Morning Star/Daily Worker: 80 years of lies

January 9, 2010 at 8:22 pm (censorship, democracy, history, Jim D, media, political groups, Russia, stalinism, truth)

The Morning Star today publishes its 80th Anniversary edition. Strictly speaking, the Star isn’t 80, as it came into existence in 1966, but we can forgive that very minor sleight of hand: the 1966 launch of the Star was in reality no more than a name change for the  Daily Worker, which was indeed founded in January 1930 as the ‘popular’ mouthpiece of the British Communist Party.

Much more difficult to forgive is the Star‘s  misrepresentation of  its own (and its forerunner’s) history. This is not done these days  by means of blatant Stalinist lies of the kind that the old Daily Worker peddled. Now it’s slightly more subtle: evasion, innuendo and deliberate ambiguity rather than straighforward lying.

Take what today’s ’80th Anniversary Special’ has to say about the Daily Worker‘s coverage of the Russian invasion of Hungary in 1956 – an event that lead to the resignation of the paper’s special correspondent in Hungary, Peter Fryer (who supported the Hungarian uprising) and eventually to the loss of about a quarter of the British CP’s membership. I suppose it’s a sign of progress that the Star mentions the events of 1956 at all, but read what it says today:

“Editors refused to to print two dispatches from Fryer, who had been sent to Hungary to cover the story. A third dispatch was subtantially cut before publication.

“He hailed the tragic events as a peoples’ revolution and then took refuge in the British emabassy in Budapest. His letter of resignation was published in the Daily Worker on November 16 1956.”

Took refuge in the British embassy, eh?

And while noting that the Morning Star opposed the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, today’s Anniversary Special has nothing to say about the paper’s disgraceful libelleling of pro-democracy protesters in Eastern Europe in 1989 – 90 as “hooligans” and its support for the likes of Ceausescu and Milosevic.

But the most shameful distortion in today’s coverage concerns the wartime ban on the Daily Worker between January 1941 and August/September 1942. Here’s what today’s Star has to say about it:

“Special Branch officers and uniformed police swooped on the paper’s Cayton Street building to enforce the ban on the instructioins of home secretary Herbert Morrison.

“During the ban, the Cayton Street offices and printing press and printing press were totally destroyed by fire on April 16 1941 after a direct hit from an incendiary bomb during a fierce nazi air raid.

“A huge campaign against the ban won widespread support.

“But Morrison kept it in force, despite the entry of the Soviet Union into the war on Jume 22 1941 and the British Communist Party shifting its position to wholehearted support for the war to defeat fascism.”

Well, I suppose the reference to the CP “shifting position”  and the Soviet Union’s “entry …into the war”,  give slight clues, but the uninitiated would be hard-pressed to work out from that, the real reason for the ban: that just like  ‘Action’ – the paper of the British Union of Fascists,  banned at the same time – the Daily Worker while technically neutral and “pro-peace” was in reality, pro-Nazi, painting Nazi Germany as the victim of British and French warmongers. This was, of course, the result of the CP’s slavish obedience to Moscow and the Nazi-Soviet pact of 23 August 1939. The most blatant Stalinist pro-German propaganda appeared in Labour Monthly the CP’s misleadingly-titled magazine, edited by the Party’s leading intellectual,  Palme-Dutt, but there was also plenty in the Daily Worker – for instance an interview with a German pilot who’d bailed out over England,  in which the pilot’s claim that Germany simply wanted peace was quoted without question or criticism of any kind.

As the Graun of  22 January 1941 commented: “The ‘Daily Worker’ began the war as a supporter of resistance to Hitler; it changed its tune when it found that Stalin wanted to be friends with Hitler. Day after day since it has vilified the British Government and its leaders to the exclusion of any condemnation of Hitler.”

I’ll leave the last word (for now, anyway) to George Orwell, who opposed the ban, but not out of any love for the Daily Worker:

“Soon after the suppressed Daily Worker had been reinstated, I was lecturing to a workingmen’s college in South London. The audience were working-class and lower-middle class intellectuals – the sort of audience that one used to meet at Left Book Club Branches. The lecture had touched on freedom of the press, and at the end, to my astonishment, several questioners stood up and asked me: Did I not think that the lifting of the ban on the Daily Worker was a great mistake? When asked why, they said it was a paper of doubtful loyalty and ought not to be tolerated in war time. I found myself defending the Daily Worker, which has gone out of its way to libel me more than once. But where had these people learned this essentially totalitarian outlook?  Pretty certainly they had learned it from the Communists (ie: the British Communist Party – JD) themselves!” – from “The Freedom of the Press”, part of an unpublished (at the time) preface to the first edition of Animal Farm.