The BBC and the Left: Apologists for Tyranny and Mass Murder

By Tim Haydon.

The defence by Alan Bennett, the lefty playwright whose 80^th birthday is being celebrated, of the most famous traitors in British history:  Kim Philby, Donald MacLean, Guy Burgess, John Cairncross and Anthony Blunt, who passed our secrets to the Soviet Union during the Cold War at a time when all must have known about the mass murders which that regime had undertaken, should surprise no one as should the fact that it took place in a BBC interview.

Bennett said that what these traitors did was excusable because, ’they thought that what they were doing something to improve things, that they were morally on the right side’.  What is repulsive about this attitude on the part of both Bennett and these traitors is at root the indifference it displays to the gut loyalty and gratitude that is due to one’s own people. It’s like spitting in the face of one’s family to whom one owes everything including one’s very being. It is the unnaturalness of it: the rejection of the human feeling for one’s own in preference for a vapid idea of the universal based on arrogant and in any case irrelevant assumptions of intellectual superiority, which disgusts.

Bennett’s apologia is precisely the excuse for the millions of deliberately engineered Soviet deaths that the Historian Eric Hobsbawm made in an interview with Simon Schama on the BBC shortly before that grisly old Marxist died in October 2012.  This merely confirmed what he had said at other times, for example on  Desert Island Discs when he declared that “the sacrifice of millions of lives” would have been worth the future communist society because “that’s what we felt when we fought the Second World War”.

And there have been other leftist apologists for terror and mass murder on the BBC. For example, one is liable (as has your writer) when turning on a programme about world music to find oneself listening to some admirer of Che Guevara, the executioner-in-chief of Castro’s  blood –drenched Cuban dictatorship.  It should never be forgotten, but conveniently often is by his many admirers amongst ‘Progressives’ in the BBC and the rest of the political class, that when Castro came to power he turned his country into a huge Gulag devoid of personal freedom. About half a million people (out of a population of 11 millions) have been through his camps. This is the highest proportion of political prisoners in the world.  More than 15,000 people have been executed by firing squad. Torture methods include electric shocks, incarceration in dark cells no bigger than coffins, being deprived of water for long periods, being beaten with bayonets, electric cables and truncheons, being forced to bathe in faeces and urine and so on and on.  One hears a lot about rendition and Guantanamo Bay on the BBC.  How much about the decades of torture in Cuba do we hear?

Of course, one is likely to wait a very long time indeed before one is ever likely to see some  old Nazi  excusing the excesses of the Third Reich on the ‘unbiased and balanced’ BBC,  or the views of an historian like David Irving. No programme has been broadcast featuring an admirer of the Chilean Dictator Augusto Pinochet, but Isabel, the daughter of the Marxist Salvador Allende, the man he deposed, has been feted on the BBC as a celebrity. Allende was elected with 36% of the vote in a split election but believed himself to have a mandate to ram through a hard-core Marxist program of expropriation and indoctrination. In the process he left Chile’s economy in ruins and trampled the rule of law so badly he brought his country to the brink of civil war.

Pinochet came to the rescue of his country when requested to do so by the legislature which charged Allende with 22 constitutional violations. He was successful in galvanising Chile, now one of the most successful countries in the Americas, although nothing can excuse the way his regime hunted down and eliminated Allende’s supporters. This political vindictiveness was very much the leftist way of doing things. Still, there is no Pinochet Avenue in the New Town your writer occasionally drives through, but there is an Allende Avenue to match Mandela  Avenue.

One could go on about the worship of  the impartial and balanced BBC and its staff of bloody-handed West-hating regimes, noting in passing the way that Barbara Plett, BBC’s Middle East correspondent cried when reporting the death of Yasser Arafat.   The PLO under Arafat perpetrated many atrocities of the most stomach-churning sort. It murdered some 100,000 civilians in South Lebanon between 1975 and 1981. Arafat invented modern terrorism. David Horowitz wrote (Unholy Alliance 145):

‘With the help of the Castro dictatorship, Arafat established the first terrorist training camps and launched the first international campaign of airline hijackings and hostage taking’.

In short, just the sort of person for a radical leftist, West-hating, ‘oppression ‘ hunting BBC functionary to weep over