Tact and sensitivity

It is with heavy heart that I see due to the Corona virus pandemic, the Marxism 2020 conference, a fixture of the radical left's calendar, has been indefinitely postponed. In this statement on the conference website, the organisers speak of the importance of continuing to fight against the evils of capitalism. Never mind that the Corona virus originated in a Communist dictatorship, and is arguably a direct consequence of it, as the American Enterprise Institute has observed. Without being able to contact the organisers to give them a right of reply, why are they so obstinate that they cannot see this?

This ideology has devastated the lives of millions of people. As the world grapples with the economic and social disruption of the Corona virus, it beggars belief that there is a small core of people who want to perpetuate the political system that created it. 

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.

Top weekend

The Marxism conference is an annual fixture on the radical left's calendar in Australia. It's a pity that they always choose to hold this conference over the Easter weekend. Presumably they won't be spending the weekend reflecting on the death and resurrection of Jesus, or taking short family holidays.

From its website, I see that the conference theme is "Tear Down the Walls." The irony of this appears to be lost on the conference organisers. History shows that far from tearing down walls, Marxism usually builds them. This year is also the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a despised symbol of Communist oppression and tyranny.

No cause for celebration

Today is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx, the founding father of communism. Will those who see fit to celebrate this occasion spare a thought for the millions of people who were killed during the 20th century as a direct result of his ideas being implemented? Communist regimes killed millions of people in the former Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, North Korea, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, East Germany, and Ethiopia? Don't let the facts of history spoil your party, comrades.

http://nationalpost.com/news/world/happy-birthday-karl-marx-we-could-have-done-without-the-millions-dead

Don't bother me with the facts

The Easter long weekend is a time for reflecting on the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, spending time with family and friends, or heading out of the city for a short break. 

If none of those things tickle your fancy, and you live in Melbourne, or have the means to get there, you might care to attend the Marxism 18 conference. 

I glanced over the conference program, and was surprised to see that some of the speakers are smiling in their photographs. Maybe I should go, just for the rare opportunity to meet an actual happy Marxist. I didn't know they existed. 

Presumably this conference is not just theoretical, and attendees (or comrades) will come away with renewed zeal to implement Marxism in Australia, but which version of it? Is it Lenin's? Trotsky's? Stalin's? Mao's? Ceaucescu's? The Kim dynasty's? Pol Pot's? 

My brow furrows as I write this. History clearly and consistently shows that their ideology has failed, so they choose to ignore it. Presumably, the deaths of as many as 100 million people at the hands of communist regimes is not important to them. That old saying, "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results," applies to them.