Maoist Sex Slaves

It was just over a year ago that the story broke about the "Domestic Slavery" case in Brixton. I guessed at the time that the likely culprit was Ara Balakrishnan and his Workers Institue of Mao Tse Tung Thought. Well, the story is in the news again today when the police revealed that charges are to be brought. It turns out that Comrade Balakrishnan is being charged with:

...one count of cruelty to a person under 16, four counts of rape and 19 counts of indecent assault.

Of course there's plenty of precedence for this. Did not the Great Helmsman himself not have a little harem of young women to satisfy his need for dialectics? On a smaller scale there have also been well-publicised cases of sexual exploitation by comrade Gerald Healy (WRP), and lots of stuff going on the in the SWP.

Still, the court case should be interesting...

Media - Stealing Material

Richard North has a piece on EU Referendum entitled 'Media: The Story Stealers', which is about the way that Christopher Booker's story about an Italian woman who was forced to have her baby by caesarean so that it could be taken from her and be put up for adoption. It's a horrific story, and it's easy to see why it has been picked up right across the media. The only thing is that Booker, who's been writing about the reign of terror that social workers and the family courts have imposed on many families, hardly gets credited with brining the story to public attention in the first place.

I've had a little taste of it here too, with the Balakrishnan and the Lambeth Slaves story. It started when I guessed the likely identity of the group involved before it had been revealed in the press. Once it was confirmed that it was Balakrishnan and his group I wrote a few pieces about my contacts with them years ago in Brixton. Not only did that lead to a massive spike in traffic, it also lead to numerous contacts from the mass media.

To date I have spoken or had email contact with the Independent, the Sunday Times, the BBC, the Huffington Post, the Sunday Telegraph, Sky News and more. I gave them information about the group, what it was like in Brixton at the time, the ins and outs of the different far Left groups active at the time and more.

And the result? Only one person has given any credit to this blog and that's Cahal Milmo of the Independent. Many of the rest have quoted verbatim from text I've given, used extracts from conversations I've had with them or else picked up facts that I supplied and have given no credit or attribution. I shouldn't be surprised, but when I've had long and detailed conversations with journalists and they've promised to give the blog a mention it's galling for them to use my material and not credit me with it.

Not only that, I see the same idiocies and errors of fact repeated again and again. Even when given correct information some newspapers seem unable to get it right. For example, the Communist Party of Great Britain, the Communist Party of England (Marxist Leninist) and the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist Leninist) are not the same, and Balakrishnan was only ever involved with one of them. And the stories about Balakrishnan proclaiming himself Jesus are as idiotic as the garbage about Carlos the Jackal staying with Balakrishnan in Brixton.

Politics - Then and Now

The last few days has seen traffic to this blog shoot up massively, attracted by my posts about Ara Balakrishnan and the Lambeth 'Slavery' case. These visitors have included members of the mainstream media, many of whom have been in touch and who I've spoken to. Some, like the reporter from the Independent have credited this blog directly, others, like the Huffington Post have been happy to take what I've offered and then used it without attribution. However, that's material for a future article, for today I want to just make a few things clear about my politics as it's clear to me that some people haven't looked at anything else on this site.

Back in the days when Balakrishnan and his group were active, that is in the mid to late 1970s, my politics were far Left. I was a teenage Marxist, from an immigrant working class background. The world was clear to me. I knew that I was on the side of history and that proletarian revolution was the only solution to the poverty, racism and violence around me. I was driven by a strong sense of injustice, that people like me were excluded from society, that we were poor and would remain so. It was also clear that class society was organised to preserve the status quo and that the country was run by a political class that did everything it could to keep us down. On the streets the National Front and British Movement were active neo-Nazi movements that were acting as tools of the ruling class, and that the police were there to defend them and to fight those of us who were anti-fascists. And these views, though they may seem extreme now, were not that uncommon. Brixton, and places like Brixton, were home to numerous far Left groups, and though they differed in degree, the views I've described were common across most groups, whether they described themselves as Communist, Maoist, Trotskyist or Anarchist. And it was all so black and white - the temper of the times would not admit shades of grey. And, to be fair, being a teenager makes it easy to be certain, dogmatic and intolerant of ambiguity.

That was then. Here I am more than thirty years later, and I still believe that society is run by a political class that is intolerant of dissent and divorced from the lives of most people. I still care about poverty and racism and the struggle for economic and political justice. Only now I think that the victims of racism are as likely to be, or even more likely to be, white and working class as they are to be black. I believe that multi-culturalism is a poisonous ideology that enshrines and fetishises difference whereas I had wanted to eliminate difference and to aim for a society that was truly colour-blind. Where I wanted race to become inconsequential, todays anti-racists elevate it to a guiding principle and turn victimhood into a virtue. I now believe that you fight poverty locally and globally by economic development - and that free trade and globalisation are the best means to acheive this - whereas now it is the establishment that hates development. I believe that the green agenda is shared by our political classes and what sadly now passes for 'the left'. Rather than aiming to pull people from poverty and exclusion by giving space for them to work and to grow their economy, we instead try and shoe-horn them into 'sustainable' paths that actually means they stay poor.

