Of course, the question arises: Is this stupidity or just slander?
After all, it takes some lack of imagination to equate the old Eastern block with "anti-capitalism." It also reeks of stupidity to not ask the protestors what their viewpoints are when you try to criticise their ideas. It is also a sign of ignorance and/or idiocy to argue that anarchists seek a society in which the state controls the individual! All in all, to associate anarchists and "anti-capitalism" with Soviet Russia suggests a lack of intelligence.
It could be slander, of course. An attempt to smear the protestors and their ideas by associating them with Soviet Russia. Ironically, the paper also compared them to fascists - apparently the protestors seek to dominate the individual just as much as the NF or BNP do - a strange position to take in a paper that in the 1930s supported Mosley's Blackshirts, Fascist Italy, Franco and Hitler's Germany. In contrast, anarchists fought the Fascists in Italy, Spain, Germany and here (and still do). They also resisted Leninist tyranny as well (and were among its first victims). Given this, and that almost all the protestors would have rejected Stalinism and that the libertarian element viewed it as little more than state capitalism, it may be just a mis-information campaign to discredit radical ideas.
Probably it is a bit of both.
Who would have thought that over a decade after the fall of Stalinism, the old Cold War rhetoric would be dusted off and applied to protestors? But then again, we are talking about the Daily Mail. Its lack of imagination, intelligence and accuracy are shown by its smearing of protestors and their ideas. In February, The Mail on Sunday was explaining how officially "we're all middle class now" (bar the 49.4% who are officially working class, according to the article!). So we should not be that surprised at its stupidity. Like the working class, the protestors are unpeople in the eyes of the Daily Mail. And, needless to say, most of this "middle class" are wage slaves, and so proletarians...
But, then again, what do you expect from a paper which praises a system in which inequality rises, poverty increases and alienation, unhappiness and insecurity are common place? Or one which praises capitalism as a growth machine while ignoring the fact that growth has been less under globalisation than under social democracy. Or equates capitalism with freedom while ignoring the facts that the vast majority sell their freedom to survive and that inequality in wealth and power makes a mockery of freedom for the majority.
Apparently, we are free when it is capitalist bosses and governments which tell us what to do, repress us when we rebel and deny basic human rights but we are unfree when other governments do it. Nice to know!
Why let a little thing called fact get in the way of ideology and a good rant? After all, we should not expect a newspaper to accurately and objectively report events, or should we?