McDowell, the new right and Stalin’s ghost

MICHAEL McDowell has made a convoluted effort to blame ex-Stalinists for the huge anti-war demonstration in Dublin.

One must wonder if he is not projecting his own dilemma onto his enemies. If 'Stalinism' meant anything outside the USSR, it meant some 1930s leftists pretending to believe that Stalin in faraway Moscow was the infallible leader of all progressive movements the world over.

These intellectuals would have despised a man like Stalin in real life, yet they felt their only choice was to agree always with the leader of the Soviet Communist Party or to become politically irrelevant. So they defended the indefensible as long as they could first the purges, then the show trials, then Hungary, etc.