PERHAPS, like most people, I have never been able to distinguish one Mitford from another: Jessica, Met ford, Diana, Unity, Deborah and perhaps a few others. Diana made the complexities of the family comprehensible only by means of the Rosetta Stone when she married into the Guinnesses, thus entangling herself in that ziggurat of Moynes, Dufferins, Avas and Iveaghs that was only ever understood by a mad old German who shot himself.
But the three who became famous for their public deeds, rather than their name and their, marriages, were Nancy, Jessica and Diana. Nancy wrote two of the funniest paeans to English snobbery that ever left a pen - The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate - and, like the stories of Somerville and Ross, they simultaneously irritate and entertain.
The differing fates of her two famous sisters, Diana and Jessica, show how the liberal luvvy left is still able to justify unapologetic righteous totalitarianism. For Diana is derided as a supporter of Mosleyism, whereas this week Jessica, a defender of communism who died last July, was feted by the right on who gathered in London to chatter, chic to chic, about what a wonderful woman she was.
Ms Helena Kennedy QC, spoke of how Jessica had been a communist in the US in the 1950s, when communism wash widely reviled there - as if a dislike of communism was a baffling aberration which the world has since got over. But if the Americans disliked communism, they did not do so as fiercely as the people who were governed by communism, and who passed from generation to generation amid squalor, poverty and corruption.
An utter fool
It would require a rare fool to say that the US of the 1950s was perfect it would be an utter fool to be unaware of the grotesque racial inequalities, the prejudices, the systemic bigotry, the KKK and the lynchings throughout the American South.
Yet these were not intrinsic to the idealised American way of life, but departures from it. To say that lynching was central to American values is like saying that the rack was central to Christianity.
This could not be said for the communism which Jessica embraced. It did not require great knowledge to discover that wherever communism took root, it did so with the aid of secret police, informers, corrupt courts and concentration camps.
The fierce creature standing as the founding father of communism, whose example was emulated by virtually every regime where communism - came to power, was the psychotic Pole Feliks Dzerzhinsky, whose appetite for bloodshed was a precursor and an excuse for the butchers of the Third Reich.
Lenin and Trotsky approved of bloodshed and terror, but in Dzerzhinsky they found a man who could organise the massacre of prisoners with the ease that others might serve sandwiches. He not merely organised terror but boasted of it, and founded the Extraordinary Commission for Combatting Counter Revolution and Sabotage, the Cheka - the pioneer secret state police of the 20th century.
Social control
When Jessica Mitford was a member of the Communist Party, half the world was ruled by a communist totalitarianism which had killed far more people than had the beasts of the Third Reich. In the Soviet Union and China, millions had died in famines resulting from experiments with collectivisation; tens of millions had been purged - murdered - in huge experiments in social control.
Thought itself became a weapon. Entire ethnic groups were forcibly relocated; schools became mere instruments of state indoctrination. Everywhere which succumbed to communism soon succumbed to personality worship from China to North Korea, to Albania, the Soviet Union, and now, finally and lingeringly, Cuba.
Was it surprising that the Americans were appalled by the growth of this monstrous tyranny as a violation of almost every decency mankind had been assembling since the Sermon on the Mount?
Was it surprising that they armed themselves against the threat that communism posed to freedom everywhere? The abominable regimes which the US installed or propped up in Central and South America can be seen in retrospect not as central to American freedom but departures from it, taken for strategic reasons. It is hardly coincidental that the collapse of the evil of communism has similarly been followed by a collapse in right wing oligarchies in the Americas.
It is impossible to imagine Nazism without communism as a template from which it was formed, and against the contours of which it took shape and method. If the Nazis were especially vile for the boastful hatred of Untermenschen, which turned into mass homicide, they were merely a distorted mirror image of communism, which exulted in hatred too - hatred of class, hatred of dissent, hatred of non compliance, hatred of any traditional identity and hatred of religion.
Not `active' enough
For all this, Jessica Mitford - celebrated in the US and Britain - stood for. Indeed, she left the US Communist Party because it was not "active" enough.
But what the communists were doing was no secrets throughout her entire life. A communist regime by definition was a totalitarian one; in which state tyranny was matched by incompetence and corruption. Yet this defender of communism is now the heroine of the chic, the right on - including John Mortimer and Salman Rushdie, who were both at the Lyric Theatre in London last Monday to celebrate her life.
That, of course, is their right. That is the meaning of freedom - the right to be wrong headed, daft or plain mad. It is not a freedom which Jessica Mitford stood for.
Like Feliks Dzerzhinski, she was an aristocrat who hated the aristocracy; she also contrived to hate the country which gave, her sanctuary for 60 years. That it tolerated her hatred is perhaps a measure of the freedom the US defended and which, finally, notwithstanding the luvvies, triumphed in the end.