The Dictator and the Clown

This coming Sunday will mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Enver Hoxha, head of the Marxist dictatorship in Albania for some forty years. He was also a fervent admirer of Stalin, so much so that after the Khrushchev Secret Speech, revealing some of the excesses of Stalinist rule, Hoxha broke with the Soviet Union, realigning Albania with Mao’s China, the only Communist ruler to do so.

No country can entirely escape the past, and just as Stalin was a product of Russian history, so, too, was Hoxha a product of the history of the Balkans. He was born into a Muslim family when Albania was still a backward and obscure province of the Ottoman Empire. He ruled Albania in much the same oppressive fashion as a Turkish Bey, with absolute and unrestricted power. All organised religion was banned. Sorry, that’s not quite true. Existing religions were replaced with the most abject forms of state worship with the attendant personality cult.

There was little of the lip-service paid to liberty paid in other communist countries. The 1976 constitution effectively defined political liberty as contrary to established order. The Sigurimi, Albania’s secret police, were allowed the widest discretion in monitoring the population for any expressions of dissent. Thousands were imprisoned in labour camps.

Almost any kind of foreign literature or media was banned, with the odd exception of old British comedies starring Norman Wisdom. It’s impossible to fathom the minds of dictators, but one would have thought that Wisdom, who often played the little man at odds with authority, would be as unacceptable as Sancho Panza. But, for whatever reason, he made it across the cultural barrier, becoming the much beloved ‘Mr Pitkin’, the character he played in his earliest movies. Wisdom became, if you like, the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. His comedy was the opium of the Albanian people.

History has condemned you

If people hoped that things could only get better in Cuba after that communist dinosaur Fidel Castro give way to his brother Raul, a little further ahead in the scale of evolution, they must be disappointed by the results. The real question with these people, in this nepotistic dictatorship, is not when will things get better, no, it’s could they conceivably get any worse? The answer to that is simple, yes, they most certainly can.

Cuba was once an island with a thriving agricultural economy. Not any longer; now food shortages are a regular feature of daily live. This is not North Korea- yet-, there is still the endless monotony of beans and rice to keep people away from the frontier of starvation, but other basics like bread and milk are disappearing from supermarket shelves for weeks on end.

Again it’s the same old same old when the state tries to manage the economy. The worst part of state socialism was always the collectivisation of agriculture. Cuba is no different here from the old Soviet Union. Its state farms are massively inefficient, now producing no more than 20% of the country’s needs. Such private enterprise as the state allows is stymied by a system of central supply and transport totally inelastic in responding to market demands. Last year the whole of a bumper tomato crop rotted, as The Economist reports, because government trucks failed to collect it on time. This style of economic mismanagement means that Cuba has to buy a good part of its food from foreign suppliers, using up limited amounts of hard currency.

History will absolve me, Fidel once declared, appealing to exactly the same court that Adolf Hitler once did, using much the same hyperbolic language. But history is already passing its verdict on the failure of socialism in Cuba, the failure of the whole wasteful Castro experiment, one which effectively destroyed a rich and productive nation. After this remove of time even Batista, the former dictator, looks good. I know from my contacts in Havana that more and more people are looking for the kind of closure that only time, and mortality, can bring.

Venecuba, No!

I reported recently that Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s Sawdust Caesar, now considers himself to be a Marxist. So, having taken that path he is seeking ever more guidance from the Cubans, who are sending ‘aids’ to the country in ever increasing numbers. Earlier this month Ramiro Valdés, who ranks number three in the Castro government hierarchy, arrived Caracas, where he is expected to remain for some time. At home Valdés served twice as interior minister and has a particular expertise in policing the internet, so the Venezuelans have a fair idea what they might expect.

Cubans are to be seen in all areas of Venezuelan life, running the ports telecommunications, transport service, police training, the issuing of identity documents and the business registry. It’s so bad that the health ministry is unable to provide primary care data because the information is sent to Havana It’s so bad Chávez himself only learnt that thousands of primary health care posts had been shut down when he was told by Castro!

And what can ordinary Venezuelans expect from this ‘fraternal’ aid, this creeping Anschluss? Well, not much, if the experience of the workers in the oil industry is any measure. Trade unionists have complained of ill-treatment at the hands of the Cubans. Indeed, unions are not even allowed on Cuban-run sites, which must count as one of communisms more peculiar ironies. Last year Froilan Barrios, of the Confederation of Venezuelan Workers, said that the oil and petrochemical industry had been completely penetrated by G2, the Cuban intelligence service. Workers planning a strike were threatened by Cuban thugs.

The history of Eastern Europe in the immediate post-war years provides a useful roadmap for the present Venezuelan experiences. After 1945 communists effectively ate away at the national independence of places like Czechoslovakia and Poland from the inside by obtaining control of key ministries, like the interior and defence. Exactly the same thing is now happening in Venezuela, with Cuban ‘advisors’ closely involved in implementing new policies for the police force and the army.

These of course are all matters pleasing to the Castro dictatorship which is likely to get control of more and more of Venezuelan oil wealth to shore up their crumbling economy, an economy ruined by communism. Chávez, who has not the wit or the intelligence to understand that his country’s integrity and independence is being undermined, is set to become Mussolini to Castro’s Hitler.

When he was in Havana in 2005 he was told by Castro that their two countries now constituted a single-entity. “We are Venecubans”, he said. The only problem is that nobody thought to seek the approval of the people of Venezuela for this remarkable change in their fortunes. In a recent poll no fewer that 85% said that they did not want their country to become like Cuba. No wonder; for as bad as things are in Caracas they are considerably worse in Havana.

Grand Inquisitor

I’m reading Life and Fate at present, a remarkable book by a remarkable man, Vasily Grossman, best know as a journalist of genius, who reported from the Russian side during the Second World War. I’m only half way through the novel, his magnum opus, so I’m not offering this as a review. Rather I want to draw attention to one particular chapter, half way through the book, a chapter that I have not long just finished reading. I’m just so full of excitement that I simply have to say something.

