Perhaps this column should be titled “How Quick they Forget” — presuming “they” ever knew.
Believe it or not, in debating the establishment of a $1.5 million “Memorial to the Victims of Communism,” the board and members of Ottawa’s National Capital Commission (NCC) were split over whether this title was unfair to Canadians who might be communists.
So they compromised on “Memorial to the Victims of Totalitarian Communism.”
This was still too much for the board – too narrow a definition, they felt, and still might offend Canadian communists. Back to the drawing board.
The NCC’s roots go back to 1899, and its focus is to beautify and enhance Ottawa as a nice place to live. Their driving concern today is not to offend anyone and to be politically correct.
As a consequence, in this they are offending history, common sense and the victims they seek to honor. What gives with these people? True, not all totalitarians are communists, but one can make a fair case that all communists are incipient totalitarians.
Nazism is totalitarian. So was Italian fascism. But both of these malignancies were destroyed as viable forces in WWII. Hitler’s Nazi ideology evolved from Lenin’s and Stalin’s communism – only with racial hatred replacing economic hatred.
Stalin’s communism claimed more innocent victim’s than Hitler’s totalitarianism. And Mao Zedong’s communism claimed more victims that even Stalin managed.
As for Canadian communists, while the Soviet empire survived they faithfully echoed whatever anti-west theme Moscow developed. When Khrushchev denounced the perversions of Stalin, most Canadian communists (that the NCC is so fretful about not offending today) switched immediately and acknowledged Stalin’s “mistakes” and continued supporting Soviet repression and the Kremlin’s perfidy.
When Moscow disagreed with Ottawa – Canadian communists backed Moscow.
Even after Mao Zedong was exposed as a homicidal tyrant who was screwing up his country, Pierre Trudeau, before he became an MP, extolled Mao’s virtues and ruminated about the pain and wisdom in his eyes from the misery he’d seen.
The only professional Soviet spy ever sent to prison in Canada for subverting our democracy was an elected Member of Parliament – Fred Rose, later banished to Poland.
So why is the NCC uneasy about sponsoring a memorial to the 100 million-plus victims of communism — not just “totalitarian” communism, but communism itself?
In the lifetime of most of us, we saw what Communism did to Cambodia, where its proponent, Pol Pot, killed close to 2 million people – maybe 40% of the existing population. These were people whose crime was being literate, wearing spectacles, knowing another language, working for foreigners, not being communists.
One NCC member had the effrontery to suggest the NCC should not condemn totalitarian Communism when the Canadian government, in WWII, had sent Japanese-Canadians to internment camps. As if drawing a parallel with the Gulag.
What the NCC seems to be overlooking in continuing contortions to describe its proposed memorial (to be opened in 2011) is that Canada today is increasingly comprised of people who’ve come here to escape communism. Not to escape “just” totalitarian communism, but communism per se, which by its nature is dictatorial, oppressive, malignant, and an enemy of free choice.
I draw a distinction between “communism” and “Marxism” which is less restrictive. But neither has much to recommend it. As for the NCC: For shame.
14 responses so far
1 Derek // Sep 24, 2009 at 7:37 am
“Hitler’s Nazi ideology evolved from Lenin’s and Stalin’s communism – only with racial hatred replacing economic hatred.”
God you are a bigger fruitcake than I first imagined. People like you give conservatives a bad name. What exactly are you advocating with this tripe, that the Canadian gov’t ought to do more to offend people?
2 torourke // Sep 24, 2009 at 8:37 am
Derek,
If the Canadian government established a memorial to the millions of people killed by Nazism, should they change the title of such a memorial so as not to offend Neo-Nazis? If the Canadian government established a memorial to those persecuted because of their race, should they water down the title so as not to annoy current racists?
3 Jim // Sep 24, 2009 at 8:37 am
I’d like to see a memorial to the victims of Trotskyism.
4 sinz54 // Sep 24, 2009 at 9:18 am
Worthington:
That is incorrect.
The intellectual roots of the Third Reich came from European socialism, European racialism, German nationalism, Nordic romanticism, and the Nietzschean worship of the superman.
