BBC re-aired a documentary on Thursday evening titled The Cult Next Door. It was directed by Vanessa Engle in 2017, and told the story of the strange communist cult that had been uncovered in Lambeth, South London, in 2013 when two of its remaining captives escaped from the house while Aravindan Balakrishnan – or Comrade Bala/AB – and his missus, Chanda Pattni, were out getting the messages.
The commune was established after the expulsion of Balakrishnan from the Maoist Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist) in 1974. In 1978 he decided to go underground as a defence against the “fascist state” and from that time basically kept his remaining followers as slaves. Two of them died in the house and one of the victims, Katy Morgan-Davies, knew no other life as she was the child of Comrade Bala and her mother, Sian Davies.
She was not allowed to leave the house and was raised “collectively” as part of their commitment to dissolving the “bourgeois nuclear family.” She and Aisha Wahab escaped and this time the police took notice. When she was 12 she had briefly absconded but the cops had returned her to the care of Comrade AB. Despite the two deaths in the house which led to inquests, the “social services” had taken no action.
Comrade Bala died in prison in 2022 while serving 23 years for child cruelty, imprisonment, rape and sexual assault. One of the surviving commune members was Josie Herivel who was born in Belfast and was the daughter of Bletchley Park codebreaker John Herivel whose death she did not hear about due to her being cut off from the world. Herivel stood by Comrade AB and denounced his arrest and trial as a plot by the fascist state.
The saddest part of all was Katy Morgan-Davis’s retelling of how her mother had died attempting to escape through a bedroom window after being gagged and badly beaten by the other commune members. Katy did not know that Davies was her mother, and told Engle that she was happier after she died because she had been one of the cruellest of the communist monsters. The love of humanity had left no room for her own daughter.
Another woman, Aisha Wahab, was living in sheltered accommodation when the film was made and was partly nostalgic for her days as a slave. She still pined for a world such as the one the Workers Institute of Marxism-Leninism Mao Zedong Thought – to give the cult its original and proper title – had been building. One, she believed, in which all children like Katy would be raised collectively without fear.
Doesn’t that sound familiar? Some of the authors of our own state approved SPHE social engineering might appreciate the intent if not the clumsy manner in which it was implemented. It is the vision that inspired all those who believed, as a victim of Stalin’s Holodomor told Gareth Jones, that they “could change the natural order of things.”
It was such a vision that first partly sent Gareth Jones, former secretary to Lloyd George, as a freelance journalist to Moscow in 1930 and 1931 to try to interview Stalin. There he met Walter Duranty, the execrable former devotee of the Luciferian Aleister Crowley. Duranty of the New York Times was largely responsible for the covering up of the Communist terror in the Soviet Union for decades. He had at last met a Luciferian idol whom he could serve and for whom evil was more than a parlour game.
The movie Mister Jones was also shown this week and is a powerful account – one told with remarkably little dramatic licence – of Jones’ first hand experience and reportage of the mass starvation that cost millions of lives in Russia and Ukraine in the early 1930s. This was the consequence of the state expropriation of land owned by small farmers – still denigrated by many devotees of the Marxist fallacy as “Kulaks.”
In one scene, Jones finds himself unknowingly eating the body of the brother of the children who had cooked him a meal. Anyone who was horrified by Cormac McCarthy’s The Road will not be comforted by the fact that the cannibal gangs of his dystopian novel who captured and herded humans to be eaten really existed in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
A cautionary tale for we former believers was provided in the scenes featuring George Orwell. Some show him writing Animal Farm, the fable that demolishes the Marxist myth of a better world. That was not written until much later and not published until 1945 at the height of the Stalin cult in the West when it met with the same opprobrium as had greeted Jones in the early 1930s. From both the reds themselves and the useful liberal idiots.
When Orwell met Jones, according to the movie, he urged him to publish but also ventured that perhaps the horrors were the necessary teething pains of the Brave New World. Orwell had yet to experience the utter cynicism and violence of the Stalinists towards the left itself as a volunteer with the International Brigades in Spain before the scales finally fell from his eyes. Scales that still blind an Irish left whose anthem is almost become Christy Moore’s paean to the men who were tricked by the likes of communist agents such as Peadar O’Donnell to serve Walter Duranty’s Dark Lord.
Back to Comrade Bala and the Lambeth communist slave house. While others on the “revolutionary left” enjoy mocking the tiny Maoist sects – not surprisingly Maoism has attracted some of the madder “dissident republicans” – they were all to one degree or another uncomfortable with the coverage of Comrade Bala’s crimes.
The Weekly Worker, the organ of the main successor to the old Communist Party of Great Britain, was critical of the manner in which the “bourgeois media” had “sensationalised” the crimes of Comrade Bala whose “original intentions were probably quite sincere.” They even defended the rest of the far-left including their hated Trotskyite foes from the implication that they were all tainted with the same malaise.
Which they are. Indeed, it can be plausibly argued that what Comrade Bala managed to do on a micro scale was to reproduce exactly the same type of tyranny, abuse, torture and proportionate death toll that has inevitably been the feature of EVERY single successful socialist revolution, bar none.
When Orwell last meets Jones he responds to Jones’ dismissal of his arguments about the Soviets doing their best and providing free schools and hospitals with a plaintive question: “Are you saying that there is no hope?”
There always is. Somewhere in the fine balancing of the freedom of individuals and the necessary constraints on the actions of individuals where they lead to individuals who have great wealth and power doing as they please. The Christian west is the only society in historical times which has come close to striking the right balance.
It is not perfection, nor does such a thing exist on earth. Beware of the ideologues who would undermine it either in pursuit of the original and “sincere” motivations of totalitarian socialism, or indeed in pursuit of an equally fallacious myth that everyone doing as they please in order to make as much money as they can will ensure order and freedom.
Marx or Musk! I’ll pass on both if it’s all the same …