Harper's memorial for 'the victims of communism'

We need a memorial for the victims of conservatism. And then we need to prosecute the perps.

N.Beltov wrote:

We need a memorial for the victims of conservatism. And then we need to prosecute the perps.

They have museums for Holocaust remembrance. So that's a start. But in the US and Canada they need museums to document the Indian genocides and Canadian apartheid, black slavery, and the birth of southern conservatism based in religious revivalism and racism.

Excellent, Fidel.

Fact. europe has never been explored. Never. Not to this day. No one EVER tried to go to, say England, and draw a picture of the layout. The brits would stop that, and if anyone insisted, the locals would certainly shoot the mapmaker (or sell them a goddam map)! But the rest of world, excepting a few cases where too strong military power, were in fact, 'explored' Instead of asking the locals, the 'explorers' cased the region, and used the info to...well, you get the picture. It's probable that, if the Inuit could have stopped the 'explorers' from mapping say Bathurst Inlet, they would have, on the grounds that the Cariboo might have crossed the waters and, well the visitors from europe should really just go back home. 

Stalin was possibly one of the few truly honourable leaders to operate in the horror story of the 20th century. It was churchill and truman who caused the 'Iron Curtain' to be...because they wished to deny Stalin and the USSR a share of postwwar Marshal plan money. Yet Stalin was blamed for it. and he still is, though the facts are plain as day. The US nuked Japanese cities in august 1945 to scare Stalin (VE day was in May) who then was forced to hang onto as much territory as possible, while desperately developing the atom bomb (which many western scientists such as Klaus Fuchs, helped - the oxford spy Kim Philby later said he and many others were terrified for the USSR until it got the bomb in 1949)

Gensec Stalin never used nukes.

Even on Babble the assumption that them lying bastards who divided up Germany against Stalin's agreement at Yalta (and thus reduced postwar German reparation payments from the $128 billion property damage figure agreed upon to a measly $22 billion, most of which was spent in East Europe...)

the info here is is from the book 'Myth of the good War'

clandestiny wrote:

Stalin was possibly one of the few truly honourable leaders to operate in the horror story of the 20th century.

A few clarifications:

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In 1932-33 millions of Ukrainians died in the largest Famine of the 20th century. This Famine was not caused by a natural calamity such as drought or epidemic or pestilence. It was not the result of devastation or privation caused by a cataclysmic event such as war.

The Famine in Ukraine was engineered, orchestrated and directed from the Kremlin. It was implemented by Stalin and his comrades in order to complete Ukraine's subjugation to Moscow. Starvation became the tool and the Ukrainian farmers became the main victims.

"The nationality problem is by its essence a farmer problem," Stalin wrote.

Seven to ten million Ukrainians died in this genocide engineered by Stalin; we aren't really sure how many, because he was good at erasing records of peoples' existence.

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The government of the USSR under Stalin murdered many of its own citizens and foreigners.[1] These mass killings were carried out by the security organisations, such as the NKVD, and reached their peak in the Great Purge of 1937-38, when nearly 700,000 were executed by a shot to the base of the skull. Following the demise of the USSR in 1991, many of the killing and burial sites were uncovered. Some of the more notable mass graves include:

Bykivnia - containing an estimated 120,000 - 225,000 corpses[2]

Kurapaty - estimations range from 30,000 to 200,000 bodies found[3]

Butovo - over 20,000 confirmed killed[4]

Sandarmokh - over 9,000 bodies discovered[5]

Many other killing fields have been discovered[6], several as recently as 2002.[7][8] In the areas near Kiev alone, there are mass graves inUman', Bila Tserkva, Cherkasy and Zhytomyr.[9] Some were uncovered by the Germans during WWII; Katyn and Vinnitsa being the most infamous[10]

And also:

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In the late 1920’s Stalin felt that a canal linking the White Sea to the Baltic Sea would be highly beneficial to the developing USSR. In 1931 well over one hundred thousand workers picked up pickaxes, shovels, and wheelbarrows in order to construct the 227 kilometer canal. Completed by 1933, the canal took only twenty months to finish. Tens of thousands of men lost their lives in the construction project. At its conclusion, sailing on the steamship Anokhin, Stalin surveyed the canal. He concluded with disappointment that the canal was too narrow and shallow. By 1936 plans to widen the canal were completed. This expansion project would have cost many more lives. These lives, like the lives lost in the original project, were bartered from the Russian system of forced labor camps, called the Gulag.