First, a word or two about the novel and its own fate. During the Battle of Stalingrad Grossman was reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace. After the war he wrote Life and Fate, whose title invites a comparison with that great Russian novel. For once the comparison is fully justified, as Grossman, in a huge panorama, creates War and Peace for the twentieth century.
As a novel it is also intensely honest, making no allowances for the ideological shibboleths of his day, so honest that the book was ‘arrested’, yes, arrested by the KGB in the early 1960s. Grossman was subsequently summoned to the office of Mikhail Suslov, the chief ideologue of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years, who told him that the book could not be published for another two or three hundred years, an act of extreme censorship coupled with a paradoxical recognition of its lasting importance. Fortunately, a copy of the manuscript was smuggled out to the West, where it was published and hailed as a work of genius.

Now let me give you a taste of why it could never have been published in the old Soviet Union. You will find it in Chapter Fourteen of Book Two, a passage that I now think of as the ‘Grand Inquisitor Chapter’, drawing from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. In this Mikhail Mostovsky, an old Bolshevik, incarcerated in a German concentration camp, is taken to be interrogated by a senior Gestapo officer named Liss. Mostovsky is ready to be tortured; has prepared himself mentally for torture. Yes, he is tortured alright, just not in the way he imagined. Liss, you see, greets him, greets the Bolsheviks as pathfinders and teachers, as the first National Socialists of the twentieth century;

‘Do you understand me?’ Liss repeated, already too excited even to see Mostovsky. ‘When we strike a blow against your army, it’s ourselves that we hit. Our tanks didn’t only break through your defences- they broke through our own defences at the same time. The tracks of our tanks are crushing German National Socialism. It’s terrible- it’s like committing suicide in one’s sleep…We’re your deadly enemies. Yes, yes…But our victory will be your victory. Do you understand? And if you should conquer, then we shall perish only to live in your victory. It’s paradoxical: through losing the war we shall win the war- and continue our development in a different form.

Mostovsky is in hell, but not the hell he expected. This devil does not torture; he chips away at long cherished illusions. At once he recognises a terrible truth: the practice of communism in Russia, a system built on lies and terror, is in no essential different from the practice of Nazism. To defeat Liss in this game of mental chess he would have to renounce everything: the camps, the Lubyanka the whole apparatus of the secret police, an organisation that spawned a monster like Nikolai Yezhov. More than that he would have to hate Stalin and his dictatorship, have to condemn Lenin himself, the very edge of the abyss. For Lenin, as Liss asserts, while considering himself to be the builder of internationalism while in fact he was creating the great nationalism of the twentieth century.

It’s true, it’s all true; without Lenin there would have been no Mussolini and no Hitler. They are his bastard children, and fascism as much his creature as communism. If one does not grasp this simple truth one simply cannot understand the history of the last century, from the October Revolution to the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

Tea Time Blues

From a fellow libertarian in the States (http://poedpatriot.blogspot.com)I discovered recently that there is a Communist Party USA. Good grief, there is life after death! Yes, there is a Communist Party USA which has the ‘fascist’ Republican Party in its sights. The Republicans are bad enough, but when it comes to the Tea Party movement, my, oh, my, we really are talking about the spawn of Satan.

Reporting on the recent Tea Party Convention in Nashville, The People’s World, the CPUSA’s news outlet, says that occasion proved that the Tea Party was a “racist and red-baiting movement against health care reform, jobs for all, an end to war, and economic and social justice.” So, there you have it; I expect these demons are also in favour of a return to slavery and keeping black folks out of Paradise.

The accusations continue. The Tea Party wants to bring down Obama not just because he is black but because they are against ‘progressive change’, wanting to turn “our country back to the policies of Reagan, Bush or worse.” Don’t you just love the “or worse”? And always keep a-hold of nurse, for fear of finding something worse. The author of this hysterical rant, one Jarvis Tyner, gets steadily worse himself, losing all coherence at points;

The conference was an orgy of racist hate aimed mainly against blacks, Latinos, immigrants and the nation’s first African American president…It clear (sic) to most observers that most of the tea party participants, as shown in their signs and slogans, are opposed to the president mainly because he is black…Sarah Palin has jumped in front of this backward march. She is part of the new McCarthyism combined with racist contempt for the first black president.

And it’s not even the Klan! There is one part of this semi-literate gibberish that’s undeniably true: Obama really is an African American president, though he is not an African American in the sense peddled by Tyner and the brothers. He is the first black president; let’s just leave it at that, shall we?

The Tea Party is no more than a collection of citizens concerned about the drift of Obamaland, the drift towards big government and socialism by default; the drift-may the Lord help us- towards a state health care system, the delights of which we are all to experienced in England. Yes, they are mostly white and middle class- though not exclusively so- but so what? Does the fact that most black people who voted in 2008 voted for Obama make them racist? Well, there might be an element of racism there; I can’t honestly say. The point is Tyler’s diatribe helps nobody, least of all the Black African American Moses in the White House. Is that name to be changed? Perhaps Tyler and the Communists have it on their agenda.

This Communist Party, incidentally, seems to have a very close relationship with the Democrats at grass roots level, to the point where it might be meaningful to talk about ‘entryism’, the sort of thing the old Communist Party of Great Britain and the Militant Tendency attempted with Labour, and attempted successfully.

Communism is a malignant cancer and the fact that it’s present in the heart of the world’s greatest democracy, no matter if in a relatively trivial degree, really is repulsive. Tyler and his kind feed on resentment, on negative racism, on convincing people that their own inadequacies and failures are somehow the fault of ‘white racists’. Well, I had to finish on a ranting note. After all, it’s quite the fashion.:-))

Truth Will Set you Free

The question of Poland and the Holocaust is a uniquely difficult one because all sorts of complicated issues are raised: that of Polish people towards the Jewish community in their midst, and that the post-war communist authorities towards the political significance of the Holocaust.

