Perpetually aggrieved

Hello, reader. I was in central Melbourne today attending a meeting, and briefly watched the weekly Free Palestine protest march as it worked its way down one of its major thoroughfares. The radical left can be relied upon to attend any demonstration. These people always seem to be protesting for or against something. Next Sunday, please leave the red flags at home. It gives the appearance of gate crashing, or jumping on a bandwagon to advance your own cause, because you people are attendees, and not the main organisers. Put another way, to my eyes, it looked like an unwelcome distraction. 

 

Blind spots

Disclaimer: I am not a reader of Green Left Weekly. From a cursory reading of its headlines, one can deduce that it is a leftie rag, full of angry screeds produced by the perpetually aggrieved. If I still had a pet budgerigar, I'd use it to line its birdcage, or to wipe down my windows at home after I've cleaned them so that they don't have streak marks.

This article seeks to capitalise (no pun intended) on the Corona virus crisis to dismantle the free market system, and promote socialist ideology. The author conveniently overlooks the fact that the virus originated in China, which is a socialist country. They should not be let off the hook for ideological reasons, or perhaps from the author's desire to avoid offending people by appearing racist.

It is already well documented that the corruption, incompetence, and amorality of China's rulers has only made the situation worse, from President Xi Jinping down. As Paul D. Miller, professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Georgetown University writes:

"his government’s missteps are directly responsible for its global transmission and uncontrolled spread, with all its terrible consequences to populations and economies around the world."

When the crisis has abated, and the international community can thoroughly investigate the origins of the virus, and  the world can only hope that they are held accountable for the devastation they have brought upon the world. China must submit to such an investigation.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/02/coronavirus-and-blindness-authoritarianism/606922/

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/03/25/blame-china-and-xi-jinping-for-coronavirus-pandemic/

https://www.lowyinstitute.org/publications/china-rewriting-coronavirus-history-and-nobody-will-stop-it

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/the-other-chinese-virus/

https://9now.nine.com.au/60-minutes/china-cover-up-coronavirus-12-missing-days-wuhan-60-minutes/d8426648-f9b3-4439-9089-b733b8e4a6c5

100 million people served

If you live in Melbourne, Australia, and are at a loose end over the Easter break, you might consider attending Marxism 2020, Australia's biggest socialist conference. As you can see from the screen grab, the conference theme is "A world to win." Marxist evangelists seek to win the world to the hammer and sickle, just like Christian evangelists. Indeed, a cursory search of library union catalogues shows that it is also the title of several books on Christian evangelism and missions, as well as about socialism and communism. Does this mean that conference delegates dream of enacting a worldwide Marxist utopia?

The other day, one of the conference organisers did a radio interview. When asked to do so, she was unable to name one country where Marxism has worked. The interviewer said that he visited Russia in 1987, only 4 years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, and saw first hand the dire situation the country was in as a result of 70 years of Communist rule. She responded by saying that she was a Trotskyist, and that Trotskyists were persecuted by other Communists. This is true, but doesn't really answer the question.

Leon Trotsky was Stalin's rival after the death of Lenin in 1924. Trotsky was eventually forced into exile in 1928, and was assassinated in 1940 by a Spanish agent with links to Stalin at his home in Mexico. There was not enough time for a more comprehensive interview, but I would have liked to hear her opinions on whether or not Soviet Communism would have turned out differently under Trotsky's leadership instead of Stalin's. It is almost as though he was a political Messiah, a benign and compassionate revolutionary.

This is not the case at all. The late Richard Pipes, a well known historian who specialised in Russian history, notes that Trotsky was in favour of forced labor, terror, and concentration camps, all of which were key features of the Stalinist dictatorship. In view of these sentiments, "it is likely that if he had succeeded Lenin, we would have witnessed in the Soviet Union much the same oppression of labor as he did under Stalin."

