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Giles Udy

@GilesUdy

Nov 18

“Definitely and clearly our purpose is to deprive these people of their way of living"

The early Labour party openly advocated for the expropriation of privately owned land.

Now the man advising them on the farm inheritance tax is doing exactly the same. 🧵

Read this. It’s from an official Labour publication, The Case for Socialism, published in 1933

“Socialism is an attack upon the institution of private property in land and capital. We advocate the expropriation of the landed and capitalist class.”
“Definitely and clearly our purpose is to deprive these people of their way of living"

And then this is Labour’s farm tax adviser today, in 2024.

Advani advocates for “the state taking part-ownership of land and becoming the landlord to tenant farmers.”

Straight back to Stalin (much admired by the Labour Party of the 1930s) and his expropriation of kulak farmers.

order-order.com/2024/11/18/lab…

https://twitter.com/gilesudy/status/1858509710712053802

And this is where it began - Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto of 1848, which the 1948 Labour Party acknowledged as its inspiration on inheritance tax.

https://twitter.com/gilesudy/status/1858509710712053802

Read 4 tweets

Giles Udy

@GilesUdy

Oct 27

You can make 'history' say whatever you want it to. Sir Hilary Beckles, who leads the Caribbean #reparations campaign certainly does.

Beckles may be a knighted historian, a vice-Chancellor of the University of West Indies and an enormously respected figure across the Caribbean... but here's how cavalier he is with his facts. 🧵

He writes: "The British imported some 3 million Africans into the Caribbean and upon emancipation in 1833, only about 700,000 had survived. Barbados, where it all began as an economic explosion, received 600,000 people from British ships over 200 years; only 83,000 survived."
He calls this genocide.

Let's address that "the British imported some 3 million Africans into the Caribbean" first...

Remember - he's an 'eminent slavery historian' so he should get his figures right.

Clue - he doesn't.

The Transatlantic slave database states that 2,318,254 slaves were landed in the Caribbean, 2,208,296 on British ships.**

He's out by 800,000, inflating the actual figure by 36%. He could look it up (I did) and he's a historian, so surely he would, wouldn't he? He might also concede that Barbados was a stopping off point for slaves shipped on to other islands, which would reduce the total still further.

But why water down a good campaigning number with detail. These people don't want facts to interfere with their opinions.

What is horrifying about these numbers is that 2,763,411 slaves embarked in Africa. This means that about 445,000 perished before they reached the West Indies. It is a terrible statistic but it bears no relation to the figure Beckles gives.

**All these figures are from slavevoyages.org

So, 3m (actually 2.2m) slaves were shipped to the Caribbean but, he saya, because only 700,000 were alive at 1833, that was 'genocide'. No it wasn't.

Just stop for a moment and ponder this.

First everybody dies in the end. What's he trying to say? Surely not that the Brits killed 2.3m slaves? (When you listen to him saying that in a talk, calling it a 'Black Holocaust', as he trots one accusation after another out you get that impression because you haven't got time to think and say, 'hold on, what are you saying?')

With an assumed life expectancy of 30 (more on that below), the fact is that every slave shipped to the islands by 1803 would be dead anyway. Surely that's obvious?

He used his home island Barbados as an example, stating that of "600,000 slaves shipped, just 83,000 were alive at 1833."

The table below shows the actual figures of slaves landed in Barbados between 1626 and 1825 - some of whom were then transhipped to other islands but let's leave it that for the moment.

According to the Slave Voyages database, the actual total number of slaves landed in Barbados was 457,705 not 600,000. He's out again. Yet more 30% inflation.

And if we take 1801 as the cut off point, with a life expectancy of 30, there could only be 6,369 of the 83,000 slaves landed still alive at 1833. The rest, 76,631, were born on the island. That may (does it?) imply a low birth rate but that's not genocide.

Read 8 tweets

Giles Udy

@GilesUdy

Aug 27

I have just been re-reading the manifesto of the Communist Party of Britain. It includes:

· "The abolition of charitable status for private schools" - as a prelude to their abolition (🧵)
· "An annual wealth tax on the richest section of the population"
· "Replacing council tax with local income, wealth, land and property taxes"
· "The right to vote at 16"

All these happen to be current or trailed Labour policies.

"The abolition of charitable status for private schools would be the prelude to their incorporation into the public sector"

The Communist Party are at least open about it.
Meanwhile the Labour Party hides behind 'we need it to fund more teachers in the state sector'.

Every measure the CPB proposes in its manifesto is also to finance making Britain a fairer more socialist country.

Not much difference?

At least Labour aren't proposing some of other barking mad CPB policies: (Yet?)

- "Advertising, financial and property services should be limited and their socially useful functions transferred to public bodies." [nationalisation and political control]

- "Landed estates, luxury tourist establishments and ‘second’ homes must be brought under the democratic control of local communities." [in other words, expropriated]

- "replacing key personnel [in] civil and diplomatic services, the judiciary, the police, the secret services and armed forces ... with supporters of the revolutionary process".

- the establishment of a new paramilitary force, a "state’s corps of military reservists" which would be "expanded and linked with large workplaces and local working-class communities." "Over time" the emphasis would "will tilt away from a full-time selective professional army towards popular [ie 'peoples'] military reservists."

