A story about George Galloway...

An interesting story about Galloway and one of his heroes...

But note Galloway's comment in The Guardian about his banning. He concludes: "More than half a century ago Paul Robeson, one of the greatest men who ever lived, was forbidden to enter Canada not by Ottawa but by Washington, which had taken away his passport."

Robeson was an outstanding actor and singer, who suffered and courageously opposed racism. But "one of the greatest men who ever lived"?

Twenty years ago Harvey Klehr, a scholar who has done as much as anyone to illuminate the history of American Communism, reviewed in Commentary (May 1989) the standard Paul Robeson: A Biography by Martin Dauml Duberman. Klehr wrote (link requires subscription to archive):

"In 1949 Robeson arrived in Moscow in the midst of Stalin's notorious anti-Zionism campaign. Uneasy at his inability to find old Jewish friends, he asked to see Itzik Feffer, the noted Yiddish writer. Feffer was brought from prison to Robeson's hotel, where he silently communicated that their conversation was being bugged. Other Jewish cultural leaders, he was able to convey, had already been purged; drawing his hand across his throat, he indicated what was to be his own fate as well. Robeson's response was to include a tribute to Feffer during his last Moscow concert. Duberman extenuatingly suggests that the gesture was “all that he could have done without directly threatening Feffer's life,” but that life was doomed anyway; more telling is that on his return to the United States, Robeson vehemently denied the existence of Soviet anti-Semitism.

"Although he read Khrushchev's 1956 speech denouncing the crimes of Stalin, Robeson never commented on it in public or private. The closest he ever came to acknowledging that the regime to which he had given his allegiance was less than perfect was in a remark to a friend that some acts of individual injustice might have occurred. In public, from the mid-30's on, there was no more devoted fellow-traveler than Paul Robeson. Indeed, he faithfully echoed the position of the American Moscow-line Communists that while prosecution of them under the Smith Act was illegitimate, Trotskyists did not deserve civil rights because they were “allies of fascism.”"

It's a measure of how slavish was Robeson's admiration for Stalinism that he behaved this way even though Fefer was himself a convinced Communist. Fefer said before his execution in 1952 (quoted in Stalin's Last Crime: The Doctors' Plot, Jonathan Brent and Vladimir P. Naumov, 2003, p. 331):

"It seemed to me that only Stalin could correct the historical injustice committed by the Roman kings.... I had nothing against the Soviet system. I am the son of a poor schoolteacher. Soviet power made a human being out of me and a fairly well known poet as well."

Galloway is not a fool, and he will certainly be familiar with this history. His judgement of Robeson is fully consistent with his stated views: "If you are asking did I support the Soviet Union, yes I did. Yes, I did support the Soviet Union, and I think the disappearance of the Soviet Union is the biggest catastrophe of my life."

As I say, it's worth noting this and placing it in the context of Galloway's political stances. There's a tendency among commentators to assume that Galloway, for all his bombast and rhetorical excess, is a colourful character who adds to the quality of public life. The truth is much darker.