Hords of zenophobes

My correspondent has written again. I quote his letter in full and unedited:

I see that you highlight my spelling mistake; yes I did spell the word hord wrongly, however, that was the only thing you could highlight that I got wrong. You could not argue with anything I said about the nasty bunch of rightwing ideologs who now infest the body politic both in this country and the United States. These idealogs claim to be democratic and Christian -this in itself is standing ideology on its head. The Christian coalition in the US is attempting to enforce its strident views on the rest of the population -if this is successful then the teaching of evolutionary sciences in schools and colleges will be forbidden, abortion will be illegal and stem cell research will be outlawed, despite the fact that in the future it could help cure thousands of people who now suffer from crippling diseases. These good people would force social democracy off the political map and send us back to feudal economic slavery. This is why Tony Benn was attacked in the 1980s and this is why you now attack George Galloway now. Anyone who is prepared to oppose illegal wars perpertrated by so-called christian big business is fair game to be villified by these political thugs. Those who stand up for economic redistribution not only on a national but also on an international basis will always be vilified by the Kahns of this world. These people are the advocates of a type of authoritarian selfish-individualism which would make the rich and irresponsible even richer. There have been individuals such as Mussolini who claimed to be on the left and yet who at the same time were intolerant of their colleages and extremely zenophobic in attitude. Mussolini, supported the First World War and that was the end of his leftism. I have even heard from some of these rightists that even Hitler was at one stage a member of the German left in 1919, this despite the complete lack of evidence for this thesis. I have, however, heard that both he and Stalin drank in the same pub in Liverpool. The thesis you put forward equating leftist parties has the same credability as the joke about Hitler and Stalin. The oldest and dirtiest rightwing ploy is to slander those to whom you have lost the argument. You keep good political company Goebells and the Sun toilet roll.

I have never, incidentally, claimed that Hitler came from the Left: he plainly didn't. I certainly claim that parts of the Marxist Left actively aided or supported Hitler long before the Nazi-Soviet Pact. The Communist Party co-operated with the Nazis in the 1931 Prussian referendum and the 1932 transport strike, while even some Marxists initially opposed to the Comintern's scuppering of a Popular Front against fascism later found their natural political home alongside Nazi Germany. The revolutionary socialist Jacques Doriot broke with the French Communist Party on precisely the issue of a Popular Front with the Social Democrats (he supported it; the Party, taking its orders from Stalin, opposed it), before founding his own explicitly antisemitic and pro-fascist Parti Populaire Français in 1936.