The official investigation into the Holocaust began with the setting up of a commission to gather evidence of war crimes, which included the Jewish Historical Institute (JHI), a body of independent historians. This was a time when Poland was not yet fully controlled by the communists, so some degree of openness and objectivity was still possible. Things changed from 1948 onwards.

In 1950 the JHI was placed under the control of the Ministry of Education, with all inquiry not approved of by the Party coming to an end. The new line was to stress the passive response of the Jews to the Nazis, while minimising Polish anti-Semitism and collaboration. It was said that the western emphasis on the persecution of the Jews had only obscured the persecution of the Poles. The official attitude towards the Jews was further modified by the emergence of the state of Israel. Now anti-Semitism was replaced by anti-Zionism; but both still drew on the traditional stereotype of the greedy, manipulative and exploitative Jew.

After Wladyslaw Gomulka came to power, following the 'Polish October' of 1956, old forms of Polish nationalism received at least a partial rehabilitation. This was accompanied by old anti-Semitism wearing new clothes. Jewish people were removed from their positions in both the army and the civil service, while at the same time an active press campaign was launched against all of those associated with the former Stalinist regime. The particular Jewish suffering associated with the Holocaust slipped even further into the background.

The political struggles of the 1960s saw the emergence of even more strident forms of anti-Jewish nationalism, most associated with the group around Mieczyslaw Moczar, notorious both for his xenophobia and his anti-Semitism. After the victory of Israel in the Six Day War of 1967 the position for Poland's dwindling Jewish minority became steadily worse, with all sorts of people being attacked for 'Zionist sympathies', whether they had them or not.

The whole programme embraced Holocaust history. Any and every attempt to define this as a uniquely Jewish event was denounced as "part of a chauvinist Zionist propaganda plot to justify the existence of Israel and turn the world against communism." It was, so it was said, a new "Jewish world conspiracy." In 1968 all the records of the JHI were taken over by the government. Subsequent to this a conference was held to "rebut the slanderous campaign of lies in the West...especially with reference to the accusations about the alleged participation of Poles in the annihilation of the Jewish population." By now the JHI had all but ceased to exist.

The fall of communism has been accompanied by a new openness; a willingness, at least by some, to confront uncomfortable truths; issues like the Jedwabne Pogrom and other matters touching on the relations between the Jewish and Catholic communities during the Holocaust. As a further indication of how things are changing I note from a recent report in The Economist that communist-era distortions are falling away and that for the first time the majority of Polish people see Auschwitz chiefly as a place where Jews were killed.

That's the way to do it!

It’s interesting to compare the success of the British in handling the communist insurgency in the old Malay States with the failure of the parallel French struggle in Indochina.

On the face of it the French should have had greater success because they deployed much more in the way of force and firepower in Indochina than the British ever did in Malaya. But what one really has to look at here- the key to the whole issue -is the differing political strategies adopted in each case.

The French intention was to restore, in almost all respects, their pre-war colonial authority, paying little attention to the emerging national movement. It was because of this that the Viet-Minh was able to move beyond its Communist ideological confines, becoming a movement of national liberation in the most complete sense.

Now, in strategic and political terms, the British position in 1945 was no better in Malaya than the French in Indochina. The Japanese had been defeated, yes, but the former subjects of the Empire were imbued with a new sense of national consciousness. There was also a vigorous and well-armed Communist guerrilla movement, organised in the Malayan National Liberation Army. But, almost from the beginning, the British adopted a different strategy from the French. Instead of struggling against the tide of Malayan nationalism they worked with it, effectively separating and isolating the Communist Min Yuen from the rest of the national community.

When the British returned the old federated and unfederated Malay States were reorganised into a new Malayan Union. However, because of opposition from Malayan nationalists this was quickly replaced by the Federation of Malaya, returning power to many traditional rulers. The long-term British intention, moreover, was not, as in Indochina, to re-establish colonial authority on the old basis, but to hand over power to a non-Communist native government as soon as this was practicable. During the course of the Emergency, before full independence in 1957, Malayans became an increasingly important part of the bureaucracy, the army and the police. In effect the whole insurgency, it might be said, was being eaten away, from the inside out.

Ethnic divisions between the Muslim Malays and the Communist Chinese served to isolate the guerrilla campaign still further. In his counter-insurgency operations, General Gerald Templer made use of this 'ethnic fragmentation', resettling large numbers of Chinese squatters away from the forest fringes to New Villages, where they could be protected and kept under watch. Deprived of this essential base of logistical support, the number of guerrilla attacks dropped from 6000 in 1951 to 1000 in 1954, just as the strength of the Min Yuen army declined by half. In that same year, while the French were being defeated at Dien Bien Phu, the Malayan Communists were forced to retreat into Thailand. And that was the way to do it!

Googleless in China

The only question that arises from Google’s declared intention to pull out of China is why it has taken so long? This is a country governed by a corrupt oligarchy, so frightened of its own people and of freedom of speech, so frightened by a possible loss of ‘harmony’, that it will not even allow access to Facebook or Twitter.

The official Communist Party line, reiterated recently by the foreign ministry, is that the internet in China is ‘uncensored’, an obvious lie. Well, not quite; for in their scrutable inscrutable way they expect Google to do their censoring for them, disabling some functions on its internet browsers and self-censoring search results for Chinese users.

That’s one thing; hacking into the accounts of Chinese dissidents is quite another. “Chinese law”, the foreign ministry said, “prohibits any cyber attacks including hacking.” But of course respect for law is not something that one associates with Communists. It reveals so much that the hackers, presumably from within the state security apparatus, have targeted human rights activists, compromising their Gmail accounts. This is not something recent. Teng Biao, a law professor and human rights advocate, has said that his email was first hacked as long ago as 2007. So, too, has that of Zeng Jinyan, the wife of the jailed dissident Hu Jia. Others have also experience this kind of attack.

