Brendan O’Neill on the way Corbyn’s supporters seem to be harking back to Stalinist rhetoric (and belief):
I’m starting to feel a little disturbed by the Stalinist streak in the Corbynista movement. The anti-democratic sense of entitlement behind the cry of “Jeremy Corbyn is the Prime Minister”; the cult of personality growing around Corbyn, which emphasises the man and his goodness far more than his policies; the censorious branding of anyone who doesn’t have the correct Corbynista outlook as “Tory” or “far right”, which comes straight from the Stalinist handbook of denouncing everyone from Trotskyists in the Spanish Civil War to the Hungarian revolutionaries of 1956 as “fascists”; the culture war (cultural revolution?) against those generations that don’t share the worldview of the caring, meme-making, Jez-loving Glasto set…. the largely youthful bourgeoisie that make up the backbone of the Corbynista campaign look set to have a quite chilling, backward impact on political debate and public life, I think.
On the other hand, Dr. Sean Gabb seems to be softening in his attitude to Corbyn, if only due to rising disgust with Theresa May and her “conservative” government:
I’ve been thinking about Jeremy Corbyn. Is he really so awful as we are told? In particular, is he worse on things like immigration and political correctness than the Fake Conservatives have been in practice? They have kept the borders open. They haven’t shut down a single Cultural Marxist project.
For the avoidance of doubt, I’m not a socialist. However, the Conservatives have been in power for years now, and have hardly shown themselves to be friends of anything remotely describable as free enterprise. Privatisation and outsourcing have been a gigantic scam on ordinary people. Vast amounts of the taxpayers’ money are being poured into the hands of crony capitalists.
He is also against dropping bombs all over the Middle East, and is against a renewed Cold War with Russia.
Would be abolish a single civil liberty we currently enjoy? Would he be any worse than the present lot at negotiating our exit from the European Union?
If there were an election tomorrow, I’d have great trouble actually voting Labour. At the same time, I don’t feel I’d regard a Corbyn Government with the same visceral loathing I felt of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
Is my brain softening with age? Or are my eyes beginning to open?
I look forward to enlightenment.
