Yesterday we met Seumas Milne, a longtime Guardian writer and editor – and ardent apologist for Stalinism – who’s been tapped by Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn to be his spokesman. We’ve seen that his appointment appalled former Labour MP Tom Harris, who deplored Milne’s undisguised admiration for jihadists and lack of sympathy for the British soldiers they killed.

Harris wasn’t alone in his revulsion. Michael Moynihan, profiling Milne in the Daily Beast, waxed sarcastic:

Wherever there’s an aggrieved terrorist or an undemocratic regime engaged in an existential struggle with the West, you can rely on Seumas Milne, Oxford-educated warrior for the Third World and former comment editor of The Guardian, to offer a full-throated, if slightly incoherent, defense. If your country’s constitution mandates the burning down of orphanages and the conscription of 6-year-olds in to the army, Milne will likely have your back, provided you also express a deep loathing for the United States and capitalism.

Moynihan quoted Milne on various subjects.

Communism: in the USSR and its satellites, it “delivered rapid industrialisation, mass education, job security and huge advances in social and gender equality.”

The Soviet bloc: it “encompassed genuine idealism and commitment” to social justice.

East Germany: it was “a country of full employment, social equality, cheap housing, transport and culture, one of the best childcare systems in the world, and greater freedom in the workplace than most employees enjoy in today’s Germany.”

West Germany’s annexation of East Germany: it entailed “a loss of women’s rights, closure of free nurseries and mass unemployment.”

Mahmoud Ahmedinejad: he “stand[s] up for [Iran’s] independence, expose[s] elite corruption on TV and use[s] Iran’s oil wealth to boost the incomes of the poor majority.”

Fidel Castro and Che Guevara: two men whose legacy is one of “innate humanity.”

Meanwhile, in the Spectator, Alex Massie depicted Milne’s appointment as “consistent,” given Corbyn’s own admiration for Cuba and Venezuela, hatred of “American hegemony,” etc. If that’s where you’re coming from, asked Massie, why not pick a spokesman “whose back catalogue features defences of, or explanations and occasional justifications for, inter alia, Joe Stalin, Slobodan Milosevic, Iraqi Baathists attacking British troops, and much else besides”? Why not hire a guy whose published oeuvre “is stuffed with articles downplaying the horrors of Sovietism and then, latterly, redefining Russian aggression as defensive manoeuvres designed to combat – of course – western neoliberalism”?

Massie quoted one of Milne’s many cockeyed statements about the USSR: “Whatever people thought about the Soviet Union and its allies and what was going on in those countries, there was a sense throughout the twentieth century that there were alternatives – socialist political alternatives.” Yes: alternatives that involved subjecting citizens to a culture of fear, denying them even a trace of individual liberty, imposing upon them policies of forced collectivization and planned famine that took millions of lives, and establishing a network of forced-labor camps to which millions of those citizens were sentenced for their political convictions or religious beliefs – or for no reason at all.

More on Milne tomorrow.