I was not aware until late last evening of a passing claim on Kiwiblog, that I had been a communist. DPF was wrong, though I can understand both his impression (because I went to Mao’s China in 1976 to try to experience life on a commune), and perhaps his feeling that having been communist would be just historical trivia.

But it matters a great deal to me. Then and now I regard(ed)  leftist dupes as dangerous and often unpleasant fools. When Warren Freer procured for my travelling companion Jenny visas for China for both of us, with terms and other conditions that even the dedicated worshippers in the NZ China Friendship Society could not get,  it was the first of many delicious ironies, for I’d always seen them as dupes, and most of them would have seen me as “unreliable” if not a “capitalist roader”.

I can understand that these distinctions may seem trivial to David Farrar’s generation. They’ve grown up after Reagan defanged the monster. For them Stalin and his successors, and  Mao are historical monstrosities. They’ve never had to fear them. The remnant Kim Il Sung II (Kim Jung Il)  is a cartoon dictator, scary in a ‘monsters under the bed’  way (maybe they exist and could really catch and eat children who can’t leap into bed over the end) but David’s generation missed out on feeling that particular evil could triumph. They can’t know how close it felt at times.

I saw the fear of many people obliged to speak to us in China. In my mornings with Rewi Alley in Peking he explained the soldiers at the door, and his long house arrest by the Gang of Four.

I’d always detested the supercilious certainty of the various schools of communist who contended to stand at the top of their intellectual dung heap. Though  I argued with my parents against the Vietnam war, and for Norman Kirk’s ohu scheme, and other Labour soft socialist policy, I did not regard ANZUS as superfluous. Until I went to China I could think that Maoism was a necessary phase to end a corrupt feudalist oligarchy there, but never that communism was for New Zealand or any other people who were not desperate.

I can remember only one Communist who I could like socially (Peter Wilson, VUW Student Association President who was later assigned by the Party to work in a car assembly plant and join the Territorials, then committed suicide when it all proved to be fruitless).

Among the earnest Strelnikovs who infested leftist university politics were Don and Peter Franks. We have no known family connection, but people got us mixed in their minds. They were hard left and in reality they had nothing to do with me because we were on different sides, even then.  I came to know Peter a little after University days, and like him, but still do not know Don beyond a social ‘gidday’. His clique shunned people they regarded as class enemies. Today he is more polite than then. 

David Farrar’s generation can only know intellectually about the era when it was a genuine security risk to have universities everywhere full of willing dupes of Communism ( their dreary successors’ instinctive collectivism now  is merely evidence of the intellectual quality problem in higher education). But at the time the distinctions between liberal left and communist were very important. It seemed at the time unlikely that the US intellectual right would face down their own and the European intellectual left.

I regard the difference as important still. To me, to have been a communist remains evidence of credulity and a weakness for power and cruelty.