Don’t quote the murdering dictators, Corbyn: Albanians are people too

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/10/jeremy-corbyn-albania-labour-enver-hoxha

Version 0 of 1.

So Jeremy Corbyn has quoted Albania’s communist dictator, Enver Hoxha, at a Labour Christmas party, provoking yet another tempest in the media teacup. C’mon guys, he was joking, right? You know, like John McDonnell with Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book?

Corbyn’s – and Labour’s – opponents will seize on anything to paint him as an unreconstructed Stalinist itching to send the burghers of Kensington off to some marshy gulag.

But really, he should know better. First, because he and his associates keep walking into the same trap. To quote one communist dictator may be regarded as a misfortune; to quote two, etc etc.

Second, because these jokes bespeak a kind of left cosiness, an assumption of shared assumptions that bodes ill for Labour. All subcultures have their references, which for insiders carry a complex set of feelings: the comfort of belonging and shutting out outsiders, mixed with a rueful, ironic self-awareness. (Somewhere I have a pink T-shirt emblazoned with Stalinist Thug, made for me long ago by a friend and Nation colleague to commemorate our alliance on the left side of some battle being fought at the magazine. We weren’t Stalinists—we hated Stalinists—but we were defiantly chuffed that the other side had opportunistically said we were.)

But I don’t want the Labour party to be a subculture. And on the left, ironic or not, such references still carry a whiff of tankyism, a sly sentimental nostalgia for the mythic days of Actually Existing Socialism: before Nikita Khrushchev’s speech at the 20th party congress, before the invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Years ago they might have been a mark of solidarity, a useful whistling in the dark. Now they hark back to lost fantasies and the smug satisfaction of feeling beleaguered with right-on people who agree with you in a safe north London pub.

And third, and most important, dear internationalist Jezza, because Albanians are people too – and though they do a fine line in black humour, when it comes to Enver Hoxha many of them are not yet ready for irony. I was in Albania a few weeks ago, interviewing former political prisoners for a radio documentary . To call Hoxha “tough” is more than a bit of a weasel word. It’s really an unconscionable understatement.

Albania has yet to recover from the 40 terrible years of Hoxha’s dictatorship. Thousands of people were killed or imprisoned in impossibly grim labour camps: the copper mines of Spac in the freezing northern mountains, whose unheated cell blocks look like a disused 70s car park; Ballsh in the south, where the entertainment was a Chinese-run oil refinery. Some prisoners took the easy way out, running at the fence to draw a quick bullet from the guards. Their families were tortured, too, exiled in internment camps and excluded from employment. Large numbers of those who weren’t persecuted were forced to collaborate, threatened with the rape of their children or their own arrest.

Related: Corbyn’s ‘new politics’ is neither hateful nor pure: it’s complicated | John Harris

Hoxha broke first with Yugoslavia, then with the Soviet Union, and finally with China, walling Albanians up in silent isolation. Bright-eyed European leftists visiting the country in the 70s and 80s were startled to have their beards shaved and their clothes changed at the airport before they could be seen by the Albanian populace. So pervasive and persistent was the regime’s reach that a law to open Albania’s secret police files was passed only this year, nearly 25 years after the fall of communism. Many people I talked to were cynical about its likely application. The most incriminating files, they say, were destroyed a long time ago; and members or descendants of the old elite are still in positions of power

I don’t want to live in a world without transgressive jokes, or a world where humour comes with a trigger warning, like classic literature on some American campuses. But I do want the left to get over its old romance with Stalinism and stop snickering about murderers. And I do want – we desperately need – a grown-up, functioning, effective Labour party.