Although Google itself, in announcing its possible departure from the ‘People’s Republic’, has stopped short of accusing the Chinese government of responsibility for these cyber attacks, there is clear evidence of its guilt. A report by Verisign’s iDefence Labs, an American internet security firm, confirms that the hacker attacks on Google and thirty other US companies can be traced back to a clearly identifiable source;

…the internet addresses of the attack correspond to a single foreign entity consisting either of the agents of the Chinese state or the proxies thereof.

I think that China needs Google more than Google needs China. The search engine has become such a crucial part of information exchange and international business; local search engines are a third-rate substitute. The paradox is that while freedom of speech is suppressed in China in the manner one associates with Communist regimes, freedom of information cannot be controlled in the same way on the internet; or it can, but only by selectively disabling access to websites, and for private mail accounts to receive a visit from the secret police hackers.

To see their tools, the tools of freedom, turned into a method of political surveillance was clearly a step too far for Google. It’s a pity they compromised themselves by association with this shabby tyranny in the first place.

A New Generation

I have never understood-I don’t want to understand-the passion shown among certain leftie circles for the beastly Castro regime in Cuba, as repressive and as loathsome as any other dictatorship of any other age, a regime that incarcerates, tortures and oppresses; a regime that sends people as diverse as homosexuals and Jehovah’s Witnesses to camps to be‘re-educated.’

Fidel, as much influenced by Adolf Hitler as by Karl Marx, possibly even more influenced in practical terms by the former, may no longer have his fingers directly on the wheels of power, but he’s still there in the background, haunting the meagre Cuban feast rather like the ghost of Banquo. He and his brother Raul, now the public face of the tyranny, look so old, so decrepit, rather like the system they nurtured. I have no doubt that they represent the wave of the past, soon to dash on the breakwater of history. And what is the wave of the future? I would like to think that was best pictured in the shape of the courageous and indomitable Yoani Sánchez, creator of Generación Y, a really super blog about the harsh realities of life in Cuba. http://www.desdecuba.com/generationy

I’ve mentioned Yoani before in a blog headed Generación Y -Exposing the Corruption of Castroism, where I mentioned that, unable to silence her, the authorities had her physically assaulted. Still she talks on under the most difficult of circumstances. The Generación Y blog was blocked in Cuba in March 2008 forcing her to ‘talk blind’. She now emails her contributions and pictures to friends abroad who then post them to the website, though she herself cannot see the results. Of this Yoani has said “There is no censorship that can stop people who are determined to access the internet.” This is the true wonder of the internet-it overcomes silence, it overcomes isolation, something that dictators have always relied upon in the past.

It is precisely because of the actions of the thuggish and frightened Cuban dictatorship that Generación Y, starting in the most unpromising circumstances, is now one of the most influential blogs in the world getting about a million hits a month. In 2008 Yoani was even named by Time magazine as one of the hundred most influential people in the world, saying that “under the nose of a regime that has never tolerated dissent, Sánchez has practiced what paper-bound journalists in her country cannot; freedom of speech.” Recently Barak Obama himself responded in person to one of her posts.

One measure of her success is that her blog was attacked by Foul Fidel who ‘expressed his grave disappointment that there could be a young person in Cuba today who thinks as she does’. This came soon after she was awarded the 2008 Ortega y Gasset Prize. A response was published on Generación Y, a contribution from Reinaldo Escobar, Yoani’s husband:

The ex-president disapproves of the fact that Yoani accepted this year’s Ortega y Gasset Prize for Digital Journalism, arguing that the prize is something that imperialism favours to blow its own horn. I recognise the right of this gentleman to make this comment, but I allow myself to observe that the responsibility implied in receiving a prize is never comparable to that of bestowing one, and Yoani, at least, has never awarded a medal to a corrupt person, a traitor, a dictator or a murderer. I clarify this because I remember perfectly that the author of these reproaches was the one who placed (or commanded to be placed) the ‘Order of Jose Marti’ on the lapels of some of the most terrible and undeserving men possible: Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, Nocolae Ceausescu, Todor Zhikov, Gustav Husak, Janos Kadar, Mengistu Haile Mariam, Robert Mugabe, Heng Samrin, Erich Honecker and others that I have forgotten.

Yes, by their friends shall ye know them.

I know what Cuba is like. I’ve been there and I’ve seen how people live. I’ve met economists and other specialists who prefer to work as hotel porters because the gratuities they receive are the only way they can make a living wage. I see these things because I like to travel independently, not being bussed around in tour groups, going to hotels and resorts from which ordinary Cubans are banned. I’ve seen the harassment the people of Havana receive at the hands of the grey-shirted police, who stand on literally every street corner. It’s comforting to know that Generación Y allows the rest of the world to see these things also, to understand that freedom, the freedom to speak one’s mind without fear or intimidation, is the greatest right of all.

The Murdered Communist and the Headless Corpse

I was fascinated to discover in reading The Telegraph on Saturday that prosecutors in Germany are reexamining the case of Rosa Luxemburg, the communist leader who was murdered by the Freikorps after an abortive rising ninety years ago. It’s now being claimed that her corpse was replaced at the time with that of another woman.

Coroners from the state prosecutors’ office in Berlin are to perform an autopsy on a headless corpse found in the basement of the city’s Charité Hospital. In 1919 what was alleged to be the remains of Luxemburg was found in the Landwehr Canal, four months after it had been thrown in. There was never a positive identification and the government of the day, anxious to prevent any political fallout at a sensitive time, rushed through the investigation, putting pressure on the forensic examiner to go along with the official line.

Michael Toskos, the Charité’s head of forensic medicine, says that the 1919 corpse was the wrong dimensions for Luxemburg, going on to say that the body the hospital has fits all the right descriptions. The 1919 body was buried in Berlin’s Friedrichsfelde Cemetery, along with that of Karl Liebknecht, at a spot where left-wing pilgrims gather in commemoration every 15 January.