5 Derek // Sep 24, 2009 at 9:25 am
“and the Nietzschean worship of the superman.”
You may be even crazier than Worthington. Have you ever read Nietzsche, or are you relying on Glen Beck for most of your history? If you are referring to what Nietzsche’s sister did to distort his philosophy then maybe you can stretch your point to fit the crazy conspiratorial crowd that has taken over conservatism, and driven the rest of us out.
6 Derek // Sep 24, 2009 at 9:31 am
torourke why don’t they put up a memorial for all the people who died in Iraq because of neoconservatism?
7 torourke // Sep 24, 2009 at 9:44 am
Fine with me Derek, now how about answering my questions?
8 Derek // Sep 24, 2009 at 9:55 am
torourke I don’t think they should imply that they understand the cause of war at all, by blaming an ideology. If we understood the cause of human behavior the social sciences would have some predictive power, and they don’t. Not even the economists understand human behavior, because they certainly can’t predict the future. I think it is better to pay homage, and leave ideology out of it. If you just have to blame something, why not blame manic depression, malformed DNA molecules, or perhaps, Satan?
9 EscapeVelocity // Sep 24, 2009 at 11:37 am
I offend Communists daily…..as should everyone.
10 sinz54 // Sep 24, 2009 at 12:38 pm
derek:
Yes, I have.
“I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? … All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood, and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is ape to man? A laughing stock or painful embarrassment. And man shall be that to overman: a laughingstock or painful embarrassment.”
— Thus Spake Zarathrustra
Hitler cherry-picked the Nietzschean “overman” concept out of Nietzsche, while carefully omitting what Nietzsche thought of anti-Semitism and the German people.
11 sinz54 // Sep 24, 2009 at 12:49 pm
derek:
Oh, brother.
The ideology of anti-Semitism is what led to intimidation, extortion, pogroms, and eventually, mass murder of Jews. It wasn’t economics or individual Jews making asses of themselves. It was the view, held by European Christians for centuries, that the Jews had Jesus murdered.
The “Lebensraum” ideology of Nazism led Germany, under Hitler, to try to acquire a vast slave empire by force. The theory of Aryan race superiority suggested how the subjects of that empire would be treated.
The Communist ideology of Lenin subordinated the individual to the will of the state. I’ve actually discussed this issue with real Marxists, and they ADMIT that Leninism is incompatible with separation of powers, a concept which we Americans have always believed is key to limiting the power of government to oppress the individual.
Once you subordinate the individual to the will of the state, with no countervailing powers to provide balance, the GULAG follows more or less inevitably–much as murder of the Jews follows from anti-Semitism and national paranoia.
The Trotskyite ideology of “permanent revolution” claimed that the Soviet revolution in Russia could not exist for long in a world of hostile capitalist states. Communism in any one country can only succeed indefinitely if it succeeds everywhere. Hence Communism must always be expansionist. The result was Soviet imperialism, from the conquest of the Baltic States in the 1930s to the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939 to the conquest of Eastern Europe in the 1940s and 1950s to the takeovers of Cuba, Angola, El Salvador and Afghanistan.
Philosophy matters. Ideology matters. And the Nazi and Communist ideologies both inevitably lead to imperialism, bloodbaths and terror–though by different routes.
12 Derek // Sep 24, 2009 at 1:07 pm
sinz54 thanks for the reply. Since you understand the cause of human behavior could you make some predictions for me, with special emphasis on communist countries? I’d also be interested in the mechanism that ideology uses to interact with the human body, to cause it to do one thing, rather than another. Is the connection point somewhere in the pineal gland by any chance?
13 Derek // Sep 24, 2009 at 1:14 pm
“Hitler cherry-picked the Nietzschean “overman” concept out of Nietzsche, while carefully omitting what Nietzsche thought of anti-Semitism and the German people.”
What part of Hitler’s overman is like the superman Nietzsche described, who was closer to the idea of a renaissance man than a blond barbarian, more ignorant than even Glen Beck?
14 Jim // Sep 24, 2009 at 2:17 pm
Yeah, waitin’ on that monument to the victims of Trotskyism.
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