Farewell Tony Benn

[CJGibson]

Champion of Concorde, mad tea-drinker, destroyer of the Callaghan Government and diarist (his version of events), Tony Benn has passed away.

Discuss...

Chris

 

[Rickshaw]

A great loss to Britain and the Left. Wasn't afraid to speak his mind.

 

[overscan (PaulMM)]

I didn't agree with a lot of his policies but he was a certainly a politician with convictions in a moral rather than criminal sense of the word.


Today's political parties are mainly window dressing around a big-business-friendly centre-right consensus....

 

[JFC Fuller]

He was an extremist who was prepared to abandon the people of the Falklands to Argentina's military Junta. One may be impressed by his character, though I never was, but his politics were truly vile and it is a marker of how skewed Britain's politics has become that he is not remembered with the same disdain as the likes of Oswald Mosley.

 

[overscan (PaulMM)]

Among Mosley's supporters at this time were the novelist Henry Williamson, military theorist J. F. C. Fuller

I can see where your politics lie in the choice of pseudonym...

 

[JFC Fuller]

I can see where your politics lie in the choice of pseudonym...

Not really, I admire Fuller for the energy with which he pursued the application of technology to warfare and his later history and military theory writing. His Politics were naive at best and dangerous at worst- much like Benn. However, Benn got far closer to being able to inflict is particular form of human misery on the people of Britain than Fuller ever did.

 

[Grey Havoc]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/10697094/Tony-Benn-dies-aged-88.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/10697145/Tony-Benn-dies-his-most-memorable-quotes.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/10697120/Anthony-Neil-Wedgwood-Benn-obituary.html

 

[Rickshaw]

I can see where your politics lie in the choice of pseudonym...

Not really, I admire Fuller for the energy with which he pursued the application of technology to warfare and his later history and military theory writing. His Politics were naive at best and dangerous at worst- much like Benn. However, Benn got far closer to being able to inflict is particular form of human misery on the people of Britain than Fuller ever did.

Fuller was a Nazi sympathiser and was a member of subversive organisations which plotted the treasonous overthrow of the British Government. Nothing Tony Benn did was comparable. One suspects that Fuller's belief in totalitarian government would have been far more closer to 1984 than Benn's relatively benign beliefs in democratic socialism.

 

[CJGibson]

Calm down, have a brew, a biscuit and knock out yer pipe.

I was hoping for a bit more discussion on Benn's influence on Concorde, MinTech and UK technology in general.

As for far right/left politics. I can't see these happening in Britain while Private Eye, Bremner, Bird and Fortune et al can rip the piss out of politicians in general.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3c-hozUNSrg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0jgZKV4N_A&list=PL2F670C59AC8894D2

Anyway, Benn's politics are being covered ad nauseum in numerous hagiographic articles, so back to the aircraft...MinTech...

Chris

 

[Hood]

Yes, Tony Benn has been championed in the media for his support for Concorde (and for restoring the e!). However, he was no great supporter of the aircraft industry, his infamous 'Train Robbers' speech at a SBAC dinner in June 1967 for example did not go down well. He did support Concorde (he managed to take the shop stewards on a test-flight), probably partly because it was cutting edge and for its technical achievements, but most likely because it was built in his constituency and keeping Filton open was of importance in order to keep local unemployment down. I can't for one moment imagine that with his politics that he was particularly fond of building a supersonic plaything for the rich elites to fly back and forth across the Atlantic.

But its a sad loss that another of the old generation of politicians with morals, a clear viewpoint, unafraid to stand out from the crowd and with a capacity to think beyond the next soundbite has gone.

 

[uk 75]

Chris

To address your point about the Ministry of Technology I think it is worth comparing Britain's decline in manufacturing (Aerospace, Shipbuilding, Automotive and Railways) since the 1950s with the equivalent industries in France.

None of our politicians, Benn included, were able to match the success of France in these fields. It is hard to avoid the view that British politicians, civil servants, industrialists and bankers lacked the training and skills of their French counterparts.

