http://appeasingheather.blogspot.com/

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.