The Daily Mail is involved in a dispute with Ed Miliband over a recent article in the paper that accused Miliband’s father Ralph, a Marxist academic, of hating Britain. Miliband says he disagrees with the views of his father, who died in 1994, but says his father loved Britain. Dalrymple has written a short but powerful article for the Telegraph that reminds readers of the troubling emotional and moral foundations of Marxists like Ralph Miliband. I should know, Dalrymple says, because my father was Marxist too:

I saw that his concern for the fate of humanity in general was inconsistent with his contempt for the actual people by whom he was surrounded, and his inability to support relations of equality with others. I concluded that the humanitarian protestations of Marxists were a mask for an urge to domination.

In addition to the emotional dishonesty of Marxism, I was impressed by its limitless resources of intellectual dishonesty. Having grown up with the Little Lenin Library and (God help us!) the Little Stalin Library, I quickly grasped that the dialectic could prove anything you wanted it to prove, for example, that killing whole categories of people was a requirement of elementary decency.