And finally, where I used to see the world as black and white, I now see that it's all grey. Maybe it's the wisdom that comes with experience, maybe it's the fact that I've deliberately decided to test my assumptions repeatedly over the years and have to tried to adopt a sceptical attitude in politics, science and life in general. And perhaps, finally, it's the fact that I was so closely involved with the far Left for a number of years which means that I can be so critical of where they are now - the mind-set is familiar to me in the way that it isn't for those who've not been there.

Balakrishnan's Red Guards

The thing about Balakrishnan and his group is that they were completely inspired by the politics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. It was a bizarre combination of violent radicalism, self-sacrifice, utter egalitarianism and devotion to the leader - Mao or his representative here on earth. They saw themselves as Red Guards, ready to do whatever was required in the name of the Party. There could be no room for doubt, shades of grey or ambiguity. So, to make sense of what happened to Balakrishnan and his group, you have to let go of any preconceptions you might have about conventional left or far left politics.

And the spark of all this madness was the very real glamour of the Red Guards and the zeal of those who wanted to be like them. People forget that radical Maoism had quite a following in many parts of the third world (as it was then called) - and many of those attracted to Balakrishnan came from those countries. What's more, you didn't just wander into their centre and ask to be signed up. To become a member you had to work hard at it. You had to prove you could be trusted, you had to show ideological purity, exhibit devotion to the group no matter what. All this and put up with the world around you actively telling you that you're crazy. It's the ideal recipe for cultish behaviour.

Did Comrade Balakrishnan Try To Break Into Whitehall?

It's been years since I've thought about this stuff... A persistent rumour back in the late 70s, when Balakrishnan's group were at the height of their public activity, was that Balakrishnan had been arrested trying to break into government offices in Whitehall. Lots of people on the Left believed it at the time, though it's also true that it was the sort of rumour that some of the other Maoists could have spread around.

And how's this for a little historical snippet... During the Queen's 1977 Jubilee visit to Brixton, the route took her right by the Maoist centre, replete with huge red portrait of Mao Tse Tung. Balakrishnan's supporters were inside clutching copies of the little red book...

Balakrishnan In Action

How's this for Maoist style:

The Party Committee of the Workers’ Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought, which upholds the leadership of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and Chairman Mao, with profound indignation and deep class hatred, denounces the British fascist state for its repeated political persecution of our worker comrade, Ekins Brome, a member of our Party Committee. Comrade Brome was arrested on February 13th, 1976 together with Comrade Najeeb Norman, another member of our Committee, when both these comrades went to Brixton Prison to visit two of our other leading comrades who were then in unjust detention from February 1st, 1976 – Comrade Ara Balakrishnan, the Secretary of the Institute and Comrade Wee Hock Seng. A surprise attack was made on Comrades Brome and Najeeb by some prison wardens who pounced on them and violently assaulted them inside the Brixton Prison compound. Both their spectacles were smashed and their faces were covered with bloody bruises. The fascist prison wardens bared their anti-communist fangs further by tearing off a badge of Chairman Mao from Comrade Najeeb’s coat! These fascist hoodlums revealed only too clearly that they were acting on the direct instructions of the panic stricken British fascist state when they turned truth upside down and hastily charged our comrades with assaulting them! From then on we witnessed yet again the mockery of the British legal system – the rubber stamp of the dictatorship of the fascist bourgeoisie of Britain. Our comrades, as soldiers of Chairman Mao and servants of the working and oppressed people, militantly resisted at every step and resolutely denounced the fascist courts and the moribund criminals who sat in “judgement” of them. They vigorously shouted the slogans: “Long live Chairman Mao!”, “Long live the Communist Party of China!”, “Death to the British fascist state!”, “Victory to World Revolution!”

Yep, that's the authentic voice of 'slave keeper' and Marxist-Leninist Aravindan Balakrishnan
in action, exactly as I remember him...

So what we have here is not anything to do with 'modern slavery' or people trafficking or anything of that ilk. What we have is a Leftist sect that has imploded and collapsed in on itself. This lot might be more extreme, but it's what we've seen again and again with the Left.

Anyone want to talk about Gerry Healey and the WRP? Or even good old Rev Jim Jones if we really want to get dramatic.

Slavery = Democratic Centralism

Earlier this morning I blogged about the Lambeth Slavery story - (for non-UK readers, the police have retrieved three women from a house in South London, alleging that the women had been held against their will for 30 years) - and guessed that this was really a case of political brainwashing. At the time I suggested that the most likely culprits were Marxist-Leninists/Maoists. I even mentioned a specific group who ran a Maoist bookshop on Acre Lane.

The police have just revealed that the couple accused of being the 'slave keepers' were Aravindan and Chanda Balakrishnan, who ran the Maoist bookshop on Acre Lane. As a curious teenager I had been in there a couple of times and it was weird. The group were spreading the line that the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army were going to invade the UK and bring the revolution to the people. They were preparing the ground by holding study groups in Mao Tse Tung (as it was spelt in those days) Thought. The rest of the time they spent in attacking all other leftist groups. In particular they hated another Maoist group called the Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist), now known as the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist). Balakrishnan had actually been a member of the CPE(ML), but had left/been expelled and therefore hated them more than anything else in the world.

The really were the most paranoid people I ever met. On the second and last time I visited their shop a fire engine passed outside. No siren blaring or anything, it just cruised by. One of the people in the shop looked up and told me that it was an example of psychological warfare by the British government. I never went back.

So, remember where you read it first...