The issue was so historically sensitive because although Luxemburg and Liebknecht were murdered by a right wing militia it was acting on the authority of Friedrich Ebert, the Chancellor, and Gustav Noske, the Minister of Defence, both members of the mainstream SPD, the Social Democratic Party, who felt just as threatened by the extreme left. Captain Waldemar Pabst of the Freikorps' Garde-Kavallerie-Schützendivision, who gave the order for the execution, always maintained that his actions were specifically approved by Ebert and Noske. It was most certainly in their interests to have the aftermath dealt with in the most expeditious manner possible.

The question now remaining is that if the Charité corpse truly is Luxemburg who have the lefties been worshipping all these years; who is the unknown woman? We are never likely to know the answer.

A Little Freedom is a Dangerous Thing

China has undergone some remarkable changes since the death of Mao, one of the last century’s most repellent tyrants. Along with India and, perhaps, Brazil, it is set to be the great economic powerhouse of our time. So much has changed and yet so much remains the same.

This is a country that cannot escape past inferiorities and insults, reflected very much in a contemporary assertiveness that betokens insecurity and lack of ease. It is governed, moreover, by a party that has no reason for being their other than to perpetuate itself. Pleased by success, pleased by the advance of the nation, the Communist Party is also afraid, afraid that the centre will not hold and that mere anarchy will be loosed upon their world. It is afraid, in other words, that it will become historically irrelevant. It reacts by suppressing any moves to free speech; it reacts by suppressing dissent; it reacts by persecuting Liu Xiaobo.

Liu, a fifty-three year old literary critic and former academic, is one of China’s leading dissidents, the inspiration behind Charter 08, presently accused of subverting state power by posting articles on the internet calling for democratic reform and greater civil liberties in his native land. He was effectively abducted by the police from his home a year ago, formal arrest only following six months later, though it made no practical difference to his status.

He was recently charged with inciting subversion, which carries a maximum sentence of fifteen years imprisonment. Liu is no stranger to the Chinese penal system, spending almost two years in ‘re-education’ camps in the early 1990s for his part in the Tiananmen demonstrations. Representations have been lodged on his behalf at the highest levels but the Chinese government has ignored them all in its acute sensitivity over any move to question its monopoly on power.

As individuals there is little we can do about this, about the repression still exercised by the likes of the tyrannical and morally repugnant Chinese Communist Party. But in our rush to do business with these people, to buy their produce, it’s as well to remember exactly what they are and what they represent, just as bad in every way, just as dangerous in a different way, as the clerical fascists in Iran. I never knowingly buy anything made in China, a rather pointless exercise, I suppose, but one that surely avoids corruption by association.

History is not Blind

Do you think that Raúl Castro reads Orwell, specifically Nineteen Eighty-Four? It's just that in reporting the dire state of the Cuban economy earlier this year not all the woes were placed at the door of the dreaded Yankee Devil. No, he said that Cuban and Cubans were often to blame for their own shortcomings, for the fact that "often two plus two results in three." I personally think he is being over-generous. The operation of Communism in Cuba has meant that two plus two more often results in two, perhaps less.

For the Cuban people the truth is depressing. Raúl the Benevolent ordered a wage increase for over a half million employees in the education sector, which really meant they had more paper in their hands, for there is little or nothing to buy. And what pesos can buy is either sub-standard or outright rubbish. Even food is in short supply. Amazingly up to 80% of the food supply has to be imported because the inefficient state farms simply can't produce enough. Worse than that they control most of the best land but leave much of it idle. Raúl is now offering incentives to private farmers, but agricultural production continues to fall. I imagine people are all too aware what might happen from past experiences, when the tiny private sector was flourishing, flourishing just a little too much for Big Brother (and here I really am thinking of Raúl's Big Brother!). He promptly saddled it with prohibitive taxes, opening the goose to find the eggs.

Touching on Big Brother let me tell you a story about Fidel. Some of you may have been to Cuba, in which case you may have seen reprints of his History Will Absolve Me speech, the one he gave at his trail after the failure of the attack on the Moncada Barracks in 1953, his own Latin version of Hitler's 1923 Beer Hall Putsch.

What; Hitler and Castro; Munich and Moncada; Fascism and Communism? Surely not! Oh, yes, one can make a direct comparison between the two events in terms of the political mythology they engendered, that of the heroic failure, one that subsequently became an integral, and celebrated, part of the propaganda of both German Fascism and Cuban Communism. I also suspect that Castro had more than a passing familiarity with the 1923 events in Munich; for in his subsequent trial he cast himself in more or less the same 'man of destiny' role that Hitler did in 1924, even drawing on the same tiresome hyperbolic style. Consider these;

For it is not you gentlemen, who pass judgement on us. That judgement is spoken by the eternal court of history...Pronounce us guilty a thousand times over: the goddess of the eternal court of history will smile and tear to pieces the State Prosecutor's submissions and the court's verdict: for she acquits us.

I warn you, I am just beginning! If there is in your hearts a vestige of love for your country, love for humanity, love for justice, listen carefully... I know that the regime will try to suppress the truth by all possible means; I know that there will be a conspiracy to bury me in oblivion. But my voice will not be stifled - it will rise from my breast even when I feel most alone, and my heart will give it all the fire that callous cowards deny it... Condemn me. It does not matter. History will absolve me.

The first passage is Hitler and the second is Castro. Both, it would seem, have lodged appeals in exactly the same court. I leave it to you to decide if this is coincidence or not! History is not blind; Clio never absolves deadbeats and tyrants! Granice a la victoria. :-))

Generación Y-Exposing the Corruption of Castroism

Despite the shift of power from Big Brother to Little Brother, the Cuban regime remains as oppressive as ever. Raúl Castro’s government is now making greater use of a provision in the criminal code that allows indefinite detention for what is called ‘dangerousness’, this being defined as conduct “in manifest contradiction to the norms of socialist morality.” In other words, it allows for the incarceration of anyone who dares offer a criticism of this paradise in the sun and the gangsters in charge.

