group called ‘Political Soldier’ for the uniforms and the girls.
But that’s not the whole story… Nick Griffin can only idolize Hitler in the abstract. George Galloway went one better, and paid tribute to a vicious murdering dictator in the flesh.
Almost true but you’ve only got half the story here. There’s the small matter of Griffin’s trip to Libya. Not a popular tourist spot in the late 1980′s and I see no reason to regard Gaddafi as a nicer dictator than Saddam.
Finally, one question: would you apply the same standards of revulsion to those nice, moderate patriotic MP’s and prospective candidates who generally think Britain is a good thing and support British values and traditions?
The reason I ask is, as is so often forgotten, that during the 1930′s, the time of the Third Reich and Stalin’s Russia, Britain wasn’t some plucky, tiny island but at the head of the largest empire the world has ever seen.
Paul Sagar said,
February 9, 2010 at 3:57 pm
Duncan,
Good points.Although to be fair, Galloway was singing the USSR’s praise in 2002 – hardly an act of mis-spent youth.
You’re right about the other points though, I think. Certainly Griffin’s little trip to Libya needs to be remembered, so thanks for that.
RE Britain’s Empire: I’m not sure what you’re getting at.
Certainly, I think there’s an awful lot of hypocrisy and historical amnesia about Britain’s very sordid and nasty history.
Then again, the British Empire – bad as it was – pales in comparison to the Third Reich and USSR. Furthermore, most of the dim-witted patriots praising “British Values” are likely to be almost completely unaware of the horrors of Britain’s empire. I don’t think the same can be said of anyone who praises Hitler or Stalin. And that looks like a significant difference.
Paul Sagar said,
February 9, 2010 at 3:58 pm
“pales in comparison” may be putting it too strongly when we remember the Indian famines and the murder of indigenuous peoples in Australia and New Zealand – but you get what I mean.
Thomas said,
February 12, 2010 at 11:42 pm
I think you could be being a little unfair on Galloway.
Firstly, Galloway said he supported the USSR, but that does not imply that he would have supported them when Stalin was alive. He can only really be talking about the USSR from 1970 onwards (considering his age). If he retrospectively supports them before that, we cannot tell from that quote.
Similarly, if I said I used to supported the South African regime, that does not mean I support apartheid, it could just mean I admired it when Mandela became their leader.
So putting those millions of deaths on Galloway’s conscience isn’t entirely fair.
Still, he did say he supported the USSR at some point, which is a bad thing to have done regardless of exactly when, but it would be unfair to single him out for this. The story of the left in the West and the Cold War is a difficult one that needs a much deeper and longer examination.
(On a similar theme, here is a piece by Tony Judt you might find interesting:
http://blogs.nybooks.com/post/381953115/revolutionaries
)
As for Saddam, well he claims he was mistranslated. H says he was referring to the Iraqi people, not Saddam. Since I don’t speak Arabic, I’ll withhold my judgement.
Silas said,
March 9, 2010 at 11:37 pm
badconscience.com, how do you do it?
Booker said,
March 13, 2010 at 2:55 pm
badconscience.com, how do youy do it?
http://appeasingheather.blogspot.com/