Letter: Tristram Hunt’s anti-communism (web only)
It was great to see the examination of The Frock-Coated Communist by Trishy Trashy Hunt in the last Proletarian.
I was given the book as a birthday present and I am three quarters of the way through it.
I never thought anyone could pile so much crap into such a little space.
As I have ploughed my way through this heap of mouldering contradictions, I have made notes of my views, as I have struggled through page after (sometimes comical) page. However, I realise I would need to write a book at least as long as The Frock-Coated Communist if I was to do justice to reality.
It was in the late fifties, when I first cut my communist public teeth by explaining the poisonous diatribes in the leaflets of the Economic League to the apprentices at the factory where I was employed, that I first became aware of the vast amounts that capitalism was prepared to invest to save its moribund system. After that, it was paperback books written by such third-rate writers as Robert Conquest, Robert Service and the like. The books would be passed to me, I would analyse them and write my views in the margins, then they would be collected by their owners. By reading such literature I was able to work out that Joe Stalin had killed every Soviet citizen one and a half times.
The anti-communist onslaught of the fifties is about to return, and with a vengeance. Stalin will be the real target, for it is his interpretation of life, and the way he applied Marxism Leninism to the problems that confronted the Soviet people, that capitalists hate and fear most.
The capitalists can have all the make-believe writers in the world: the Conquests, the Services, and the Hunts; the contradictions of capitalism cannot be denied and they are biting so hard now that their expert pugilists are staggering about the ring, unable to tell where they have been hit or what has hit them.
Best wishes for the future
BV, Sunderland