So far some forty Cubans have been jailed under this invidious provision for such crimes against ‘socialist morality’ as organising peaceful marches or writing critical articles. At the beginning of November Yoani Sánchez, who runs a blog called Generación Y, dedicated to exposing the political and moral corruption of Castroism, was forced into an unmarked car, after which she was beaten and threatened before being dumped in the street.

We don’t know exactly how many political prisoners there are in Cuban jails. The Economist says that there are at least two hundred, probably many more. The exact figure cannot be determined because Cuba is one of only eight countries in the world that deny the International Committee of the Red Cross access to its prisons.

What strikes me about this is the sheer hypocrisy of the Organisation of American States which suspended Honduras after the coup against Manuel Zelaya, while holding out an invitation to Cuba to rejoin. There is no evidence at all of human rights abuses in Honduras; there is plenty in Cuba. Oh, and incidentally, Raúl Castro was one of those who joined in the parrot-like call for an economic embargo against the Hondurans, seemingly unaware of the irony that this invoked.

Socialism is a filthy doctrine in whatever form it comes; oppressive, miserable, thuggish and essentially anti-human, anti anything that makes life worth living. In Cuba and North Korea the doctrine has achieved its ultimate expression, that of tyrannical and self-perpetuating nepotism.

Terror, nothing but Terror

Amongst my other reading at present I’ve been working my way through Robert Conquest’s classic The Great Terror, an exploration of the Stalinist purge in Russia in the mid-1930s. I’ve reached the most terrible phase of that terrible part of the nation’s history, the so-called Yezhovchina, named after Nikolai Yezhov, then head of the NKVD, the Soviet security police.

It’s difficult to know how the nation was able to survive the ever growing spiral of denunciations, arrests and executions, embracing the whole of society, high and low, in and out. It’s difficult to know how people, ordinary people, could go to sleep at night, knowing that they might very well be visited by the secret police in the early hours of the morning, their favourite time. It’s difficult to know how Russia avoided a collective breakdown in the midst of this horror.

Here’s one story that caught my attention, a demonstration of the manic stupidity of the whole period, the kind of thing that emerged in the process of lunatic denunciations. It concerns one Sylakov, a deserter from the Red Army. He gave himself up in Kiev claiming that, for whatever reason, that he had been involved in an anti-Soviet plot. He told of a planned raid on a post office in which he had a leading part, intended to provide funds for a terrorist cell. This was not enough for the NKVD, so after a good kicking, he implicated the whole of his old military unit, right up to the commanding officer. The attacks planned were not now on a post office, no, but on government leaders.

Following this almost the whole of his unit was arrested, from the commanding officer right down to the drivers, wives included. Sylakov’s family were also drawn in, his two sisters, his father and his old and crippled mother. So, too, was an uncle, who had only ever met his nephew once. The said uncle was discovered to have served once as a corporal in the old Imperial Army, and was immediately promoted by the NKVD into a Tsarist general!

As with a rock thrown into a silent pool, the rings grew ever wider as this absurd tale progressed, embracing more and more, to the point that every cell in Kiev prison was occupied by someone implicated in the ‘Sylakov Plot.’ But no sooner had the intensity of the Terror slackened with the fall of Yezhov in late 1938 than the NKVD began to re-examine the whole case, now a complete embarrassment. The suspects were all interrogated again, with a view to getting them to withdraw their forced confessions. Some, fearing a trick, refused and had to be given another kicking, to get them to reject statements that carried the death sentence! Is there any greater madness than this?

Great Poster, Shame about the Man

Last year I saw Che, the two part biopic about aspects of the career of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, the Argentinean revolutionary and poster. Before that I saw The Motorcycle Diaries, which takes a view of his early life, his journey with a close friend from his home in Argentina to Peru, where he worked in a leper colony as a volunteer doctor. The latter was mildly entertaining; the former excruciatingly dull.

But it’s not these movies I really want to talk about; no, not the myth, rather the man, the nearest thing we have to a modern and secular saint. Indeed, I think he has acquired a semi-divine status among the local people in that part of Bolivia where he was executed in 1967. I cannot deny that Guevara was a good-looking man, one who made a great poster, eyes gazing into a million student bed-sits across the world. But look at the reality behind the image. What does one find? Why, just another repellent little thug who sought to pave the path to paradise with human skulls. Make no mistake, despite the worship he has been accorded, Guevara was a half-baked fanatic, a Marxist monster, who offered the usual substitution of tiresome abstractions for real people and real life. He was also a killer.

Soon after the overthrow of the Batista regime in 1959, Guevara organised the mass killings in Havana of former government supporters when he was commandant of La Cabaña fortress, with no attempt at any legal process. He wrote of this;

To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. … These are the procedures of the bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate. We must create the teaching of the Wall

He was also responsible for the establishment of the Cuban Labour Camp system, where children as young as fourteen were incarcerated and where thousands died. A special section of these camps was specifically dedicated to dealing with Cuba’s ‘gay problem.’ Under the guidance of Guevara, the regime imprisoned a higher proportion of the population than Stalin and killed more in its first three years than Hitler did in the six years before the outbreak of the Second World War. His contempt for human life was evidenced in a remark he made to a Cuban newspaper after the 1962 Missile Crisis that;

If the rockets had remained, we would have used them all and directed them against the very heart of the United States, including New York.

This icon of western liberals and muddle-heads was also against freedom of religion, of the press, as well as the right to assemble or protest, or anything else that was not compatible with his corrupted view of a Stalinist utopia. He was also an utter incompetent. As Finance Minister and President of the National Bank, positions for which he had absolutely no qualifications beyond his mouth, he earned the singular honour of all but destroying the Cuban economy, with his emphasis on the ‘new man’, one who would accept ‘moral’ for material incentives. Like so much else in his mind the ‘new man’ was no more than a ghost.