The UK started with a massive advantage over France in terms of its engineering and scientific skills as well as its political stability. Yet by the begining of this Century it was France and not Britain that had built the Queen Mary 2, the nuclear carrier "Charles De Gaulle", the TGV network and sustained major car manufacturers able to compete with Germany and Japan.

Blame must be shared amongst our "amaterish" public school educated politicians, managers, bankers and civil servants. Benn must take his fair share of this. If he had been a more professional and less ideological politician his terms in power might have achieved what was grandiloquently promised as the "White heat of technology".

Oh and did I mention who will be building our "too cheap to meter" nuclear power stations!

 

[JFC Fuller]

Fuller was a Nazi sympathiser and was a member of subversive organisations which plotted the treasonous overthrow of the British Government. Nothing Tony Benn did was comparable. One suspects that Fuller's belief in totalitarian government would have been far more closer to 1984 than Benn's relatively benign beliefs in democratic socialism.

Nice attempt at trolling yet another thread.

 

[starviking]

Very much a man of principles, but also led awry by some of them. I was particularly unimpressed with his ideas of kicking Northern Ireland out of the UK. I'm sure that many will disagree with me!


As for his impact on technology, aviation, and other technological enterprises: it must be hard to pull one contribution out of the mess that was the establishment's treatment of industry and hold it up clearly to the light.

 

[Rickshaw]

Fuller was a Nazi sympathiser and was a member of subversive organisations which plotted the treasonous overthrow of the British Government. Nothing Tony Benn did was comparable. One suspects that Fuller's belief in totalitarian government would have been far more closer to 1984 than Benn's relatively benign beliefs in democratic socialism.

Nice attempt at trolling yet another thread.

No, not an attempt at trolling, rather a personal opinion which is based on my reading of the differences between Fuller and Benn's beliefs. The accusation of trolling is one which is commonly levelled at anybody who holds a contrary position.

Fuller was a supporter of Mosley and his Fascists, he sat on the party's Policy Directorate and was considered one of Mosley's closest allies. He was also a senior member of the clandestine Nordic League which was set up by the Nazis to co-ordinate Fascist movements within the UK. Fuller came under suspicion for his Nazi sympathies during the war.

Compared to that, Benn may have been misguided in his beliefs but he was never under suspicion of being a traitor or working to overthrow the democratically elected government.

 

[JFC Fuller]

Trolling every thread these days I see.

Benn was Mao worshipping extremist and represented a threat to Britains (barely worthy of the word anyway) democracy. Defending him just further exposes your own already blatant colours.

 

[Orionblamblam]

As a non-Brit who knows precisely nothing about either Benn or Fuller, I just want to say...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmHeP9Sve48

 

[marauder2048]

Benn's life long committed and principled opposition to Britain's membership in the EEC/EU can surely be regarded as both prescient and well founded.

However, denouncing Enoch Powell's "Rivers of Blood" speech as Nazi-esque was especially short-sighted and wrong.

 

[Rickshaw]

Trolling every thread these days I see.

Just a lot of spare time at the moment while I wait for some servers to build.

Benn was Mao worshipping extremist and represented a threat to Britains (barely worthy of the word anyway) democracy.

"Worshipping"? I can't find anything other than the word "admiration" (and that in Benn's own diary) for Mao. Mistaken perhaps, naive perhaps but not an active participant in fascist organisations who's aim was the overthrow of the democratic government of the day. What's more, one of the organisations was actually set up by the enemy to organise it! "Boney" Fuller was an active fascist and supporter of Naziism. He hob-nobbed actively with the leadership of Nazi Germany.

Defending him just further exposes your own already blatant colours.

Hey, everybody else, including yourself appears to enjoy exposing themselves, so I'm just following suit. Difference is, my politics which are mildly left-of-centre are acceptable, fascism isn't. We fought rather a bloody war to prove the illigitimacy of fascism, in case you've forgotten?

