The realm of the extreme left and the scars it has engraved into history is all but ignored by documentary makers, the media in general and in the education system. The hard right is a constant theme and rightly red-flagged as a real and present danger to the West. But so is one of equal malignancy on the extreme left, one which still exists and poses a threat to our way of life. It produced something very different to anything which had preceded it: Communism. The masterpiece of the nineteenth century thinkers, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. And despite its history about which it is difficult to find anything to admire, it remains a very modern, up to date and future blight on peace in the West.
Communism and its history gets very little coverage, but its aims and ambitions were well understood during the cold war, but perhaps forgotten by most today. However it is well remembered by those of us who lived through the nineteen sixties, seventies and eighties. Who watched from a safe distance the courageous struggle to escape its grip by nations seeking to break the rule imposed by Communist Russia. Leaders like Lech Wałęsa, a retired Polish political leader, pro-democracy activist and union organiser. An electrician by trade, he was a leading dissident in the Polish People’s Republic and became the leader of Solidarity, an independent trade union and freedom-oriented social movement, for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983. He led a successful nonviolent struggle which eventually brought the end to communism in Europe. He later served as the first democratically elected President of Poland from 1990 to 1995. Other movements of dissent were crushed. On August 21, 1968 the citizens of Czechoslovakia woke to learn that their country had overnight been invaded by Soviet led troops, deployed to crush the Prague Spring reform movement: the invasion began a two-decade long occupation.
All of this history is largely forgotten, unrecorded or just never known. This maybe because intellectuals of the West, largely left leaning in their views, tend to want to excuse the excesses of the extreme Left. Those of the Far right, especially that of Hitler and the Nazis are relayed on documentaries as if on permanent loop system, taught in schools and colleges as if this was the one and only major source of evil to have scarred the face of modern times. Far Right evil spotlit, far left given far less attention. Ask our youth or almost anyone about 6 million deaths and they will all point to the terrors and concentration camps built by the Nazis whose primary purpose was the extermination by genocide of undefended innocents, sheep for the slaughter: the Jews.
But there is another story, by awful coincidence also of six million innocents. The deaths of peasants and farm workers in Ukraine by Stalin in 1932 / 33. And yet scarcely anyone knows anything about this mass kill. The Terror-Famine and Famine-Genocide or the Ukrainian Genocide was part of the wider Soviet famine which affected the major grain-producing areas of the country. Millions of inhabitants of Ukraine, the majority of whom were ethnic Ukrainians. Since 2006, this death by starvation has been recognized by Ukraine and 15 other countries as a genocide of the Ukrainian people carried out by the Soviet government under the rule and orders of Stalin. During the Russian revolution, the label of kulak was used as an epithet for any peasant who resisted handing over his grain to requisitions from the Bolshevik / Stalinist government. During 1929–1933, Joseph Stalin‘s all-out campaign to collectivise the peasantry meant that “peasants with a couple of cows or five or six acres more than their neighbours” were labelled kulaks. That label was as good as a death sentence. Stalin’s policy targeted these farmers who were the most efficient and productive in the Ukraine.Under the dekulakization policy, government officials violently seized kulak farms and killed those who resisted and deported these to labour camps in Siberia. According to the political theory of Marxism–Leninism of the early 20th century, the kulaks were class enemies of the poorer peasants. Vladimir Lenin described them as “bloodsuckers, vampires, plunderers of the people and profiteers, who fatten on famine”, and he proclaimed the revolution against such class enemies to liberate poor peasants and farm labourers as well as the proletariat: the much smaller class of urban and industrial workers.
There are many good reasons why the Holocaust dominates any other tragedy, and it should, being the greatest crime against humanity ever envisaged, and one carried out with a savagery that is unequalled. But this famine is at least comparable and of interest for this reason. Why is one long and appalling stain on mankind well remembered and the other scarce known about? The answer may well be that the Right when it becomes maddened by an insane, politically, racially, ethnically motivated hatred is thought to be one thing, a horror never to be forgotten, while those atrocities enacted by the Left are buried and allowed to be forgotten. How? By failing to teach recent history. Why? Is it because the media and our intelligentsia is to a great extent protective of and approving of the Left to such an extent that blame is shifted and in part excused. Has it occurred to you that this memory loss and its failure to be flagged up as the product of the extreme left is caused not by good intentions, but rather the instinct to deceive and whitewash history relevant to the rise of the extreme political left. The question is, do we notice, does the lopsided nature of what is reported and what is not matter, and do we care?