So, failing as a minister he trotted off around the world on a series of mad revolutionary adventures, where he proved himself no more competent as a soldier, totally lacking in military capacity and political vision. Never mind; he still made a great poster. It’s just a pity that Pol Pot was not just a little more handsome.

Please Release Me, Let Me Go

Imagine a man, if you will, indicted on a charge of mass murder, indicted on a charge of running a torture centre where thousands were imprisoned and thousands killed, even small children, a place from where only a dozen people emerged alive. Imagine still further that the accused freely admitted that he alone bore the direct responsibility for the loss of at least 12,380 lives. What kind of penalty do you think such a person could expect; death, perhaps, or life imprisonment? No, he expects to be released, or at least he has asked the court if it will release him, thank you very much.

This is no black comedy; this is a scene being played out before the tribunal set up in Cambodia to examine the atrocities committed in that country by the Khmer Rouge. The individual in question, one of the principal defendants, is Kaing Guek Eav, better known simply as Comrade Duch, who ran the Toul Sleng prison in Phnom Penn in the days of Pol Pot. I’ve been there; it’s a grim place, a place where mug shots of former inmates are fixed on the walls, staring out in a blank and expressionless fashion, a stare without hope.

Duch has continually expressed his regret for his past actions, though he now seems to believe that these actions carry no consequences. After all, these people, those who were tortured to death at Toul Sleng, did not matter when they were alive, why should they matter now they are dead? At the end of his summing up, two days after admitting his culpability, he said “I would ask the chamber to release me, thank you very much.” Just like that. Not quite believing what it had heard, the bench asked Duch’s lawyers to clarify, asking if it was a plea for acquittal. Yes, it was.

Listening to this in the public gallery was one Bou Meng, one of the few to survive Toul Sleng, whose wife died there. He stormed out of the court, outraged by this insult to his wife’s memory. Outside, Dara Chey, a student who lost four members of her family under the Pol Pot regime, said that she no longer believed Duch’s expressions of regret. Nor do I; his words are merely a perpetuation of his original crime.

Now sixty-seven years old, Duch will be sentenced next year. The prosecution has asked for a minimum of forty years imprisonment, which, if granted, means that he will never emerge alive. Unless, of course, the judges think that sorry is enough and that the dead really don’t matter.

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Keep Calm and Carry On

The fall of the Berlin Wall twenty years ago signalled the beginning of the end for communism across much of the world. When the flood was over the one major outpost left was China. Why? Was it simply because of the brute force show at in the Tiananmen Square Massacre? In part, yes, but mass killings did not save the vile Ceauşescu regime in Romania. The real answer lies in the collapse of a second wall, a wall built on lies and hypocrisy. China continues to be ruled by a corrupt and self-perpetuating oligarchy but communism, the ideology of communism, is long dead.

There was a point when the regime seemed to be about to lose the 'mandate of heaven'. The resignation of Erich Honecker, the colourless dictator of the old East German, in October 1989 was serious blow to the morale of the Chinese gerontocracy. It was Deng Xiaoping, the second Great Helmsman, who urged them to keep calm and carry on with reforms.

It was a subtle process, though, not at all like the Gorbachev programme in Russia, floundering on the promotion of idealism, on the gap between image and reality. The Chinese saw that disaster was like a tree refusing to give way to the wind: an ossified ideology, an entrenched an unimaginative elite and an inflexible party organisation all standing on top of a stagnant economy.

The Chinese would not have political liberty, but they would have economic liberty. They would, in other words, have capitalism. Walls came down, economic walls, the walls that had restricted and frustrated personal initiative. The paradox here is that, in China at least, it was capitalism that saved communism, or saved the Communist Party, to be more exact.

There are, as the Marxists would say, serious contradictions here, contradictions between economic liberalism and state authoritarianism. The Chinese establishment has adjusted very well to the new realities and the new riches that owe nothing at all to the official state religion. But how far this can continue it is difficult to say. How far, indeed, can economic liberalism continue without political liberalism? If China were beset be a serious economic crisis the structure of the state itself is likely to come under the closest of scrutiny rather than simply the policy of the government.

The oligarchs have kept calm and are carrying on in the fashion urged by Deng. But freedom, real freedom, still scares them. Walls have come down, yes, but firewalls have gone up.

Khrushchev contra Stalin

To begin with it should be noted that the whole speech was built on the oddest of paradoxes: a denunciation of Stalin's personality cult and authoritarian style by a man who had spent the three years since the dictator's death in undermining collective leadership, and establishing his own unparalleled power! By the time of the 20th Congress, in other words, Khrushchev’s political authority was almost as great as that previously enjoyed by Stalin.

Delegates at the Congress were given no advance warning of what to expect. Indeed, proceedings were opened by Khrushchev’s call for all to stand in memory of the Communist leaders who had died since the previous Congress, with Stalin being mentioned in the same breath as Klement Gottwald. Hints of a new direction only came out gradually over the next ten days, which must have left those present highly perplexed. On the 25 February, the very last day of the Congress, it was announced that an unscheduled secret session had been called for the Soviet delegates.

The speech itself began with vague references to the harmful consequences of elevating a single individual so high that he took on the "supernatural characteristics akin to those of a god." Khrushchev went on to say that such a mistake had been made about Stalin. He himself had been guilty of what was, in essence, a distortion of the basic principles of Marxism-Leninism. The attention of the audience was then drawn to Lenin's Testament, copies of which had been distributed, criticising Stalin's 'rudeness'. Further accusations, and hints of accusations, followed, including the suggestion that the murder of Sergey Kirov in 1934, the event that sparked of the Great Terror, could be included in the list of Stalin's crimes. While criticising the Man, Khrushchev carefully praised the Party, which had the strength to withstand all the negative effects of imaginary crimes and false accusations. The Party, in other words, had been a victim of Stalin, not an accessory to his crimes. He finished by calling on the Party to eradicate the cult of the personality and return to "the revolutionary fight for the transformation of society."