 

[Madoc]

Sadly, I think the West in general still has far, far too many like him. And far, far too few of those have been called out for their backing, their support, and their admiration of evil. Far too few of them.

Tony Benn 'admired' Chairman Mao, responsible for the deaths of millions. Why is this ignored?

What has this got to do with Tony Benn? A lot. Because Tony Benn was a fervent admirer of Chairman Mao, the ultimate leader of East Asian communists like the Khmer Rouge. In 1976, Britain’s best-loved pipe smoker wrote this in one of his hundreds of self-obsessed diaries: “In my opinion, [Chairman Mao] will undoubtedly be regarded as one of the greatest – if not the greatest – figures of the 20th century.”

Check that date again, because it’s important. Benn wrote this in 1976. That’s years after Chairman Mao, Tony Benn’s great hero, procured the deaths of 1.5 million Chinese citizens in the Cultural Revolution. That’s many years after Mao engineered 45 million deaths in the Great Famine. That’s four decades after Chairman Mao envisaged that 50 million Chinese peasants “would have to be destroyed” to facilitate agrarian reform.

More painfully still, 1976 is a year after those fervent Maoists, the Khmer Rouge, seized power in Phnom Penh (an advent greeted with words of celebration from Mao himself). By the year 1976, Cambodia was 12 months into a communist campaign of death, which would eventually annihilate 20-30 per cent of the entire Cambodian population.

And by 1976 we knew this: The Guardian, surely Tony Benn’s favourite newspaper, had already published many articles about the new Cambodia, describing “a systematic process of mass elimination”, of “executions used as a tool of social control”. That is to say, in 1976, when Tony Benn happily praised Chairman Mao as the greatest man of the 20th century, he knew Mao’s acolytes were “exterminating class enemies”.

But that’s alright, because we all make mistakes – at least according to rumpled, brilliant Tony Benn and his adorable mugs of tea. Twenty years later, an even wiser Benn – perhaps reflecting on the Maoist baby-killing – said this to the Chinese ambassador: “I am a great admirer of Mao. He made mistakes, because everybody does, but it seems to me that the development of the countryside and so on was very sensible.”

Throw in his praising Mugabe, praising Castro, and praising Hugo Chavez, and you've got quite the loathesome character.

 

[Orionblamblam]

Seeing as how people who seem to know about these people get all upset about 'em, I looked up Benn & Fuller on Wikipedia. Fuller it seems was a bit of a dumbass, your standard 1930's leftist who thought that Fascism was just neato. Not really sure what his wartime & postwar opinions on Fascism were, once it's nastiness was known. But Benn seems to have been quite the execrable scumbag:

In June 1985, three months after the miners admitted defeat and ended their strike, Benn introduced the Miners' Amnesty (General Pardon) Bill into the Commons, which would have extended an amnesty to all miners imprisoned during the strike. This would have included two men convicted of murder (later reduced to manslaughter) for the killing of David Wilkie, a taxi driver driving a non-striking miner to work in South Wales during the strike.

Yikes.

 

[joncarrfarrelly]

Fuller was not a leftist, like the rest of the English fascists, and the Italian Fascists (the only ones the
name properly belongs to), the Nazis, Franco's Falange etc, he was a rightist they were all rightists.
The constant American Right, and latterly Libertarian, dribbling that those movements/groups were
leftist is moronic and flies in the face of history. The American right-wing supported the European 'fascist'
movements prior to the war, and in almost hilariously anti-English manner if you read their screeds, and only
started singing the 'the Fascists were Leftists' tune post-war, after their earlier support became an
embarrassment.
The Libertarians parroting the old line American Right on this issue just the demonstrates the level of
their intellectual bankruptcy, for a while it looked like they might develop into something different, an
actual alternative, but once they attached themselves to the Republicans, they just became the same ol'
shit in a slightly different bottle.

