Seumas Milne

Seumas Patrick Charles Milne (born 5 September 1958) is a British journalist and former political aide. A journalist at The Guardian from 1984, later a columnist for the newspaper, he was appointed as the Labour Party's Executive Director of Strategy and Communications in October 2015 under party leader Jeremy Corbyn. He left the role when Corbyn ceased being leader in April 2020.

Quotes

2001–2007

• But any glimmer of recognition of why people might have been driven to carry out such atrocities, sacrificing their own lives in the process - or why the United States is hated with such bitterness, not only in Arab and Muslim countries, but across the developing world - seems almost entirely absent.
• It is this record of unabashed national egotism and arrogance that drives anti-Americanism among swaths of the world's population, for whom there is little democracy in the current distribution of global wealth and power. If it turns out that Tuesday's attacks were the work of Osama bin Laden's supporters, the sense that the Americans are once again reaping a dragons' teeth harvest they themselves sowed will be overwhelming.
• But for every "terror network" that is rooted out, another will emerge - until the injustices and inequalities that produce them are addressed.
  • "They can't see why they are hated", The Guardian (13 September 2001)
  • The scare quotes are in the original.

• It has become almost received wisdom to bracket Stalin and Hitler as twin monsters of the past century - Mao and Pol Pot are sometimes thrown in as an afterthought - and commonplace to equate communism and fascism as the two greatest evils of an unprecedentedly sanguinary era. In some versions, communism is even held to be the more vile and bloodier wickedness. The impact of this cold war victors' version of the past has been to relativise the unique crimes of Nazism, bury those of colonialism and feed the idea that any attempt at radical social change will always lead to suffering, killing and failure.
  • "The battle for history" The Guardian (12 September 2002).

• No major 20th-century political tradition is without blood on its hands, but battles over history are more about the future than the past. Part of the current enthusiasm in official western circles for dancing on the grave of communism is no doubt about relations with today's Russia and China. But it also reflects a determination to prove there is no alternative to the new global capitalist order - and that any attempt to find one is bound to lead to suffering and bloodshed.
  • "Communism may be dead, but clearly not dead enough", The Guardian (16 February 2006)

• Communism, which came to control a third of the planet in a generation, was the most important political movement of the past century. It carried out what other socialists had only talked about, abolishing capitalism and creating publicly owned, planned economies. Its crimes and failures are now so well rehearsed that they are in danger of obliterating any understanding of its achievements - both of which have lessons for the future of progressive politics and the search for a social alternative to globalised capitalism.
  • "Movement of the people" The Guardian (12 May 2007).

2009–2016

• The media and politicians in this country and all over the Western world would have you believe that the cause of this suffering and this carnage is the rockets of Hamas that are fired into Israel. That is to turn reality on its head.
  The Palestinian people have the right, as any occupied people under law and under all political and legal conventions - the right to resist. Israel, as an illegal occupying power, has one obligation, and that is to withdraw.
  Even now, despite the horrific casualties, Hamas is not broken and will not be broken, because of the spirit of resistance of the Palestinian people.
  • Speech at a rally (10 January 2009), as cited in "Jeremy Corbyn praised 'magnificent' pro-Hamas rally", The Telegraph (5 December 2015).
  • Speaking during the Gaza war (7 December 2008 – 18 January 2009).

• What has transformed the contest has been the dramatic rise of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, former Socialist minister and candidate of the Front de Gauche (Left Front), who has gone from 6% to 15% in a few months to become the pivotal "third man" in the election. He has done so with an unashamedly populist campaign, targeting marginalised working class voters prey to the National Front, inspiring the young and non-voters and using the kind of street language alien to the magic circles of the French political establishment he abandoned.
  • "George Galloway and Jean-Luc Mélenchon expose a huge political gap", The Guardian (3 April 2012)
  • In the 2012 French presidential election, the Left Front came fourth behind the National Front (now National Rally). The Left Front was dissolved in 2018.

• There is a view among pro-Palestinian people often that the Zionist movement has a grip on the media, in a way that I think sometimes exaggerates the mechanisms through which that influence is exerted.
• Zionist movement activists [are] incredibly hard-working and dedicated, and they bombard the media, day in and day out, with their obsessive campaigns.
  • Speech at a event entitled "The Nakba: Sixty years of dispossession, Sixty years of resistance" (February 2009), as cited in "Seumas Milne called for campaign to counter media 'bombardment' by 'Zionist activists'", The Jewish Chronicle (24 April 2019)

• A particular form of socialism grew up in the post-war period in the conditions of the Cold War [...] East Berlin was absolutely at the front line of the cold war. That’s what the Berlin Wall was. It was a front line between two social and military systems and two military alliances, and a very tense one at that. It wasn’t just some kind of arbitrary division to hold people in, it was also a front line in a global conflict. And that conditioned a lot of the things that happened.
  • Interview on George Galloway's The Mother of All Talk Shows on talkSport (2009) cited in Kristian Niemietz "Seumas Milne on East Germany: Historical revisionism at its worst"] Institute of Economic Affairs (25 August 2017).

