I had a strange idea yesterday. I had the idea of inviting Harriet Harman home for dinner. This isn\’t a thought that occurs to me often, but I suddenly felt it might be fun.
I\’d invite my Dad too. And then, when we\’d given Harriet a nice meal (what do you think she likes to eat?), my father could tell her his story.
He could tell her how the Soviets and the Nazis closed in on his home town of Lvov in September 1939 and how the town council chose the Soviets to surrender to. Then he might tell her how the fathers of his friends were taken to the woods at Katyn and shot by the communists.
He might recount the story of his father\’s arrest as an antisocial element, of Adolf Finkelstein\’s repeated interrogations leading to a trial in his absence and a jail sentence of 15 years\’ hard labour. Then Dad could tell the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party about his own experience as a child, exiled to a remote Siberian village. And how he and his mother and his father never saw their home again.
And, when he\’d finished, he could let Harriet speak. And she could explain to Dad why she thinks that Fidel Castro is a hero.
Do you think Harriet Harman would understand the connection? She is not big on joining dots to form a consecutive line.
I can tell you and Danny now why Harriet Halfwit thinks Castro is a hero; left-wing = hero, revolutionary = hero, anti-US = hero. Also, “cool and iconic among the yoof” = hero (she’s probably confusing him with Guevara). Also, of course, she’s an utter moron.
While inflicting Harriet Harman and Dan Finkelstein on each other would be a wholly justified punishment for both, the suggestion that Stalin’s utter bastardry should have any bearing on one’s affection for or dislike of Fidel is moronic.
After all, Cuba’s hardly the only small island nation to ally with the Russians after the much bigger military power just over the sea threatened to destroy it. And Stalin was still in power when we made that choice…
Who is “we”, what other small island, and what choice prior to 1953 is john b considering?
@ Mike – sorry if I was being opaque. Finkelstein is criticising Cuba for being allied to the Soviet Union. Cuba allied with the Soviet Union because the US made clear that it was planning to invade Cuba and overthrow the government. After Cuba allied with the Soviet Union, the US stopped trying to overthrow the Cuban government. In 1941, the UK and US allied with the Soviet Union against the Nazis, for broadly similar reasons.
@ Stephen – well, obviously, but that has no direct bearing on whether allying with an evil genocidal maniac is inherently a Bad Thing.
There’s a difference between threatening the destruction of a democratic government, and threatening the existence of a dictatorship.
“Finkelstein is criticising Cuba for being allied to the Soviet Union.”
I’m pretty sure he was criticising communist dictatorships for being evil, and introducing his Dad as a victim of a communist dictatorship. Given that La Presidenta (deputa) is pretty keen on these things, I think we need to be reminded of just where she would take us if given free rein (thousands or millions of broken eggs, for a start).
Thankfully El Gordo slapped her down in PMQs today.
allied with the Soviet Union because the US made clear that it was planning to invade Cuba and overthrow the government.
Cuba allied with the Soviet Union only after the US had turned down Castro’s overtures. The US knew what a nasty piece of work Castro was and would later prove to be, and refused to support him. This is why Castro turned to the Soviet Union, not because the US were threatening to destroy him.