Pro communist banners obscure protesters during a visit by Chinese Premier Li Qiang. PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES He wrote scripts for the 1990s New Zealand television crime series Duggan , starring John Bach as an introverted police inspector brooding morosely over the Marlborough Sounds. What was the line? As I recall, it was put in the mouth of an ageing communist, who had reduced his entire ideology to one brutal sentence: "Nationalise everything — and shoot the buggers who complain!" As an honest summation of the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, that line (whoever wrote it) is pretty hard to beat.
Indeed, anyone who seriously proposes socialism as a solution to the world’s woes is being disingenuous if they suggest that the Red Dawn, should it ever arrive, will be the product of anything other than crushing centralised control and many, many executions. If you’re a socialist living in a liberal democracy, the problem is compounded ten-fold. In those circumstances, the socialist paradise that must be painted has to strike one’s audience as appreciably better than the capitalist economy they inhabit.
How is the orthodox comrade supposed to answer when asked: "Why would we trade games-consoles and Gucci fashion accessories for the guns and gulags of totalitarian communism?" Not honestly, for a start. Or, at least, not when you’re addressing anyone who isn’t already so far ground down by the cruelties of capitalism that "guns and gulags" present themselves as intriguing .