 

[bobbymike]

Fuller was not a leftist, like the rest of the English fascists, and the Italian Fascists (the only ones the
name properly belongs to), the Nazis, Franco's Falange etc, he was a rightist they were all rightists.
The constant American Right, and latterly Libertarian, dribbling that those movements/groups were
leftist is moronic and flies in the face of history. The American right-wing supported the European 'fascist'
movements prior to the war, and in almost hilariously anti-English manner if you read their screeds, and only
started singing the 'the Fascists were Leftists' tune post-war, after their earlier support became an
embarrassment.
The Libertarians parroting the old line American Right on this issue just the demonstrates the level of
their intellectual bankruptcy, for a while it looked like they might develop into something different, an
actual alternative, but once they attached themselves to the Republicans, they just became the same ol'
shit in a slightly different bottle.

PLEASE not this again! Also can we not use profanity?

 

[JFC Fuller]

PLEASE not this again! Also can we not use profanity?

People like that are best ignored, their claims are demonstrably absurd. For instance, in the UK the British Union of Fascists (of which Fuller was a senior member) was lead by a former Labour labour politician in the form of Oswald Mosley, who denounced capitalism in favour of syndicalism (worker owned industries). Post-War he actually called it European Socialism, he even claimed he was from the left.

As for Benn, to what Madoc said I would just add his desire to abandon the people of the Falkland Islands to Argentina's murderous military junta. He was without doubt one of the most unpleasant politicians the UK has had the misfortune of producing.

 

[Hot Breath]

Fuller was not a leftist, like the rest of the English fascists, and the Italian Fascists (the only ones the
name properly belongs to), the Nazis, Franco's Falange etc, he was a rightist they were all rightists.
The constant American Right, and latterly Libertarian, dribbling that those movements/groups were
leftist is moronic and flies in the face of history. The American right-wing supported the European 'fascist'
movements prior to the war, and in almost hilariously anti-English manner if you read their screeds, and only
started singing the 'the Fascists were Leftists' tune post-war, after their earlier support became an
embarrassment.
The Libertarians parroting the old line American Right on this issue just the demonstrates the level of
their intellectual bankruptcy, for a while it looked like they might develop into something different, an
actual alternative, but once they attached themselves to the Republicans, they just became the same ol'
shit in a slightly different bottle.

PLEASE not this again! Also can we not use profanity?

Being a bit over sensitive? I'd hardly call the use of "shit" in this context to be something to get your knickers in a twist over. Calling attention to it, in an effort to delegitimise the message seems rather silly. Americans I notice often seem unwilling to tolerate the robust use of the full English language. We are, I assume all adults? It's like complaining about seeing a fake stone penis on a person in a leotard acting as a stone statue during the Athens Olympic opening Ceremony.

The whole thread looks like a bit of a storm in a teacup really. Fuller did some good things and some bad things. Benn likewise. Both were human. We shouldn't ignore the bad while we celebrate the good. Trying to claim Benn was a Maoist is like trying to claim Fuller was a Warlock.

I'd also have great difficulties believing what the Torygraph says about anybody on the Left. The Khmer Rouge weren't Maoists, if anything Pol Pot and his followers owed more to Sartre than Mao. Pol Pot was more a French existentialist, rather than a Chinese Communist.

 

[Madoc]

Hot Breath,

Benn was an apologist for the still-in-vogue evils of the Left. There are too many like him still around. Think how short his public career would've been had he made equally as apologetic statements about Hitler or Mussolini.

It is a pretty damning thing that an ideology which has murdered more human beings is still held in such high regard by so many "intellectuals" of the Left in the west. In comparison, Hitler's atrocities were but those of a piker's when compared to Stalin's, compared to Mao's, compared to Pot's, and so on. But too many of the Left are actually eager to praise Mao or Castro or Chavez and content to declare themselves Marxists or Trotskyites whilst ignoring that evil.

Benn should have rightly and roundly and soundly damned for his praising such evil. Instead, he - like too many other "iconic figures" of the Left have gone on to lengthy public careers and heaps of praise in their eulogies.

 

[Orionblamblam]

Fuller was not a leftist...