 

The Gulag system was a network of forced labor camps that, at its peak, consisted of over four hundred official prisons and held millions of inmates. First begun in 1919, the system really did not flourish until the 1930’s when Stalin used it with extreme regularity. The Gulag system is believed to be responsible for millions of deaths. That is more than the amount of Americans that have been killed in all wars combined. That amounts to almost three times the amount of people that live in the New York City area.

How many were killed when Japan was nuked? Anyone know, offhand?

Yes, perhaps that's more to the point. Fascism is just a particular brand of capitalism, after all.

The bit about no one ever 'exploring' Europe was an effort to show how, by slightly adjusting the focus of the historical lens, a totally different sight emerges. The reason no one explored Europe was because Europeans owned/operated it, and surveyed/ charted everything etc. When Capt Cook, a hero to west, went overseas and made maps, the idea was to establish control of all the property, to steal it from the locals, to exterminate them if possible. By that reckoning, if i, a bum w/out money, went to your house and profitted from my efforts - l eaving you and family in the bathtub, so i get away and set up good alibi etc-  then what difference is that from claiming australia for the stars/stripes, or swastika, or even hammer and sickle? It got the needed result in that, now having lotsa money, my kids go to private school and rub elbows with kids of the elite, and....future so bright and so on...

Stalin was a ruthless and dedicated communist who broke alot of eggs making the omelet we today enjoy, what's left of it. The lying bastards who sent 1800 Canadians troops to death at Dieppe in an out-of-channels operation that couldn't have succeeded even if that was the purpose, did the deed in the dark of night in order to show Stalin something ie  '2nd front'  when they were rofl at the sight of millions innocents dying in Barbarrossa! How utterly evil can one get then to nuke two Japanese cities for no reason then to 'teach them little yellow bastards a goddam lesson' (truman was quoted as saying) and btw, frighten Joe Stalin into paranoid psychosis, and BTW, lying about all that to US, filling the history books with lies and teaching new generation selfish untruths (Hirohito sent telegram dated July '45 begging US to accept Japan surrender, as recounted in Gore Vidals 'Blood for Oil,  bush and cheney 'etc))  until finally all them lying chickens comes home to roost see 911. CBC is running a series called 'love,hate propaganda' and it basically repeats mantra "Lee Oswald shot JFK by himself lalalala!' because the truth become known would sicken even the hardest reactionary stooge. Radio and tv and the newspapers are TOTALLY rightwing reactionary, and the lie (the media is liberal, giggety) still is repeated at least once a day by oakley or stifford or carrol or judy madrin. Don Cherry is a hero! The rightwing stooge probably doesn't even know why Afghanistan is being warred over, yet he sings songs of praise for the dead youths who looked up to guys like him

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I am not naive enough to believe what my teachers and the propaganda machine in general have been telling me since I was small.

well put...and i would also

add for myself, i am sick of pretending to believe, or be called a conspiracy theorist ;)

thanks wrote:

from square one bolsheviks tortured and mass-murdered, and themselves set up fake consituent assemblies, or tried to.

You mean like Reagan?

"Yes, perhaps that's more to the point. Fascism is just a particular brand of capitalism, after all."

mr.Beltov could I keep this one for Quote of the Year? thanks :)

Fascism is, of course, a form of Socialism. That's why it was called "National Socialism".

N.Beltov wrote:

Actually, ever since socialist ideas became popular in working class circles, bourgeois politics has included the strategy of supporting, if need be, a section of bourgeois politicians that pretend to be genuine socialists. This practice of fake socialists is actually older than fascism by quite a bit. Lenin wrote a great deal about this phenomenon ... as a result of which he is detested in certain political circles.

