Tuesday, January 11, 2005

BRUTAL MASS MURDERERS ARE CORRECT

Turning communist tyrants into chic motifs of popular culture mocks their victims, writes Louis Nowra, from Sydney, Australia.

Each morning when I go to collect my mail I pass a new plaque on the footpath of Darlinghurst Road. I do not recognise the name of the man who is celebrated but he is proudly called a "communist". Imagine the outcry if the plaque read "fascist". What is disturbing to me is how being a communist continues to be seen as a badge of honour rather than a stigma it should be.

A popular movie showing at the moment is The Motorcycle Diaries, a romanticised portrait of the revolutionary Che Guevara before he became a communist. He is shown as handsome, sensitive and caring. There is no hint of the vicious-minded hoodlum he would become. When he came to power in Cuba as Castro's right-hand man, Che advocated the extermination of ideological enemies, ordered the incarceration and torture of many people and actively promoted terrorism. Thankfully, he was killed in Bolivia before he had a chance to add to his contribution to mass murder. Yet I see people in Sydney streets wearing his image on T-shirts or posters of him on shop walls as if he were the epitome of chic. The equivalent would be to enjoy a film about the pre-political youthful shenanigans of Nazis such as Goebbels or Goering.

Australians who were communists have seldom had to deal with society's moral opprobrium. There are always excuses. Their beliefs and actions are seen as youthful idealism or harmless japes. Then there are novelists such as Frank Hardy who, in a sentimental piece of codswallop, The Dead Are Many, ennobled communists as the moral lightning rod of Australian society. In a seminal overview of Australian communism, The Reds, the left-wing historian and hectoring polemicist Stuart Macintyre is enormously forgiving of its trespasses. It is forgotten that Australian communists fully supported Stalin's mass purges, which resulted in the deaths of untold millions. There are those who say that these Australians didn't know of the horrors that were being committed. That is balderdash. Astute visitors to the Soviet Union in the 1920s reported the truth.

After 1945 the Communist Party of Australia and its followers turned a blind eye to mass murders and torture in the new communist states. I don't know of any Australian communists who ever thought they were morally culpable for that. They were quite willing to talk of the brutality of fascism but seldom, if ever, faced the reality that their own creed jointly contributed to the horrors of the 20th century. This was brought home to me recently during interviews with former communists for a documentary. Not one was ashamed or even a little embarrassed about their party past. Not one said: "We were ideological thugs." The writers Dorothy Hewett and Bob Herbert recounted having to face tribunals that vetted their work and ordered them to rewrite it in accordance with "social realist principles". Don't think for a moment that those Australian bullies wouldn't have acted in the same way as Stalin if communists had come to power here.

And what of Australian Maoists? When I was at university in the early 1970s, these supposedly intelligent men and women not only supported Mao, who any sensible person knew was a murderer on a scale not seen since Hitler and Stalin, but called anyone who disagreed with them a fascist. If Che is regarded as chic, monstrous Mao is seen as kitsch and his image crops up on badges and as a beaming Buddha-like face in paintings and even on curtains. Again, imagine if Hitler or the swastika were used.

The net server BigPond's latest ad campaign has the headline "Join the Revolution" with a picture of an avuncular and "cool" Lenin. The empty-headed copywriters don't seem to realise that the Russian tyrant had hundreds of thousands of people put to death and founded the secret police which instigated a reign of terror that was to murder millions.

Last year I went to a museum in Budapest called The House of Terror. It is in a building used by fascists in World War II for interrogation and torture. After the war, the communist secret police appropriated it and proved themselves even more murderous and cruel. Every dismal room is testimony to the bloody brutality of communism. I recommend a visit to those who think of communism and its practitioners as benign, funny and hip.

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DOGGY CORRECTNESS

More tools for bureaucratic harassment

San Francisco is considering steps to make sure its dogs are well cared for. The Board of Supervisors will vote Thursday on a proposed law setting minimum creature comforts for the more than 100,000 dogs that live in the city. The ordinance would regulate the nutritional quality of food fed to dogs, how water is served and specific requirements for dog shelters. For example, water would have to be served in a non-tipping bowl. Dog houses would have to have a raised floor and dry, clean bedding that's appropriate for the weather. The ordinance is expected to be approved.

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