According to the Economist, all you Torontonians out there in the blogosphere just missed this really coool event:
“For all the horrors of Stalinism, brutality, incompetence and other dreadfulness of the Soviet Union, a small fan club remains. Readers may well have missed it, but the grandiosely titled "Third World Congress of the International Council for Friendship and Solidarity with the Soviet People" met in Toronto on September 9th-11th. The word “third” does not mean "third world" but indicates that there have been two such congresses after the “temporary demise of the Soviet Union”: the first was held in 2001 and the second in 2005, both of them also in Toronto.
This meeting was attended by around 30 delegates from different parts of the world. Most were from Canada and the United States, quite a few from Russia, and at least one was from the UK.
On the first day, one of the speakers was Viktor V Bourenkov, chairperson of the Soviet Friendship Society for Friendship with the Peoples in Foreign countries. The stated objective of the society is the rebirth of the Soviet Union and socialism.”
“It is easy to raise a wry smile about the event. Perhaps the ghosts of the millions murdered in the Soviet system, and the tens of millions whose lives were blighted, might not see the funny side. Why is Soviet revivalism a joke, while similar efforts to rehabilitate Hitler are seen as disgusting or outright criminal?”
The reason Soviet revivalism is a joke (as well as remaining to be a perfectly respectable moral system in academia) while National Socialism is regarded as an obscenity, is because the 100 million victims of communism have not been explicitly and repeatedly tied to Marxism in the same way that the 20 million victims of Hitler have been tied to fascism.
It should be the project of all people who have suffered through communism, and indeed all decent people around the world, to correct this omission. There is a movement by the Eastern European members of the EU to get the European Union to recognize communism as an ideology of hate. In Ottawa, a monument to the victims of communism is being built (after some initial resistance by unsympathetic government bureaucrats).
These efforts should be encouraged, supported and replicated until conferences like “The Third World Congress of the International Council for Friendship and Solidarity with the Soviet People” become the moral equivalent of a monthly NAMBLA (the North American Man-Boy Love Association) get-together.