Communism's Two-pronged Attack

"Can this Red Wreck The British Empire?" is the heading of a Saturday Evening Post article about Rajani Palme Dutt, vice-chairman of the Communist Party of Great Britain and its real leader. The short answer is of course "no." What chance would this King Street functionary have against the much more important people engaged in the same talk, people who may or may not have Communist affiliations or sympathies?

That he knows that his job is being most efficiently done for him would seem to be implicit in Dutt's complacent remark to the Post's correspondent: "Within the life span of this generation we will have won the struggle all along the world's colonial front. Look at what has already happened since the Russian revolution of 1917." It is true that much has happened since that time, as it is also true that Marx. Engels. Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin all perceived the necessity, in the assault upon Western civilisation, to destroy Europe at its centre by destroying it upon the periphery of its colonial power.

But it so happens that the formidable gains achieved cannot be credited to the formal Communism of Moscow and King Street. To take one small but very clear example: Britain was robbed of the Persian oil industry, not by the Tudeh' Party, but by the World Bank and the U.S. State Department in sinister conjunction.