Signs of the extreme left are not difficult to discern, not even in the good old safe haven of the UK. The extreme socialist pressure group Momentum has this to say about itself.
‘Momentum is a people-powered, grassroots movement working to transform Britain in the interests of the many, not the few. Together, we’re campaigning locally and nationally to build power in our communities, strengthen our rights at work and elect a socialist Labour government.’
The Interests of Many Not the Few is a Labour Party slogan. It could equally well have been a Stalinist slogan during the purge of the Kulaks and the wreckage of an economy, The Ukraine before Stalin’s Terror was the bread basket of much of Eastern Europe.
Momentum is the power base which holds Jeremy Corbyn in place as leader of the Labour Party. He and they are Communist / Marxist / in their thinking. And where their thinking goes, so will their actions should they find themselves holding the levers of power. At Corbyn’s side is his equally leftist and Stalinist colleague, John McDonnell. The Labour Party is in my view mostly filled by members of Parliament who are decent, moderate men and women wanting to serve the best interests of the country and their constituents. They hold a thin line, and on them may depend how the future of our country works out. If you look at the history of extreme left wing activists when in power, then fear and anxiety are natural responses. This history is not difficult to uncover, but for some reason the media in this country seem reluctant to open up this particular can of worms. Just check out the counties that have fallen under a Soviet type of government. China under Mao, Russia and its empire under the influences of Marx, Lenin. Trotsky and Stalin and all those lesser monsters up to and including Putin. Then there is Cambodia under Pol Pot. Cuba under Castro and North Korea under Kim Jong-un; a country in which some 120,000 people are believed to be imprisoned without due process for political reasons, according to the US-based Committee for Human Rights in North Korea.
Finally, Venezuela is a current regime in the news under leadership disputed between Juan Guaido and Nicolás Maduro. Here is a report on this country, one admired and supported by Jeremy Corbyn. In the statement below, the organisations involved detail why a UN Commission of Inquiry is the best answer the international community can offer to victims of Venezuela’s spiralling human rights and humanitarian emergency:
“A UN Commission of Inquiry would play a crucial role in addressing the rights to justice, truth and reparation for victims of rights abuses in Venezuela, advancing accountability, and encouraging rights-respecting policies. Such an effort could have an important deterrent effect to prevent additional serious human rights violations and possible mass atrocity crimes during the country’s ongoing crisis”.
That is Corbyn’s example of a Socialist State he admires. But this is nothing in comparison to a really big example, such as that illustrated by the mother of all evils; the rise of the Soviet Union and the teachings of Communism.
Left-wing activists and apologists have a great influence throughout the media and they seem to near inhabit the humanities curriculum in the universities. They hammer a message which warns against the rise of the Far Right. The noise of the Left Wing cabals that largely run our media and lecture our sons and daughters in universities ensure that such warnings as I give are dumped in an incinerator; labelled as far right fantasies. They drown out the few respected voices who do warn us. People like Jordan Peterson, Andrew Murray, Roger Scruton and others, but they are few and far between.This threat is never far away because ideologies do not easily give ground . When forced to, they tend to rise again under a new form: post modernism is one candidate you might like to investigate. If you wonder what is happening to our society you might chance peering under this stone. The video below is a harrowing example of Communism when applied without restraint, as it was under the rule of the dictator Joseph Stalin.
This is a warning to us from the twentieth century. All free peoples should know about, if they did we might value our freedoms more and watch carefully for any indications that these freedoms are coming under threat. Why we do not seem much concerned by the rise in State control of our rights and freedoms is a question worth asking? Communism when seen in the light of history and when implemented without restrain by an ideologue is a death cult. It twists and perverts every human good into evil. The toll? Up to sixty million died in the Soviet Union. Well over a hundred million in China and around six million in Cambodia. The other lesser examples are well established basket cases, there are no cases of Communism enacted in the real world that has not been an example of the worst way imaginable to organise and govern a country. And the UK has never been closer to such a government taking power. The rhetoric will sound progressive, look after the left behind, the poor and the disadvantaged. Government for the many, not the few. The few will be persecuted, and it will not just be the great financiers and investors and the filthy rich and those who have misused power, it could you or me or anyone who stands in the way.