It is significant to note that Trotsky, not Stalin, introduced concentration camps to deal with the enemies of the new regime. It was Stalin who developed the gulag system by building upon Trotsky's work. As Pipes also notes:

"Though the fact is little-known, it was Trotsky, not Stalin, who introduced into Soviet Russia the concentration camp, an institution that under Stalin developed into the monstrous Gulag empire...Trotsky ordered a network of concentration camps to be constructed to isolate “sinister agitators, counterrevolutionary officers, saboteurs, parasites, and speculators” who were not executed or subjected to other penalties...By 1919, concentration camps were established in every provincial capital. In 1923, Russia had 315 concentration camps with 70,000 inmates."

Elsewhere, Andrew Stuttaford calls Trotsky a "mass murderer." In Trotsky's worldview, murder was permissible if the ends justified the means, the means being the consolidation of Bolshevik power. He was the commissar of the Red Army during the brutal Russian Civil War (1918-1921). As such, he must take some of the responsibility for the deaths of 8 million people during the war.

Conference delegates such as this interview participant would do well to take off their historiographical blinkers, develop some critical thinking skills, and not see Trotsky as a revolutionary hero to be looked up to.

https://fee.org/articles/why-trotsky-believed-it-was-moral-to-kill-the-tsars-children/

https://www.historytoday.com/archive/trotsky-angel-enlightenment-or-frustrated-dictator

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/communism-memory-and-forgetting/

https://www.sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-resistance/en/document/crimes-and-mass-violence-russian-civil-wars-1918-1921.html

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2007/04/don-t-idealize-leon-trotsky.html

https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/80739/trotsky-the-jew

Watermelons are in season

I took a passing interest in the blockade of the International Mining and Resources Conference, held in Melbourne this week. In media interviews, such as the one with Andrew Bolt on his Sky News Australia television programme, blockade organisers haven't done much to win people to their cause, nor does their penchant for allegedly punching police horses. While they may have raised some valid points about the environmental impacts of the mining industry, or whether its business and taxation arrangements are ethical, most of the protesters are radical Marxists.

When asked about the aims of their movement, they want to close down the mining industry by enacting a Marxist revolution. Presumably, ending mining and the use of all fossil fuels is also the only way to avert ecological Armageddon, and there's no way to do this without also ending capitalism. Never mind that Marxism has failed wherever it has been implemented, and it is well documented that communist countries have or had appalling environmental records.

To add to their historical illiteracy, speaking as a nitpicking, annoying pedant, I question the credibility of any political activist group that runs a website containing spelling errors.

Dregs of the middle class

So said Australian Opposition leader, Bill Shorten, in his debate last night with Prime Minister, Scott Morrison. How noble it all sounds. The problem is that on the current trajectory that much of the English speaking world is heading on, following the wrong faith, or a particular expression of that faith, will hinder rather than help your life chances in Australia. I have a long memory. During the same sex marriage debate a couple of years ago, he explicitly labelled anyone who didn't support implementing gay marriage as “far right.” When he said that, he permanently alienated me from his party.

On top of that, at their campaign launch last Sunday, Senator Penny Wong described conservative politicians as "small men with small ideas." What a loaded statement. Once you get past the latent misandry in it, this is what it also implies. I am not a Liberal, but as a conservative male, by association, this implies that I am also a small man with small ideas.

I tune out whenever I hear Labor platitudes about equity and fairness. You do not represent my aspirations or values, nor do they matter to you. You arrogantly believe that you are wiser and more compassionate and tolerant than people like me. Furthermore, your campaign rhetoric makes it clear that you regard people like me as pariahs who have no place in modern Australia. I am a political conservative. I believe in traditional marriage between a man and a woman. I do not believe in state sponsored radical gender theory. I do not believe in identity politics. I do not believe in making Australia a geographically designated safe space, in which only correct opinions and ideas are allowed to be expressed and disseminated. I do not believe that enacting heavy handed legislation to regulate peoples’ lives is the answer to every social problem.

