If there is one thing that really annoys communists and their admirers it is being compared to “the fash.”And for good reason. Pups off the same bitch as my Tipp Grandad used to say when comparing the pedigree of his beloved greyhounds to the possible genetic qualities, usually bad, of bipeds.
(Note the “I am good people and everyone else is a monster” vibe.)
Last night on RTÉ’s Upfront Irish Examiner journalist Mick Clifford said something to the effect that the far right, as in Nazi types – of whom there are few and far between, thankfully, but they provide a convenient foil to attack anyone who dissents from the liberal left – and the far left are indeed as my Grandad might have described them.
The far left, as in communists of whom there are quite a number judging by the iconography at recent leftist protests such as the recent attempt to drown out actual women (mostly normal leftists as far I as I know) who were trying to hold a peaceful meeting.
Of course, there are quite a number of TDs and probably a Senator or two, including among the Shinners, who would describe themselves as Marxists.
Marxists. Yes. Just like Lenin, Stalin. Bela Kun, Mao, Pol Pot, Fidel Castro, Mengistu, and many other such stalwart chaps who between them were part of the murders of more than a hundred million people.
Now of course, most modern communists, including the Trotskyist TDs in Leinster House like Richard Boyd Barrett and Bríd Smith – although perhaps not the Shinner MLA with her “class” hammer and sickle mug who probably doesn’t know why the Provies were founded – will throw their hands up and cry that these were all Stalinists and deviationists and that therefore it had nothing to do with them. And that it will all be different the next time.
Which is fair enough if you accept that their own hero Leon Trotsky was an innocent in the whole bloody saga.
Which he was not. Trotsky lost out in the internal Bolshevik feud with Stalin, but Stalin then adopted most of Trotsky’s policies, which Stalin had previously attacked as “ultra leftist.” Trotsky, for example, had been an advocate of collectivising agriculture, and when he and Lenin first attempted that it led to the first artificial famines in Russia – more devastating than any that had occurred during the history of Tsarism.
Under Stalin, collectivisation led to the Holodomor in Ukraine and the deaths of millions when the NKVD and Red Army seized small holdings and murdered those peasants who resisted being forced to become state slaves. These were the same people in most cases whose ancestors had been serfs up until serfdom was abolished in 1861. I doubt they would describe it as progress.
Trotsky had also been the main advocate of smashing the trade unions and forcing them to become arms of the Party.
At the 9th Party Congress in spring 1920 Trotsky proposed what he described as the “militarisation of the working class.” When those to his left demurred, he sent in the militia to slaughter the garrison at Kronstadt in 1921. These historical facts are something the contemporary “anarchists” – who appear to think that anarchy is lads wearing blond wigs and black eyeliner – have no conception of, it seems.
What the “militarisation of labour” meant in practical terms was that “every worker feels himself a soldier of labour, who cannot dispose of himself freely; if the order is given to transfer him, he must carry it out; if he does not carry it out, he will be a deserter who is punished. Who looks after this? The trade unions. It creates the new regime.”
Communism meant that Russian and Ukrainian workers and peasants would become the slaves of the state run by Trotsky and Lenin, rather than, as their grandparents had been, the slaves of the grandparents of Lenin and Trotsky and their ilk.
Plus ca change, plus c‘est la meme chose.
The Nazis did exactly the same thing after they came to power in Germany in 1933. Robert Ley, the leader of the German Labour Front, which likewise incorporated the free trade unions into the ruling party, declared in April 1933 that the “taking over of the independent trade unions must proceed in such a fashion that the workers and employees will not be given the feeling that this action is directed against them, but, on the contrary, against a superannuated system that does not conform to the interests of the German nation.”
The Nazis hated the Communists but only as rivals for totalitarian power and both had chosen as their enemy the social democrats and Christian democrats who were attacked by both the Nazi Brownshirts and the reds, including the first manifestation of Anti Fascist Action.
When in power the Nazis and the Communists ruled by the very same means. They abolished free elections, they abolished free trade unions, they abolished the free press, they banned organised religion, they attempted to replace the family with collectivist organisations that took over the role of parents as the mentors of their own children, they murdered and imprisoned millions of their opponents. They substituted worship of the state for the worship of God and the traditions of the Russian and German people.
No wonder they hate one another. For national socialism to ever be a viable ideology or political movement again, they would need to erase the memory of the horrors of what Nazism meant when in power. The same ought to apply to the reds, but seemingly outside of the countries that suffered at first hand from the Red Terror, there is an historical amnesia when it comes to the crimes of communism. This is why people can flaunt the iconography of the Red Terror on the streets of Dublin. Paris, New York.
Few have fallen for the holocaust denial. Many have fallen for the Gulag denial, and the Great Leap Forward denial and the Year Zero denial. That is why when Mick Clifford or anyone else reminds them that the reds and the browns are only mirror images of one another, they become upset. Remind them. Upset them.