So, what were his motives? Was it really a call for a return to Leninist 'collective leadership' destroyed by Stalin? Well, here we have to remember that Lenin himself had only called for collective leadership in his final days, in the belief that no single individual was fit to follow in his singular path. Khrushchev himself, moreover, had, as I have said, effectively destroyed the new forms of collectivity that emerged after Stalin's death in 1953. In a sense, the Secret Speech was his own triumphal declaration, and he used it to undermine still further some senior Soviet politicians, including Georgy Malenkov and Kliment Voroshilov.

The implication was clear enough: he was innocent and the rest were guilty, though the simple truth was that he was just as bloody as any of the others. He was simply shifting the burden of responsibility. Exempting himself and blaming others: the whole speech was not about principles and ideals-it was about politics, and it was about power. Khrushchev had to demolish Stalin to establish his own imperium; Augustus had to give way to Tiberius. It may be of passing interest to make note of the fact that Stalin's portrait continued to hang in Khrushchev’s office long after 1956, as a kind of spiritual avatar. And those who took the speech at face value were soon to face the simple truth that the ideal was not reborn

Just Dictatorship

The notion of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat' is possibly one of the least well-defined concepts in the whole of the Marxist canon. In terms of concrete political practice this was to have a particularly serious impact, because it is also one of the most central.

The root cause of the problem is that Karl Marx himself wrote far more about Capitalism than he ever did about Communism. The 'dictatorship of the proletariat' is mentioned for the first time in rather vague terms in a letter of 1852, where he suggests that it will 'emerge' as the outcome of the ongoing class struggle. It was to take another twenty years before it had a second outing, this time in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, where Marx made essentially the same vague pronouncement: "...between capitalist and communist society lies the period of revolutionary transformation...Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat."

The problem this presented for those who followed was simply this: in what fashion or manner would this coercive use of political power lead to the second great element of Marxist eschatology-the 'withering away' of the state?

This core problem was to lead to some incredible intellectual contortions, with Karl Kautsky, the leading German Marxist thinker at the beginning of the twentieth century, suggesting that it simply meant 'majority rule', since the proletariat were the 'majority' of the people in advanced industrial societies. But the man who came closest to the truth was another German socialist, Edouard Bernstein, who argued that Marx had derived the concept from Auguste Blanqui, who in turn was looking back to the forms of dictatorship established during the First French Republic by Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety, which, in turn, harked back to the forms of emergency dictatorship established during the time of the ancient Roman Republic.

So, the concept, regardless of the setting, always had authoritarian roots. The best that can be said of it is that, in the manner of Kautsky, in advanced capitalist societies the dictatorship of the proletariat would replace the 'dictatorship of the bourgeoisie', achieving a higher form, in other words, of popular democracy. But what about less advanced societies like Russia, with an active Marxist intelligentsia and a relatively small urban working-class? We are now in the world of Leninism, of 'substitutionism', if you like, where the revolutionary vanguard stands in the place of the revolutionary worker.

For Lenin and his Bolshevik Party the working-class, left to its own devices, was only capable of lower forms of consciousness, usually centring on trade union struggles. The Russian Revolution of 1905 and 1917 might, indeed, be said to have established in the Soviets nascent forms of direct democracy, in contrast with 'bourgeois' parliamentary institutions, like the Duma and the later Constituent Assembly. But the Bolsheviks, in pursuit of their own revolutionary doctrines, were quick to seize complete control of the Soviets, removing all rival voices in the working-class movement, Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks alike. In the end the Soviets were no more than auxiliary agencies of the state, and the dictatorship of the proletariat no more than the outright dictatorship of the Communist Party; and the dictatorship of the Communist Party the dictatorship of one man. Bakunin and Bernstein were both absolutely correct

Remembrance of things Past

I was reading recently about the museum in Warsaw dedicated to the story of the city’s rising against the Nazi occupiers in 1944. It opened some five years ago and has proved massively popular with the Polish people, attracting a million and a half visitors so far, an attendance rate far higher that the other museums in the city.

This, and similar projects elsewhere across Eastern Europe, is part of a process of national rediscovery, a new awareness of past struggles in the light of present freedoms. For there was a time, and not so long ago, when so much of the past had to be ‘forgotten’ for reason of political survival, if no other. We tend to forget in the west that for many across the Continent May 1945 is noted not for the end of the war but the substitution of one occupation for another.

History across the east is a living presence, though not always a comfortable one. Václav Havel, the former president of the Czech Republic, has said that Europe will not be united until communism and fascism are recognised as a common legacy. That seems obvious to me though the attempts by the Lithuanians, Poles and other to draw an exact parallel between Nazism and Communism has met with resistance from sections of the Jewish community, who see the former as uniquely evil.

Ephraim Zuruff, an Israeli Nazi hunter, has denounced the campaign as the beginning of an attempt to rewrite the history of the Second World War in a way that will, as he puts it “whitewash the villains and dishonour the victims.” It’s not a view shared, though, by Stanislaw Krajewski, a Warsaw mathematics professor and Jewish community leader, who sees no problem in drawing a moral equivalence between Hitler and Stalin.

Neither do I, quite frankly. Yes, I accept that there are features to the Holocaust that allow it to stand as a historically unique event Even so, while the Communists did not discriminate in murder they still murdered, and on an unprecedented scale. Far more people, it has to be said, died under the sign of the hammer and sickle than the swastika.

There are truths that should not be hidden, no matter how inconvenient. The full significance of the Holocaust was blurred when the Communists had charge of Poland. The unique importance of the Holocaust should not now be used to gloss over the enormities of Stalin and all who followed in his shadow.