The Conquest of History

In 1968 a seminal book on the crimes of communism was published by the late British historian Robert Conquest. The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties finally outlined in meticulous detail the scale of the homicide committed by Stalin in the Soviet Union.

Originally himself a communist in his youth Conquest saw for himself the communist terror machine at work in Bulgaria. His work finally revealed the fools that the pro-Soviet left wing intelligentsia had been. George Bernard Shaw and Beatrice Webb were amongst those taken in by the Soviet lie.

You can quibble about the numbers, Conquest himself thought the number of 20 million was "too low" but the scale is on a par with those of Hitler and the Nazi's.

But committed in the name of the workers revolution of course.

Robert Conquest was not alone in working to expose the communists and others like Robert Service have also written at length about the origins of the "Red Terror" which originated with Lenin and Trotsky long before Stalin got his hands of the full reins of power.

Not that the comrades will ever admit this.

Stalin simply "hijacked" the revolution in their eyes and many, Trotskyite types included continue to deny the historical truth that the Marxist-Leninist creed is murderous to the nth degree.

Even today with all the evidence available there are those who defend the worlds last dictators such as the New Communist Party which praises the North Korea despite it being the largest concentration camp on Earth.

The Korean Communists are simply camp guards. Nothing more.

The mentality behind this ideological blindness is everywhere to be seen on the far left. Counterfire and Stop the war Coalition activists think nothing of working for Press TV because they, like Lenin's "useful fools" of the past see their democratic homelands as the real enemy.

So long as they can be seen as "anti-imperialist" (whatever that term actually means these days) the enemy is "always at home" an old Leninist phrase.

Russian TV. Left wing firebrands are there. George Galloway anyone?

Invasion of Crimea? Tibet? It's the West's fault not Russia's, not China's.

Like Webb and Bernard Shaw they are simply taken in. Not all of them are stupid, some are quite wilfully ignorant if it suits their ideological purposes.

Stalinism was not an aberration of communism, it is simply a consequence.

As Robert Conquest surmised in his famous limerick

There was a great Marxist called Lenin,
Who did two or three million men in,
That;s a lot to have done in,
But where he did one in,
That grand Marxist Stalin did ten in.

Just like all the extremes of ideology in our world, Communism, fascism and Islamism have one thing in common.

Do as we say or die.

Robert Conquest helped build the fightback against communism and for that he will always be remembered.