The international mouthpieces of social democracy seem to be working under the most adverse of circumstances. Among them is Paul Mason, member of the Labour Party in the UK, former Corbyn’s errand boy, writer, and former journalist, who decided to address the issue of the “European Left” in his article published in the broadsheet newspaper “Information” in Denmark.

In his five-page article, this star of journalism attempted to analyse the problems which the “left” is called upon to combat on the occasion of the war in Ukraine. He concluded that “The left is not united, because some are on the side of the West, some on the side of Russia, and some do not take a stand”. He also reached the following profound conclusion as regards Greece: “Instead of fighting one against the other in different countries, the lefts should turn their attention to Greece, where 20 years ago the left split into the moderate party of SYRIZA, which has a European orientation and embraces western democracy, and the KKE, which follows the hard Stalinist line. That is a good solution because there is no problem in having a party that supports Putin (note: he means the KKE), which in its majority consists of elderly pensioners. That way, the rest of us can continue to deal with the life we want.”

Firstly, we can clearly see that the writer bears animosity towards the KKE and attempts to whitewash the anti-popular policy of SYRIZA. Furthermore, the chronological inaccuracies in the above excerpt of Paul Mason's article are glaringly obvious, while he reproduces the well-known propaganda of Euro-Atlantic forces claiming that anyone who does not stand with NATO is on Putin’s side. It would, of course, be an exaggeration to ask those who use the EU and NATO “compass” to be objective in their assessments or at least to read the positions of the KKE, which condemn the unacceptable Russian military invasion of Ukraine, highlighting at the same time the enormous responsibilities of the US, NATO, and the EU for these developments. Besides, we never expected that the writer would understand the KKE’s slogan “We refuse to choose an imperialist camp, we refuse to choose between thieves. We stand with the peoples”. By his claims about a party consisting of pensioners the writer laid himself open to ridicule. In addition to his ignorance about the influence of the KKE and the Communist Youth on young men and women, these claims demonstrate that his cheat sheet lacked basic information. That is why, for example, he did not see the photos of the anti-war rally of the KKE at the Russian and US embassy, nor the other demonstrations that were attended by thousands of young people. What can we say… the imperialist propaganda reportage is indeed difficult but the writer should have fact-checked his story...

24.03.2022