I remember many years ago in a student meeting in Portsmouth there was a debate about not allowing fascist groups a platform. One of those opposing the motion argued that communists were as bad as fascists and, that in Germany, large numbers of socialists and communists simply switched and became Nazis.
I was reminded of this recently by an article in the Guardian by Jonathan Freedland. Freedland was rightly horrified by the tales that have emerged about the eugenicist practices of certain Scandinavian countries, where for decades people thought to be of the wrong race, class or mental/physical ability were forcibly sterilised.
This all happened in countries whose governments were not fascist dictatorships. Most of the time they had social democratic (Labour) governments. This is a scandal, and one that deserves to be aired.
Yet Freedland wants to go further. He wants to show that 'the early history of British socialism...with its unshakeable faith in science, central planning and the cool wisdom of the rational elite...contained the seeds of the atrocities that were to come later.' By the 'atrocities' he is referring to Hitler's death camps.
Now there are a couple of points to be made here. Freedland wishes to grasp hold of a few figures from early British socialism, in particular such prominent Fabians as Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and George Bernard Shaw, lump them in with the economist JM Keynes (who wasn't a socialist at all), and through this condemn socialism in general.
He cannot cite a single figure from the revolutionary socialist tradition, but through sleight of hand throws in Marx for dedicating a volume of Capital to Darwin - as if supporting the development of the theory of evolution was reactionary (as opposed, one presumes, to creationism, ie the notion that we were all made by God and in seven days at that!). And as if this inevitably led you to supporting some of the reactionary elements of what later became known as Social Darwinism.
It has to be said there was a huge gulf between the revolutionary socialist tradition and the reformist Fabian one. Take Beatrice Webb who described herself as 'the cleverest member of one of the cleverest families in the cleverest class of the cleverest nation of the world'.
In just about every respect this runs into direct contradiction with revolutionary socialist thinking. We reject the belief that cleverness is something inherited and therefore could possibly be the property of a family. We would reject that there is a class in society cleverer than the others - better educated maybe, better opportunities certainly, but cleverer? Nor does our tradition allow for the notion that there are nations that are inherently cleverer than others.
Indeed the slogan 'workers of the world unite' runs in direct contradiction to such a notion. Indeed Freedland might like to explain why Marx, the 'admirer of Darwin', was a Jew, who supported the struggle for Irish independence, the freeing of slaves in America, and the revolutionary mob in Paris. All four - Jews, Irish, blacks and the uneducated, unwashed Parisian mobs - would have ranked poorly in any eugenicist league table.
It is of course true that many of the Fabian leaders were elitists whose vision of socialism was something preordained, orderly and imposed from above. They had little time for the masses and certainly viewed them as the object rather than the subject of change. They certainly didn't share Marx's view of the working class as the agents of human liberation.
That is why many of them found little enthusiasm for workers taking power in Russia in 1917, but could heap praise upon the regime under Stalin when workers had lost every last vestige of power and democratic control.
I have never found the Webbs very attractive, nor Shaw very consistent, but to argue that they sowed the seeds for Hitler is absurd. Indeed Freedland argues: 'For years leftists, historians and everyone else have drawn a veil over Adolf Hitler's naming of his creed National Socialism as if Nazism and socialism represented opposite faiths.'
Funnily enough, original as Freedland might like to think this wheeze is, I heard it used for the first time in that student debate in Portsmouth.
No doubt they weren't opposite faiths, and this is why Hitler banned the Socialist and Communist Parties, threw their members in concentration camps, had them executed and smashed their trade unions.
No doubt the fact that one side attempted to stand for international solidarity, and the other for racial purity and international carnage doesn't differentiate them either. No, they were all the same, and it can be proved by a few inane and reactionary utterings from the mouths of GB Shaw, Marie Stopes, the Webbs or Keynes.
So we can dismiss the fact that the left from across the world gathered together to fight the fascist Franco, or that the left has consistently stood for resisting the rise of fascists.
This is all for nothing in the startling new world of Jonathan Freedland who, having read a little history and ingested some rather distasteful facts, thinks he has discovered a whole new theory to discredit socialism.