Nazi hostility to trade unions, socialists and communists should expose the demagogic claim that Nazis were socialists themselves. Canadian Conservatives that I know, personally, regurgitate these claims when it suits them.

When I think of "bourgeois politicians that pretend to be socialists" it is not the Conservatives that come to mind...

Actually, ever since socialist ideas became popular in working class circles, bourgeois politics has included the strategy of supporting, if need be, a section of bourgeois politicians that pretend to be genuine socialists. This practice of fake socialists is actually older than fascism by quite a bit. Lenin wrote a great deal about this phenomenon ... as a result of which he is detested in certain political circles. (Edited to add: I will leave it to the imagination of babblers as to what those political circles might be. It's a side point to the main point here.)

Nazi hostility to trade unions, socialists and communists should expose the demagogic claim that Nazis were socialists themselves. Canadian Conservatives that I know, personally, regurgitate these claims when it suits them.

NoDifferencePartyPooper wrote:

N.Beltov wrote:

Actually, ever since socialist ideas became popular in working class circles, bourgeois politics has included the strategy of supporting, if need be, a section of bourgeois politicians that pretend to be genuine socialists. This practice of fake socialists is actually older than fascism by quite a bit. Lenin wrote a great deal about this phenomenon ... as a result of which he is detested in certain political circles.

Nazi hostility to trade unions, socialists and communists should expose the demagogic claim that Nazis were socialists themselves. Canadian Conservatives that I know, personally, regurgitate these claims when it suits them.

NDPP

When I think of "bourgeois politicians that pretend to be socialists" it is not the Conservatives that come to mind...

Me three. I tend to think of [url=http://www.lindamcquaig.com/Columns/ViewColumn.cfm?REF=103]that party[/url] of lying-liars which is infamous for campaigning on the left and governing on the right in Ottawa. And we can follow the money all the way to Bay Street. 

The same might be said about capitalism itself ... seeing as capitalist economics theorizes perfectly competitive markets that never existed, and so on. So we have capitalist ideology and working class ideology. That's good enough for me.

"True" communism sounds too much like "true" Christianity. Keep the faith, eh, but no thanks.

Well the problem with a monument to the victims of capitalism is that you need to put an electronic ticker on it to keep tallying up the victims...

Well, I would argue a lot of those points Viking77. A lot.

The Communists had a long history prior to the Stalin era of the Soviet Union. When Marx and Engels penned their work and others created commentaries and had discussions, this was in the 19th century. More than half a century of thought had already gone into communist thought by the time Hitler came around.

With the NAZIs, it is entirely different. The initial party may have been primarily working class, but soon this began to change. The party at first was made up of disgruntled veterans of WWI. They returned from what is probably the cruellest and most industrial-thought driven war in European history to a state that was broken. Everyone in Germany was angry and despondent regarding the state of their country. A lot of people joined the various leftist groups. But Hitler got the most broken, the angriest. People that had been in the military from a very young age, come back after seeing countless friends die. WWI was brutal. That cannot be stressed enough, because it also ties very much into the Soviet Union - albeit in a very different way. Now, combine to these veterans a smatteing of theosophists, reactionaries, romantic conservatives, esotericists and the like and the NAZI party came to be. And it would always be divided by class - and that would be used by Hitler to control the party. The party became one that was split between rough and tumble working class men and lots of veterans, current soldiers, and militarist sympathizers (even the middle class ones had a bit a history of brawling) - and then there were the aristocrats and middle class who saw Hitler's rapid nationalism as a return to a more agreeable way of expression for the people of the country. And moreover, one cannot stress the cross-class appeal of Hitler. So in a way, it was a working class movement - in as much as the Conservatives or Liberals can be considered working class parties in a Canadian context, sure they have working class people working their campaigns, but let's be honest, you couldn't paint either as a working class/labour/socialist sort of movement. I'd really suggest reading the biographies of many of the 1920s NAZIs - like Strasser, von Shirach, and their ilk. They were part of a more 'vibrant' time in German political history, that was buttressed and created out of a disaster for the people.