He was a fascist, yes? Or at least a fellow traveller with the fasicsts? If so... then, yes, leftist. Unless it was a form of fascism that didn't favor big government, collective (governmental) control of the economy or massive social engineering programs.

Actually, Fuller seems to perhaps not have been that far from Benn in that regard.

 

[Orionblamblam]

Americans I notice often seem unwilling to tolerate the robust use of the full English language.

Poppycock, I say! Balderdash! Baloney!Barbarastreisand! Americans, myself included, often love to use sentence enhancers and colorful metaphors. However, there's a time and a place, and public discussion for a aimed at *aircraft* might not be the best place for such.

 

[Hot Breath]

Hot Breath,

Benn was an apologist for the still-in-vogue evils of the Left.

The problem is you're talking in stereotypes. Indeed, both sides of this argument are. Both the "Left" and the "Right" are a great deal more diverse in their beliefs than either side is willing to give credit to. Benn wasn't a saint, any more than Fuller was. He was a man and he had the foibles of a man, just as Fuller did. Fuller was once a close follower and associate of Crowley, "the beast" and his occult ways. Perhaps he took part in the often homosexual drug addled occult rites that Crowley apparently enjoyed performing?

What is obvious is that some people support the Left's view of the Right and some the Right's view of the Left. They prefer to use labels and peddle stereotypes rather than address the real political beliefs of either. Some appear to be rather confused about what is normally accepted as what constitutes the "Left" and the "Right" and instead try and divert attention away by swapping the labels around to protect their pet political label.

As I've said, it's all a storm in a teacup and about as useful as arguing about how many angles can dance on the head of a pin. It's history.

For my part, Benn was it seems pretty harmless and an idealist. Fuller on the otherhand was nasty and an outright fascist and a supporter of the Nazis and their ideals but then I don't particular care for Fascists and the supporters of Fascism, having lost several relatives fighting those political views.

 

[Madoc]

Hot Breath,

Well, if this were a thread about Fuller, then details and analysis of his actions would be germane. As it's about Tony Benn, they're not. Benn was in a position of influence for far longer than was Fuller. And thus his support of that evil did more damage as a result. At the very least, he should've been held to account for it long before he died.

As I've said, there are far too many like him in the West and by their continued uncriticized acceptance in our society their support of that evil also continues.

 

[Madoc]

Oh, and as to the Fascists and National Socialists being Leftists - of course they were!


Just look at who it was that started those political parties. Look at what political parties they belonged to before they started the Fascists in Italy and the NSDP in Germany. Then look at the political platforms of those parties once they were established. Then look at their actions. Leftist. Leftist. Leftist throughout. There was damn all about them which you could pin on right wing or conservative political ideology.


Both Mussolini and Hitler expertly married extreme socialism with extreme nationalism to create a unique political party that had more appeal than the competing socialist parties or nationalist parties in their respective countries. And their actions once in power just further reinforce this premise.


The only real difference between National Socialism/ Fascism and Communism is that there is no profit in Communism. This, both figuratively and literally. Each political movement arose from the common leftist political ideology of Socialism and both took it to extremes of Leftist political practice.

 

[Hot Breath]

Thing is, the rest of the world classifies them as parties of the Right. Their authoritarian, totalitarian policies are considered to be those of the Right and are the extreme end of that side of the spectrum, carrying on in a continuum from Conservatism and accenting it's more extreme views on social order. The major difference of course is in ownership of the means of production. Left-wing ideology as it progresses towards the end of that side of the spectrum moves it into State hands. On the Right, it remains firmly in Private hands.

You're right, the thread is about Benn but appears to have branched into an analysis and comparison with "Boney" Fuller. Characterising Benn as an extremist, a "Maoist" or a supporter of the Khmer Rouge is rather extreme I believe. I suppose if supporting the KR is a "crime", where does that leave the Thatcher and Reagan governments who actively supported the KR after the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia?

 

[overscan (PaulMM)]

Going nowhere. Locked.