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...