Now, I could go into fascism and its ideological roots and corporatism. But that means that I have to source things and be all ladida about Fiume and Rerum Novarum. I've literally written essays on the topic of the origins and evolution of fascist thought - and I didn't get bad grades. It is a big topic and a discussion means a lot of name dropping. I personally don't have the time to get into a protracted debate and actually dig through stuff and get sources.

Also, the NAZIs and the fascists of Europe ended up having very different relationships with industrialists. And I should also point out that fascism usually had vaguely Catholic over-tones and was universally anti-communist. And I do have to say that the S in NSDAP is entirely contingent on the N. Otherwise the party would have just been the Nationalist German Worker's Party - they were national socialists, a disaffected movement that may have wanted benefits, but they wanted them through a statist system - the finer policy points were less fleshed out than the Communists. The NAZIs, being a new bunch, just sort of made it up as they went along til' Mein Kampf - where they had a single, massive articulation - less of policy, but a more revealing looking into the party leader's ethos. I do not think that the pre-government NAZIs could have survived without Hitler. They were a charasmatic movement, based on one man. Lenin may have been irrepressible and charasmatic, but he ultimately was replaceable.

Plus, Russian and German history during the first world war are also very divergent and must be taken into account when you see the successor regimes in question (the Bolsheviks took down the Romanov dynasty in its totality, the NAZIs took an elected parliamentary republic down a road to totalitarianism.

But I'd also say that neither movement is dead. Far-right European thought bled back into Canada, America, Britain, and tonnes of other places and a lot of the 'lessons' were syncretized into contemporanious strainds of conservative thought. Its bubbled up from time to time, of course, in out and out fascist or nazistic political expressions in mainstream political parties of many points on the political spectrum. Communists, on the other hand, have generally kept discussing their ideas and meeting and organizing and evolving in a whole other way. In my own personal experience, a lot of big and little C/c (ommunists) are pretty much some of the more democratic leftists doing the Process of Canadian Politics (or PCP as I call it). Many are hard working activists and great allies for a lot of causes. They do tonnes of community work and all sorts of things. Point me out some far-right wingers that do that. I dare you.

And since you and I both know it is pointless to take up that dare, you'll note that the far-right post-fascist movements have merged with pre-existing social prejudices in North America to become hate groups, for the most part. Sure, a lot of fascist rhetorical trappings exist within the Tea Party movement and militia folk and patriots and natavists and truthers, it is mutated and Americanized. They've got the violence down pat, but they don't quite have the same economic and social policies and goals. The little extreme outfits all hide and hate. They are insular, depressing groups of people that stay around plan on how to hate.

Basically, neither of them have gone away. They have both been pushed outside of mainstream discourse and consciousness. But neither are dead and it would be foolish to assume so. The fascists now have a long history of thought and action. The communist movements have also kept talking and are very different than they were in the 1920s.

As for the monument? If various communities want to organize and try to put this forward, I think that is their own stuff to do and a lot of people are pretty in the right for memorializing friends and family lost to repressive states, but I really don't feel like the federal government should hop in and push for something like this

Viking77 is 100% unadulterated troll, and his disruptive nonsense here is more than enough reason to lose him permanently. Until action is taken, could everyone please ignore it?

Viking77, I guess this is more a cumulative thing than a one egregious offence thing, but you are clearly on the wrong board.  You are stubbornly and willfully weak on the whole anti-racism and oppression thing.  Other people here don't quite get our model either but they aren't drawn to it the way you are.  Now the old discredited National Socialism = socialism nonsense.  You are consistently and belligerently contrary to core principles here. For a while I thought you might be educatiable, but my optimism was misplaced. You're gone.

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 True Communism (Marxism) has never yet existed in this world. So far the form of Communism in our world has been lead by fascism/dictatorship/totalitarianism.

Funny how they all start off thinking they're the True Shining Path though, eh?

But the next time will surely be different! Can't you feel the hope?