In Labor's Australia, my religious beliefs, and any opinions I have that are influenced by these beliefs will not be welcome. I will be expected to pay my taxes, keep quiet, and do as the government tells me, just being a compliant citizen. More than ever, I am becoming increasingly aware that this world is not my true home (Philippians 3:20, Hebrews 13:14, 1 Peter 5:10).

In a spiritual sense, I am a stateless person. This is part and parcel of living in an aggressively post-Christian Australia.

The past does matter

This is concerning. According to new research from the Centre for Independent Studies, younger generations, some of whom appear to be historically illiterate, have a favourable and romanticised opinion of socialism.

If this research is accurate, most Australian Millennials have a poor awareness of some of socialism’s most infamous historical figures Of those polled, more than half (51%) didn’t know who Chinese communist revolutionary Mao Zedong was. Only 21% were familiar with him. Not only was Mao perhaps the most important leader in Asia in the past century, he was also responsible for between 37-45 million deaths during the famine associated with his Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. 42% of Australian Millennials weren’t aware at all of Vladimir Lenin, the Bolshevik revolutionary, father of modern communism and the first leader of the Soviet Union. While more people (34%) were familiar with Joseph Stalin, Lenin's successor, who was responsible for the deaths of up to 43 million people, approximately two-thirds either didn’t know him or were not familiar with his bloody history.

This causes me despair. As George Santayana said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

https://www.cis.org.au/publications/policy-papers/millennials-and-socialism-australian-youth-are-lurching-to-the-left/

Lowering the standard

I hear with interest the news of the formation of a new radical leftist political party, the Victorian Socialists. They are planning to contest the state election, which will be held in November. Among other things, they want to replace the Victorian state flag with the Eureka flag, because they claim that it is outdated, and does not reflect modern Victoria. It was first used at the famous Eureka Stockade in 1854 at Ballarat, and since then has been used as a symbol of protest and democracy, and by the Labor movement.

Given that Socialists claim to oppose racism, I can't help but wonder if they are aware of the Eureka flag's association with racism. It started with the racism that Chinese miners experienced on the Victorian goldfields. This association has been continued by the flag's usage by various Australian white supremacist groups.

It seems to me that this is a pointless and counterproductive campaign. If it succeeded, it would merely replace a flag that offends some people with one that offends even more, and is not actually any more of a unifying symbol to everyday Victorians than the present flag. This sort of posturing plays well with the Socialists' support base in inner suburban Melbourne, but I dare say it is unlikely to get much traction with voters in urban growth corridors, or regional areas. 

Public Domain, Link

Act your age, not your shoe size

Triple J is moving its Hottest 100 countdown from Australia Day to January 27. The radio station said it moved the countdown in recognition of “increasing debate” surrounding and the day’s meaning for indigenous people. In response, Senator Cory Bernardi, leader of the Australian Conservatives Party, decided to compile his own alternative list of 100 Australian songs on Spotify. The created controversy, when many of the artists on the list demanded they be removed from it.

To paraphrase, "You and your party are against everything I stand for. I refuse to let you use my music for your political purposes," they said.

Bernardi also invited suggestions from Twitter users. Leftist keyboard warriors couldn't resist the opportunity to smear and mock him by suggesting songs like Mummy Doesn't Know You're a Nazi, by Frenzal Rhomb, and Christian songs with titles such as Jesus Use Me, He Touched Me, and Hallelujah, The Lord's Coming Again. Well, tee hee, and chortle. What shining wits these people are. 

Two can play at that game. Here's some of my song suggestions for the other side, some of whom stubbornly cling to socialist ideology, despite ample historical evidence that it doesn't work. 

Dahp Prampi Mesa Moha Chokchey (National anthem of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge)

The East is Red by Li Youyan

The Internationale (Traditional)

Haste Siempre, Comandante by Carlos Puebla

Onwards Toward the Final Victory by Kim Moon Hyuk and Yoon De Geun

Solidarity Forever (Traditional)
The Stalin Album by the Red Army Choir

State Anthem of the Soviet Union (1944 version) by Alexander Alexandrov 

Here ends today's history lesson.