• Emboldened by the wave of change and growing support across the region, Hamas has also regained credibility as a resistance force, which had faded since 2009, and strengthened its hand against an increasingly discredited Palestinian Authority leadership in Ramallah.
  • "It's Palestinians who have the right to defend themselves", The Guardian (20 November 2012)

• During a Valdai club session I chaired, [Vladimir] Putin told foreign journalists and academics that the unipolar world had been a "means of justifying dictatorship over people and countries" – but the emerging multipolar world was likely to be still more unstable. The only answer – and this was clearly intended as an opening to the west – was to rebuild international institutions, based on mutual respect and co-operation. The choice was new rules – or no rules, which would lead to "global anarchy".
  When I asked Putin whether Russia's actions in Ukraine had been a response to, and an example of, a "no-rules order", Putin denied it, insisting that the Kosovo precedent meant Crimea had every right to self-determination. But by conceding that Russian troops had intervened in Crimea "to block Ukrainian units", he effectively admitted crossing the line of legality – even if not remotely on the scale of the illegal invasions, bombing campaigns and covert interventions by the US and its allies over the past decade and a half.
  But there is little chance of the western camp responding to Putin's call for a new system of global rules. In fact, the US showed little respect for rules during the cold war either, intervening relentlessly wherever it could. But it did have respect for power. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, that restraint disappeared. It was only the failure of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – and Russia's subsequent challenge to western expansion and intervention in Georgia, Syria and Ukraine – that provided some check to unbridled US power.
• Putin’s oligarchic nationalism may not have much global appeal, but Russia's role as a counterweight to western supremacism certainly does.
• Only China offers the eventual prospect of a global restraint on western unilateral power and that is still some way off.
  • "A real counterweight to US power is a global necessity", The Guardian (29 October 2014).
  • The Valdai club discussions were held in Sochi between 22–24 October 2014.

• Resistance and the unity of the working class is what will progress our movement.
• [On the 2011 London riots] Those people need to be organised and need to find a political expression . . . It is a huge opportunity to channel that anger.
  • May Day speech in Glasgow (3 May 2015), as cited in "Jeremy Corbyn’s strategist Seumas Milne in the eye of Labour storm", Financial Times (14 January 2016).
  • The source is ambiguous on the date of the second quote, but a YouTube video is the only external citation.

About Milne

In chronological order.

• Seumas Milne, the Stalinist Rip van Winkle who now edits the Guardian‍'‍s comment pages
  • Robert Harris "Now my generation is in a war we must win", The Telegraph (18 September 2001) Published in The Daily Telegraph (18 September 2001), p. 27

• A particularly telling Milne moment came in 2006, when the Council of Europe’s parliamentary assembly voted to condemn "the massive human rights violations committed by totalitarian communist regimes". In the article he wrote in response, Milne admitted the USSR executed 799,455 people, then moved on.
  "For all its brutalities and failures, communism in the Soviet Union, eastern Europe and elsewhere delivered rapid industrialisation, mass education, job security and huge advances in social and gender equality," he insisted.
  Now, you can quibble with the facts. Focussing only on the USSR's executions ignores the millions it starved to death in Ukraine, or in the mass deportations from the Caucasus and Crimea, the way it used rape as a weapon, or that fact it invaded without provocation half a dozen countries. You can also question those "huge advances" considering the fact that life expectancy in the USSR peaked in 1962, then declined steadily as chronic alcoholism took hold.
  • Oliver Bullough "I wanted to believe in Jeremy Corbyn. But I can't believe in Seumas Milne", New Statesman (23 October 2015).
  • For Bullough's reference to "the way it used rape as a weapon", see Rape during the occupation of Germany, Rape during the Soviet occupation of Poland and Soviet war crimes.

• He was oversympathetic to autocratic regimes and undersympathetic to countries with the rule of law and democracy [...] That is the worst aspect of the hard left.
  • Clive Soley, as cited in "Jeremy Corbyn’s strategist Seumas Milne in the eye of Labour storm", Financial Times (14 January 2016).
  • In Hammersmith, Milne was Chair of the Constituency Labour Party (CLP) in the 1980s when Clive Soley, now Lord Soley, was the local MP.

• Corbyn’s circle of advisers reflects and reinforces the moral absolutism of his political instincts. The anti-imperialist left is, in short, running the show.
  The name of Seumas Milne, a former Guardian journalist now Labour's head of strategy and communications, often emerges in this connection. His case illuminates precisely the ideological direction of Corbyn's Labour. Milne has a brilliant intellect and there is vanishingly little he does not know about anti-Semitism, its traps and tropes. (I know this because I owe a good deal of my own education on the subject to him, a former colleague.) Milne himself would never have fallen into his boss's grossest errors—of failing to notice, for example, that a London mural whose removal Corbyn protested in a recently-resurfaced 2012 Facebook posting contained shockingly obvious and explicit anti-Semitic stereotypes. But Milne is in lockstep with Corbyn in cleaving to the hard left's anti-imperialist line that whatever the faults of authoritarians such as Putin, Assad, and Maduro, they are at least enemies of American hegemony, and the crimes of the United States and Israel are infinitely worse.
  • Matt Seaton "Behind the Anti-Semitism Crisis of Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party", The New York Review of Books (17 August 2018)

• But [Owen] Jones's real bete noire is Milne, whom he charges with a simple "lack of professionalism". One insider says he was one of the few people in Corbyn’s office "that you could actually discuss socialist theory with", but in Jones's telling, it was "impossible to get him to sign off press releases, speeches or other public interventions", and "this apparent non-engagement would frequently bring the entire operation to a grinding halt". From one of the Corbyn project’s most devout advocates, this is remarkable stuff.
  • John Harris "Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour Under Corbyn; This Land: The Story of a Movement - review, The Observer (13 September 2020)
  • From a review of This Land: The Story of a Movement (Allen Lane) by Owen Jones. The other book mentioned in the heading was by Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire published by Bodley Head.