Sir: Am I alone in finding Peregrine Worsthorne's volte-face over
nuclear weapons truly extraordinary? To berate the New Right for their stiffness of spine at the time communism was collapsing because of its — to use the Marxist phrase — internal contradictions, is to forget that the point at which most dictatorships launch military adventures abroad is when their citizenry are most dissatisfied at home. Galtieri's and Saddam Hussein's prophylactic annexations are both within living memory.
Most eye-popping of all, though, was the following casual analysis of 70 years of communist mayhem in the countries of the former Soviet Union: 'Communism did indeed wreck the Soviet economy, but not the educational system, or even the world of Russian scholarship, which somehow managed to carry on regardless.'
Strewth! One can't help suspecting that this particular 'Cold War warrior' conduct- ed his campaign against the Evil Empire from the perilous outpost of a table at the Ivy, flanked on the left by a decanter of vintage port and on the right by a regula- tion cigar and ash-tray! We will never know the exact number of Soviet citizens murdered in the name of communism. Forty million is deemed a conservative estimate (including truckloads of scholars who — what was it? — 'managed to carry on regardless'). Add to that 30 million Chi- nese and the ancillary single-digit millions produced by enthusiastic ideologues in adjacent countries and we are left with only one possible conclusion: communism has proven itself to be the most efficient destroyer of life in the history of mankind; more so than the nuclear weapons that contained it. Those who opposed this truly evil doctrine, Sir P. and New Rightists in equal measure, deserve our thanks. Revi- sionism is best left to those who mustered together under the banner of 'Better red than dead', not because of a love of life, but because of a genuine enthusiasm for the political condition implied by that colour. Peregrine Worsthorne's heart is always in the right place; on this occasion his head seems to have taken an Absence Without Leave.
Guy Carter
63 Rectory Road, Walthsntstow, London E17
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