- Mass nationalisation but with compensation only "on the basis of need".

Welcome to USSR 2.0...

Read 4 tweets

Giles Udy

@GilesUdy

Jul 28

Unbelievably, the Soviets shot 157,000 of their own service men and women in WW2 for ‘military crimes’.

Today the execution of 300 Brits in WW1 is considered a scandal. Just one was shot for desertion in WW2.

Stalin’s murderous response to Red Army failures and his earlier paranoid fear of a coup left a trail of corpses through the years before and during the war 🧵

The Soviet military did not escape the purges of the Great Terror of 1937-38. Between 15,000 and 30,000 of the officer corps were shot, including, 11 of 13 senior generals, 57 of 85 corps commanders and 110 of 195 brigade commanders.

Some, such as Marshall Mikhail Tukhachevsky, were no loss to humanity. Tukhachevsky had quelled a peasant revolt in the Civil War by the use of poison gas. He also blamed his defeat by the Poles at the battle of the Vistula in 1920 on Stalin, would have made him a marked man from then on.

Stalin’s resentment at that defeat was a major driver in his hatred of the Poles, which would later have terrible consequences, leading to the death or deportation of millions.

Hitler was delighted by Stalin’s 1937-38 military purge and it probably had enormous consequences - both in his decision to invade the USSR in 1941 and it may have been a contributory factor in his decision to invade Poland in the first place in 1939.

The massive Red Army and Air Force losses after the German invasion in the summer of 1941 were Stalin’s direct responsibility.

When a German deserter came across the lines to warn the Soviets of the coming invasion they shot him as a provocateur

Warnings were also sent through diplomatic channels by the Allies but Stalin dismissed them as mischief making.

Once again, covering for his failures, Stalin took it out on his military…

Read 5 tweets

Giles Udy

@GilesUdy

Jul 27

I'm delighted to be able to announce that my next book At Dawn They Came: Soviet Terror and Repression 1917-1953 is scheduled for publication by @HofTotalitarian at the end of September.

It recounts the history of Soviet repression from Lenin's first labour camps through to their fully fledged climax as the Gulag system under Stalin. 🧵

(Yes, the labour camp system began with Lenin, not Stalin. Lenin is sometimes portrayed as the 'good communist' whose ideals were betrayed by Stalin. This, as my book shows, is nonsense. )

The title 'At Dawn They Came' is the opening line of the first stanza of Requiem ('Реквием 1935-1940') by Anna Akhmatova, one of Russia’s greatest twentieth century poets. Anna's husband was shot by the secret police in 1921 and then, much later, her son and common-law husband were both arrested and sent to the Gulag. Only her son survived.

Requiem movingly describes her son’s arrest and the agony of the years she spent waiting for his return, not even knowing if he was still alive. Kept under close surveillance by the authorities, Akhmatova wrote Requiem in secret.

Such was the climate of terror that Anna could not keep any copies of the poem on paper. Once she had written a stanza, she committed it to memory and then burned it. Next, she gathered her closest and most trusted friends and recited the poem to them, repeating it until each had memorised it exactly.

Only when Stalin had died could the poem be performed to select gatherings. But even then it was too dangerous for it to be published.

Now considered one of the most poignant testimonies of life in the Gulag era, the poem was only finally published after her death.

The cover, designed for the publishers @HofTotalitarian by Hristiyan Mitev in Bulgaria, forms prison bars which, when opened, reveal the photo, previously only partly seen through them, of Elena Amberg.

Elena Sergeevna Amberg was a clerk at the First State Bearing Plant in Moscow. She was arrested on 23rd June 1937 and this photograph was probably taken at the prison straight away, according to normal practice. On 28th October 1937, she was found guilty of espionage and shot the same day.
Her body now lies among the 6,600 others buried in the mass graves of the former rifle range of the NKVD (the secret police) at Kommunarka, just outside Moscow.

Read 7 tweets

Giles Udy

@GilesUdy

Jul 24

The IRA also allied with the Soviet Union against Britain in the 1920s in addition to cosying up to the Nazis in WW2.

Stalin secretly bankrolled the IRA for a couple of years, enabling it to survive when it had almost been put out of business.

The money was laundered through a Russian bank in London which had a British pro-Soviet Labour MP as a director. It was uncovered when a couple IRA gunrunners were arrested of Tottenham Court Road in possession of a large number of handguns. They also had bank notes in their possession which could be traced back to the Russian bank - which thought their scheme was untraceable. It wasn't.
🧵

2/ In 1925, two years after its defeat in the Civil War, a group went to Moscow to beg the Soviets for financial support.

They met Stalin who agreed to give them £500 a month in return for them spying for the Kremlin in Britain and the US.

3/ At the end of the following year, this subsidy was cut to £100, the Soviets complaining they weren’t getting enough espionage product for their money. Most of the IRA’s full time officers were let go.

Eventually in May 1927 the Soviets agreed to a final one-off payment of £1000.

The whole deal would have remained secret if a blunder had not exposed it - and the complicity of at least one leading pro-Soviet Labour MP who must have known of the deal…

Read 6 tweets

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