Left Under Attack
March 6, 2006 16:52 | by Robert Griffiths
Europe's anti-communist crusade is down to fear of a resurgent left.
In Turkey, constitutional provisions outlawing the instigation of class conflict have been used in recent years to ban the Communist Party and detain and torture its leaders. The Latvian government bans communist election candidates while erecting war memorials to Latvian fascists who fought with the nazi SS. Currently, the Czech government is seeking to criminalise the Union of Young Communists because the latter calls for working class state power in order to overthrow capitalism. In Hungary today, it is a criminal offence to display communist symbols, including the five-pointed red star.
This is the backdrop to the January 25 Council of Europe parliamentary assembly vote for the resolution on the "need for international condemnation of the crimes of totalitarian communist regimes." The vote was passed by 99 to 42 votes. Twelve representatives abstained and more than half the assembly's members did not turn up at all.
Although aimed primarily at former regimes in central and eastern Europe, the resolution explicitly included in the indictment communist regimes which "are still in power in several countries of the world." The resolution argues that communist crimes - both real and imaginary - were "justified in the name of the class struggle theory and the dictatorship of the proletariat." This helps to lay the ideological basis for smearing and eventually outlawing those who respond to the class war waged by monopoly capital against working people, humanity and the planet.
The Council of Europe resolution bemoans the fact that the authors of communist crimes have not been brought to trial by the "international community," unlike those responsible for the "horrible crimes" of nazism. Thus, the resolution perpetuates one of the great myths of the 20th century, namely that the victorious Western allies implemented a programme of "denazification" after the second world war.
The myth was invented to serve the cause of anti-communism during the cold war and continues to serve the same purpose today. True, a small number of top nazi leaders were tried at Nuremburg and then imprisoned or executed for committing crimes against humanity. But many thousands of their accomplices in important positions in the nazi state apparatus went unpunished. Nazi-supporting industrialists, bankers, judges, police chiefs and military officers not only resumed their jobs in West Germany after the war, but, in many cases, rose to the highest positions in business, government, Interpol and NATO. They must have enjoyed drafting and implementing West German laws to ban the Communist Party and exclude communists from public-sector employment, while guarding the frontiers of the "free world" against the German Democratic Republic.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of nazi war criminals were assisted by the Vatican and US and British intelligence services to escape along the "rat line" to Argentina, Chile, Nicaragua and El Salvador. There, they helped the US to train and fund murderous anti-communist dictatorships and death squads. The entire German army intelligence service on the eastern front - the Gehlen Organisation - was recruited for future covert operations by the forerunner of the CIA, knowing full well the organisation's involvement in the mass extermination of Jews and communists.
German scientists were smuggled to the US where they developed that country's nuclear, ballistic missile and chemical weapons programmes. Japanese scientists who had devised biological weapons for use against the Chinese - and killing 3,000 prisoners in "experiments" at Camp Harbin in Manchuria - were also brought to the US and redeployed in the cold war effort.
For many decades, these and other shameful projects were dismissed in the West as Soviet or communist propaganda. They are now well-documented matters of indisputable fact, exposing "denazification" for the charade that it actually was.
The myth may live on in the Council of Europe assembly chamber, but its proceedings on January 25 did not represent an unqualified victory for the anti-communists. True, they succeeded in rigging the debate as pro-resolution speeches outnumbered those against by 19 to four. But, in a second vote, they failed to secure the two-thirds majority needed to adopt a set of recommendations for action by the council's committee of ministers. These included the appointment of national and international committees of "independent experts" to investigate the crimes of communism, a Europe-wide public awareness campaign, an international conference and - in eastern Europe - the rewriting of school text books and the establishment of memorials and museums to honour the "victims" of communist regimes.
Although the Socialist group in the assembly had decided to abstain, some members broke ranks to oppose the resolution and the recommendations. For many western European conservatives and liberals, the whole session was an "internal" eastern European affair from which they kept away. In the debate itself, anti-semitic Russian MP Vladimir Zhirinovsky wanted the witch-hunt to begin with a trial at the Hague for Communist Party of the Russian Federation leader Gennady Zyganov, who has campaigned vigorously against the resolution. Earlier this year, Zhirinovsky was quoted as saying that "communism must be condemned only because it saved Jews from total extermination."
One of the most powerful interventions in the assembly came from Swedish Left Party representative Mats Einarsson. http://www.spectrezine.org/weblog/?p=180 He pointed out that, "under the banner of anti-communism, millions of men and women dreaming of - and fighting for - freedom have been jailed, tortured and killed...The real target of anti-communism has never been dictatorship or violations of human rights, but "the left, the labour movement and anyone who questions capitalism and imperialism."
He insisted that 20th century anti-communists had opposed the "dictatorship of the proletariat" in the Soviet Union not because it was a dictatorship, but because it was - or so they thought - "of the proletariat." It embodied the "eternal nightmare of the ruling classes - the fear that the workers might seize power."
Czech social democrat Petr Lachnit had a quotation for those ex-communists who had jumped ship when the wind changed and who now proclaimed their anti-communism. "I wasn't a coward with you then, I needn't be a hero with you now."
Zyganov proposed that the "leaders of the colonial past should be judged for their atrocities in Africa, Asia and the Middle East." Like others, he urged the Council of Europe to pay more attention to the revival of neofascism.
But the real concern of the anti-communists is that capitalism's failures may produce a turn to the left. Branding equality and social justice as "elements" of communist ideology which have to be resisted, Goran Lindblad, the Swedish conservative who has led the anti-communist drive in the council, is promising to put his recommendations back on the agenda very soon.
A broad international alliance of communists, socialists and liberals has played a vital role so far in blocking what is in essence an anti-democratic as well as an anti-socialist initiative. For its part, the Communist Party in Britain is also going on the offensive. The Communist Party History Group is being re-established to reclaim our past - and that of the wider labour movement - from non-labour and anti-communist historians.
Furthermore, a major new pamphlet by John Foster on The Case for communism will be published within the next few weeks.
Robert Griffiths is general secretary of the Communist Party of Britain. This article was first published in The Morning Star (Tuesday 21 February 2006)