Comrades, I just couldn’t believe it when John McDonnell, the Shadow Chancellor -in his response to George Osborne’s Autumn Financial Statement, quoted Chairman Mao and then passed his personal copy of Mao’s little Red Book across the despatch box.
I had forgotten that I had once owned a copy. It was the early nineteen seventies and the ‘cultural revolution’ was well under way in China. I recall that a number of us at school wrote to the Chinese Embassy in London for a copies of the Thoughts of Chairman Mao. My excuse is that I was a mere schoolboy with no knowledge of the enormity of Mao’s crimes and the poverty, starvation and misery that he inflicted on millions.
Armchair revolutionaries could be in no doubt about the nature of Maoism because it is all there in black and white, spelt out in the book. How about this for a taster:
“Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun”
No compromise with the voters then!
‘Champagne socialists’ and other lefty intellectuals at their Islington dinner parties (I am confident that such dinner parties are not to be had in Ringwood or Fordingbridge, -but perhaps Lymington? No, surely not!) need to wise up to what ‘revolution’ really means. Here is further guidance from the Great Helmsman’s thoughts:
“A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”
To the barricades then Comrades, but make sure you know which class you’re in. I thought we were all middle class now, but then perhaps that just shows that I need to be sent to a re-education camp, along with capitalist roaders, some members of Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, and others who have taken the wrong road.