A question is asked re my previous (peevious?) posting on the Foreign Secretary’s visit to Poland:

On david’s grandfather, are you sure he fought with the red army? Are you referring to ralph’s father samuel?

Good question. How do I know? I wasn’t there.

But rummaging around through Google finds all sorts of references to Samuel Miliband being in the Red Army, albeit perhaps on the Trotskist end of the ideological spectrum. See eg the Wikipedia entry for father Ralph (Adolphe) Miliband. Or this Marxist site.

But this Indy obituary of David’s father Ralph Miliband by Tariq Ali ascribes the Red Army role to an uncle of Ralph, not his father.

Not an uninteresting question, one way or the other. But when you start looking for the answer, you find site after site of weird anti-semitic extremist ‘conservative’ ravings poring over the issue. If you can face it, click here for one example.

On the other hand, Ralph Miliband’s role in academic and public life as an openly Marxist intellectual with an independent style is well documented.

And he died as he lived: someone baffled by the failings of democracy and communism alike, as if they were equal/equivalent.

Read this bracing review of his last book Socialism for a Sceptical Age (1995). Dominic Hilton starts with the cover:

The cover is the ugliest thing you’ll ever see outside of a socialist housing development, cleverly designed to distract you from the book’s contents. "Frozen Sea" depicts a beachfront with accompanying pinkish orange sunset cascading off breaking waves. Perhaps it is meant to evoke erotic daydreams of Pamela Anderson bouncing around in an ill-fitting red swimsuit…

He moves on to the wheezy substance:

Staying awake during passages about "intra-class conflicts among wage earners", "the conditions surrounding strike action", and "the level and scope of social and collective services" is as hard as it sounds. This is why Tony Blair started hanging around businessmen. It must be painful to be as crimeless as Miliband. Never to exploit your position as an able-bodied, heterosexual, rich, educated white male. What does a guy like that do all day?

Then … the massacres:

The "endless catalogue of horrors" listed by the author look suspiciously similar: National Socialism, Stalinism, Maoism, Ho Chi Minimalism, Slobodan Milosevicness. Miliband concedes that this blood-soaked history is "unacceptable" (imagine a Nazi saying, "In hindsight, I suppose massacring all those Jews was pretty unacceptable.") but prefers to focus on the "optimism". Chin up, comrades. Communism lives, even if you don’t.

To Miliband’s mind, the failure of Soviet social engineering was not its evil imperialism, economic poverty or moral worthlessness, but everything on spec: unfavourable "specific conditions" and, of course, those pesky "special interests". Treating humans as cattle, we’re told, is not "an easy matter" and requires "delicacy". Those "negative aspects of communist regimes" can be "remedied"…

… To skip over all those cadavers then bleat about "the McCarthy witch-hunt" was too much for my martini-soaked stomach. No digestive system produces enough acid to burn lines like

it may well be said that it is precisely the existence of so much evil which makes it essential to create a context in which evil may be conquered, or at least attenuated.

Mao’s famines – 70 million starved to death – are explained by an "under-estimation" of

the problems that must arise in the organization and administration of a post-capitalist society.

And he sums up:

"Yeah, but is any of this relevant?" you might ask. Kids these days are too busy living their iLives and being gentle to the environment to advocate worker’s cooperatives, aren’t they?

Maybe, but David Miliband is touted as a future Prime Minister of Great Britain. In the foreword, David writes,

it is some comfort that the ideas developed by Ralph Miliband in this book and elsewhere will live on.

We are all guinea pigs now…

And this week we peer from our small cage with its whirring treadmill at this visit to Poland.

A British Foreign Secretary from a family with a Polish/Jewish background and awash with apologies for communist violence, arrives in Warsaw and talks briskly and blandly about Poland’s suffering through the ‘dark years of Communism’ without mentioning the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, or the role of Catholicism in defeating communism, or the Katyn massacre.

This just strikes me as Bad.

Sorry, but it does. On many levels simultaneously.