The Lingering Red Parasites

Defending the indefensible and believing the absurd is still a common pastime for many battle hardened British Stalinists, albeit these days the struggle continues with aging ranks and greatly depleted numbers (depleting one assumes due to the deaths of members from the aging ranks). The late Andrew Rothstein’s CPB remains the largest grouping of tanky Brits. Don’t let that fact overwhelm you though. Figures from the party’s 2007 congress reported that membership had at the last count fallen to just 941. One can only wonder just how small the smaller factions actually are when this is considered the behemoth of British Stalinism. It does appear to be that the smaller your faction the crazier you tend to be - and the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) is both very small and very crazy.

So reports the Johnny Guitar, but have no doubts, others of this ilk do indeed have options. While most have gravitated toward the comfortable, protected, humanity-hating false populism of Greenie mendacity, others would do well to move to France with the home-buying sort of Britons they detest.

They are sure to find a friend in the boy wonder of agitational fantasy Marxism, Olivier Besancenot. A recent revelation that he has links to a Red Brigade era terrorist of Action Directe proves that he’s got the “cred” that the hopeless, lonely, and stupid are looking for.

Ultradirigisme on one side, and ultralaxisme on the other... In immigration, his constituents and others know that they Besancenot and his party are demanding the immediate amnesty of anyone not in the country lawfully, granting each a 10 year residence permit which they suggest could be automatically renewable. Do they know that the LCR claims the right to voter eligibility for all foreigners (including non-EU noational) in all elections, perhaps even for president? To break the "criminalization of youth and the poor," the Trotskyist party advocates nothing less than the repeal of public safely laws, and even the doing away of keeping police files! Nonetheless they want "controls" over the social sphere.


"Unrealistic and dangerous": is what Minister Jean-Marie Bockel, called the LCR’s program in an interview. "If revenues were applied [as the LCR wished], he adds, the economy would collapse in a few weeks, and, fairly quickly, our freedoms would be questioned." Including in his party one Jean-Marc Rouillan, the former Action Directe terrorist, the party is not as limited to worker issues as Besancenot has suggested. She recalled the "historic links" between the extreme left and violence, and these tinks never completely broken. Interviewed by Le Monde, Pierre-Francois Grond, leader of the LCR and one close to Besancenot described as mere "twenty years ago bullshit" the double murder of Georges Besse and General Audran!

Moreover he’s a complete fake, as 5 Years Later recently notes.

We often wondered if the factor Aggravant still working? To this question, the candidate Besancenot spoke of his monthly salary of less than €1200 as a Postal worker. Blessed are the believers, because the reality is somewhat different. He’s paid mainly by the party. For example, he very regularly got compensation as a European parliamentary assistant when Alain Krivine was an MEP, in amount considerably above the monthly €5000.

What is his provenance? To this question, Olivier Besancenot speaks with modesty of a small studio in the 18th arrondissement. The journalist would have had much to see - a really good size apartment in the neighborhood of Sacre Coeur in Montmartre - the most expensive part of the 18th, one of the most sought after by Parisian Bobos. Of course, he owns it... something impossible on a postal worker’s salary, but who’s saying...

What strikes me about these people is their ignorance, for which I have absolutely no desire to lend any tolerance to. I lived behind the iron curtain as a fireigner, and had the good fortune to be able to leave. The population didn’t, and none of these latter-day zealots who continue to have wet dreams of collective, homogeneous being where so many of life’s choices are taken away, but are rather assigned to you, have never had to live that kind of life. Rather than make any effort to understand the dynamics of making a good life in a free society, they’re more than happy to seem to appeal to others while being very much in love with assigning you your life options based on opinions they alone have without respect to others’ freedom to have some control over hteir own lives.

Even if their exaggerations about the life in the easterm block being so good, and ours being so violent and unjust were true (which they aren’t,) removing people’s will over their simplistic materialism is an abomination. Were they to actually think about it, would they themselves actually take free child daycare over the ability to leave the country, or to travel, or to invent a new vocation of their own? Would they genuinely be able to salve their suspicions that everything is “the peoples’ property” versus “the corporations” when they are slaves to a state which itself is the boldest example of corporate abuse and holds an absolute monopoly over the satisfaction of simple, easily served human needs which they struggled with? Unless they’re stupid enough, I doubt it.