From Kevin Barry to Iran: a lesson Bush and Blair have never learned

By Ryle Dwyer

His reply is expected to fetch over £3,000 at a forthcoming auction in London. (Shaw probably would suggest that this says something about capitalism, that some of his more foolish musings would fetch so much money.)

The document is now being hyped as a shocking insight into the thinking of communist apologists in Britain in the 1930s.

Shaw visited Russia in 1931, when he met Stalin and was so captivated by the idealism of the communists that he was unable to see the reality of what was happening.

He was just one of many who were fooled.

"Even in the opinion of the bitterest enemies of the Soviet Union and of her government, the trials have clearly demonstrated the existence of active conspiracies against the regime," Shaw declared publicly at the time. "I am convinced that this is the truth."

Thus when Dorothy Royal submitted her list of questions asking if the show trials were proof that the revolution had "attracted degenerate types", Shaw defended the line he had taken earlier.

"On the contrary," he replied, "it has attracted superior types all the world over to an extraordinary extent wherever it has been understood.

"But the top of the ladder is a very trying place for old revolutionists who have had no administrative experience, who had no financial experience, who have been trained as penniless, hunted fugitives with Karl Marx on the brain, and not as statesmen," Shaw continued.

"They often have to be pushed off the ladder with a rope around their necks."

He was effectively saying that the idealists who drive a revolution are frequently unfit to run the subsequent government, and should therefore be strung up.

His response provides an insight into the confused thinking that allowed such people to be admirers of one of the most evil men who ever blighted humanity.

"A single death is a tragedy," Stalin once declared, "a million deaths is a statistic."

Thus, the estimated 10 million people who died in the famine that he organised in the Ukraine and Kazakhstan in 1932 were just statistics to him.

"After Stalin, the most hated man in Russia is Bernard Shaw among those who have read his glowing descriptions of plentiful food in their starving land," Gareth Jones, a brave young reporter, noted at the time.

Shaw was not the only person who met and liked Stalin personally. Stalin initially impressed US President Harry Truman, who was to do more than any man to stop the Soviet leader's gallop.

"I can deal with Stalin," Truman wrote, describing him as "honest but smart as hell".

Truman preferred Stalin to Winston Churchill initially. Sometimes people are judged by the calibre of their enemies.

Many of those who were impressed by communism really knew little about it, but were probably influenced by those political nitwits who brought back glowing accounts of what was happening in Russia.

This attitude may well have been strengthened by the negative impact of some vocal critics.

Churchill was probably the most outspoken critic of communism in Britain, especially during the 1920s and 1930s.

Recently he was voted the greatest Briton of all times, so he is not just a historical memory; he is an icon that the British hold up as an example to be emulated.

If the British do seek to emulate him, as Tony Blair seems to be doing, they may well again find themselves wondering why they are so despised throughout the world.

Churchill's record which is stained with massive blunders looks good because he was pitted against the likes of Hitler and Stalin.

As Secretary for War in 1920, Churchill called for the British to adopt a policy of reprisals in Ireland.

He said the security forces were "getting out of control, drinking, and thieving, and destroying indiscriminately".

His response was not to rein in those forces but to endorse their behaviour by making it official.

He argued that the reprisal policy should be formally regularised. Instead of turning a blind eye while the Black and Tans burned or killed indiscriminately, he wanted it done officially and publicly acknowledged, with the full support of the British Government.

He contended that a "strictly defined policy of reprisals" would be "less discreditable and more effective than what is now going on".

Churchill complained to his cabinet colleagues on May 31, 1920: "It is monstrous that we have 200 murders and no one hung.

After a person is caught he should pay the penalty within a week. Look at the tribunals which the Russian Government have devised.

You should get three or four judges whose scope should be universal and they should move quickly over the country and do summary justice."

In short, he wanted the British to behave like Bolsheviks in Ireland.

"There should be hanging," Churchill insisted. "Why not make life intolerable in a particular area?"

HE persuaded the British to introduce a new force in Ireland, the Auxiliaries. They were former officers who had fought in World War I but had been unable to fit back into society afterwards.

He got his way on the hanging issue on November 1, 1920, when Kevin Barry became the first rebel to be executed during the War of Independence.

Churchill and his cabinet colleagues could hardly have handled the situation more insensitively or more stupidly.

Adding insult to injury, they chose a Catholic holy day for the execution All Saints' Day.

In the process they desecrated a Catholic holy day and ensured that Barry became what the ballad refers to as "another martyr for old Ireland".

Before the end of the month the Auxiliaries had left their imprint on Irish history by raiding a football game in Dublin and firing indiscriminately into the crowd, killing 12 innocent people and wounding scores of others on what would be remembered as Bloody Sunday.

"It was the most disgraceful show I have ever seen," one of the officers told the head of the Auxiliaries, Brigadier General Frank Crozier. They "fired into the crowd without any provocation whatever".

This is all history. No doubt the British think we Irish should forget it. The tragedy is that they forgot, and they are now living with the consequences of repeating their mistake on a second Bloody Sunday in January 1972.

Only this month British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw was complaining about the expense of the ongoing Saville Inquiry into the events of Bloody Sunday, which has been "costing scores and scores of millions of pounds".

Are they going to learn from those mistakes, or are they and the Americans going to repeat them in Iraq?

More ominous still, US President George W Bush warned this week for the first time that the United States and its

allies will not tolerate the construction of a nuclear weapon in Iran. That sounds like another ultimatum.

Who are America's allies in this? Israel, the country that has developed nuclear weapons and repeatedly threatens her Arab neighbours, is obviously one of those allies.

That should be enough for any right thinking people to question what is happening now.

Are we going to stand mutely by as Bush behaves with the demented idealism of a Stalin? It's time people shouted: "Enough, already!"