Canadian Cincinnatus

The recent Stalinist conference in Toronto

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.

Forbes magazine: “The Left’s Big Lie on Allende”

Have you noticed how the left only gets upset about atrocities when it happens to them?

The overthrow of Salvador Allende of Chile, the coup organized by the CIA in 1953 against Mohammed Mosaddegh in Iran and Franco winning the Spanish Civil War: if you listened to the left, you would think that these were among the biggest atrocities of the blood soaked 20^th century. Communists killed 100 million people in that same time period but they choose to stress relatively trivial incidents.

Take Franco. Yes there was a bloodbath after he won the Civil War. But to judge Franco properly, it must be remembered that much of his killing was primarily confined to communists and anarchists (i.e. the people who were actively fighting against him – when they were not killing each other). After these people were suppressed, Franco left the Spanish people pretty much alone and, as a result, Spain began to enjoy a genuine peace and tranquility that has lasted until this day. It is, or should be, a testament to his leadership that Spain was able to make a smooth transition to liberal democracy in only a few years since his death. And also that he steadfastly rebuffed Hitler’s entreaties to join him in World War II. Considering the anarchy that Spain was gripped with in the mid-1930’s and the awful choices that it faced, it seems to me the Spanish Civil War had about the best possible outcome that it realistically could have had. But no, we instead remember Franco as a bloody butcher, and conveniently ignore what happens every single time the communists take over a country.

Even with the one indisputable monster popularly known to be a right-winger, Adolph Hitler, limousine liberals don’t like to acknowledge that his party was called the National Socialist Party, or more precisely, the National Socialist German Workers Party. Cripes, when you say it like that it sounds like the Nazis were a Teutonic version of the NDP! The name is indicative of the fact that Hitler explicitly created National Socialism (which, by the way, was how he referred to his movement) as a Hegelian synthesis of the right (nationalism, militarism, anti-Semitism) and the left (central planning, concentration camps, the continuous and systematic mass murder of opponents and eugenics). The left remembers the first part of Hitler’s equation but not the last part.

Getting back to the overthrow of Salvador Allende in 1973 - which to academic hipsters is an act of pure evil on the part of the CIA - a recent Forbes magazine article counters with some inconvenient truths: 

“Elected with just 36% of the vote in a split election, he believed he had a mandate to ram through a hard-core Marxist program of expropriation and indoctrination like that of his mentor, Cuba's Fidel Castro.

In the process Allende left Chile's economy in ruins and trampled the rule of law so badly he brought his country to the brink of civil war. He was stopped only when the legislature charged him with 22 constitutional violations and ordered Chile's military to oust him.

As Chilean jets strafed La Moneda presidential palace Sept. 11, 1973, Allende shot himself with a gold-plated submachine gun given him by Castro.

At the request of Allende's family, an official investigation in May exhumed the dead man's body, conducted forensic tests and on Tuesday found that, yes, Allende took his own life. It was what his family always believed, consistent with the tone of his final speech and a family history of suicides.”

"’Within weeks of Allende's overthrow,’ wrote Henry Kissinger in his Years of Upheaval, ‘his incompetence, corruption and violation of democratic procedures — all widely acknowledged while he was alive — disappeared from public comment.’

No one had a bigger stake in making a claim that communism doesn't lead to disaster than Castro himself ... That's why Castro was the first to spread the Big Lie that Allende was killed by a sinister CIA-Pinochet cabal.

Castro sycophants in the media and Hollywood followed and succeeded for years in making Allende their martyr.” 

Getting only 36% of the vote, an unpopular political agenda, wrecking the economy, violating the constitution and the rule of law, a power struggle with the democratically elected parliament and an ignominious suicide with a gold-plated, commemorative subgun: not part of the official narrative. Not part of it at all.