Not So Much A "Cold" As A "Deep-Frozen" Warrior: New Zealand's most industrious anti-communist, Trevor Loudon, would have been much happier peddling his red-baiting wares back in the days of US Senator Joseph McCarthy and his local franchisee, National’s first prime minister, Sid Holland. At least back then there was a market for left-wing names, addresses and meticulously-recorded red rendezvous.
IT’S HARD NOT TO FEEL just a little bit proud of New Zealand-born
businessman, Chris Liddell. To have a Kiwi in the West Wing of the White House
– as Director of Strategic Initiatives, no less – is a pretty big deal.
Another Kiwi making waves in Donald Trump’s America is a lot
harder to like.
In her coverage of the recent Conservative Political Action Conference
(CPAC) held in Washington DC, Rolling
Stone journalist, Sarah Posner, name-checked our very own Trevor Loudon.
Describing the Christchurch-born anti-communist as: “a
conspiracy theorist who appeared on a panel moderated by Ginni Thomas, wife of
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas”, Posner offered Loudon’s outlandish
conspiracism as proof of the Republican Party’s “willingness to look the other
way as the movement mutates from 20th century conservatism to a
Trump-Alt-Right-white-nationalism.”
What caught Posner’s attention were the startling claims
contained in Loudon’s 23-minute video America
Under Siege: Civil War 2017. Decrying the very idea that the Russians intervened
in last year’s US Presidential Election on Trump’s behalf, Loudon advances the novel
theory that Vladimir Putin is, in fact, the principal funder and director of Donald
Trump’s enemies.
New Zealand Leftists of a certain age, especially those who
belonged to the gaggle of tiny communist groups that once clung like limpets to
the broader labour movement, will have little difficulty recalling Loudon. I
certainly remember his NewZeal blog and its ferocious dedication to tracking
down and monitoring the membership and minutiae of every Marxist-Leninist group
that ever published a pamphlet or stood on a picket line. Verily, wherever
three or more of them were gathered in Marx’s name, it seemed that Trevor was
with them also.
To be honest, I felt sorry for him. Like so many others who found
themselves swept up in revolutionary politics in the 1980s and 90s, Loudon was
born too late. How much happier and more gainfully employed he would have been
had he been able to peddle his anti-communist wares back in the days of US Senator Joseph
McCarthy and his local franchisee, National’s first prime minister, Sid
Holland. At least back then there was a market for left-wing names, addresses
and meticulously-recorded red rendezvous.
But Loudon’s influence, both here and in his spiritual home,
the United States, grew out of the Internet. There is considerable irony here, because
by the time New Zealanders started connecting themselves to the Internet and
starting up blogs, Loudon’s great fountainhead of subversion and sedition, the
Soviet Union, had suddenly and irrevocably blipped-off History’s
computer-screen.
Not that Loudon was about to let a little thing like the
fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of what used to be called “actually
existing socialism” get in the way of his Manichean conviction that the future
of the entire world turned upon the never-ending twilight struggle between the Children
of Darkness and the Children of Light.
Nevertheless, the collapse of the Soviet Union in August
1991, did leave Loudon prey to the same deadening realisation that had demoralised
its loyal disciples all over the world. Without so much as a bang, indeed, with
barely a whimper, all the patiently collected literature and memorabilia of
Soviet-style communism – along with all the bulging files detailing its
collectors’ every move – were reduced to piles of worthless junk. Like those Russian
warehouses filled with unwanted busts of Lenin and Stalin, Loudon’s vast
archive of red subversion in Godzone no longer had any serious buyers.
Luckily for Loudon, the USA remains the one place where comically
unserious people can still be taken very seriously indeed. While their more
adaptable comrades made the necessary Manicheist transition from the evils of Soviet
Communism to the evils of Radical Islam (assisted admirably by the terrorism of
Osama Bin Laden) dyed-in-the-wool anti-communists like Loudon (now based in the
United States) doggedly insisted that the Red Menace was still very much alive.
Putin and his “puppet masters”, says Loudon, have been
“guiding the chaos unfolding on America’s streets”. Still inspired by the
doctrines of Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong, these shadowy string-pullers have
been “organizing protests and riots in the United States from the Vietnam War
to Ferguson, Missouri.”
The CPAC crowd lapped-up Loudon’s Cold War retro paranoia
like gravy. Instead of being hailed as Trump’s best friend, Putin was, very helpfully, being
recast as America’s old adversary.
As strategic initiatives go – it’s a beauty.
This essay was
originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The
Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 3 March 2017.
