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Red Mist Descends
European communists have reacted with fury to the news that the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe has voted to formally condemn "the crimes of totalitarian communist regimes."The PACE issued a statement expressing "sympathy, understanding and recognition for the victims of these crimes" which it described as "massive human rights violations... including individual and collective assassinations and executions, death in concentration camps, starvation, deportations, torture, slave labour and other forms of mass physical terror." It called on communist parties in European states "to reassess the history of communism and their own past [ ] and condemn them without any ambiguity. Fat chance. Russian newspapers reacted predictably, with former Soviet mouthpiece Pravda describing it as a "ridiculous attempt to condemn communism." It also expressed unease over the prospect of Russian officers being categorised as no different from members of the Nazi SS. Russian MPs on the assembly warned that Moscow was opposed to a condemnation. Russian opposition to the statement is only to be expected: After all, this is a nation where around 50 percent of the population profess an admiration for Stalin and close to that number admit that having a similarly tough guy around might do their country some good. However, the antics of western socialists and communists are more shameful. The vote, which passed by 99 to 42 (with 12 abstaining), was ferociously opposed by western leftists. Spain's supposedly moderate socialists opposed the resolution, while the absurd Belgian Communist Party described it as ""a violent attack on history, present and future of communism." Various Greek factions condemned the resolution as "neo McCarthyism" and, laughably, "persecution." French Communists attempted to throw the Holocaust into the debate, arguing that to compare the horrors of Hitler's Nazis to what they must imagine to be the benign and gentle acts of their heroes "banalises the Holocaust." They added that the resolution ignored the role of Communists in fighting fascism. Other Communists in France complained that the vote was a capitalist ploy, consigning Communism to the graveyard of history of closing off any alternative to liberalism. The vote was a belated attempt to recognise the 100 million who have died at the hands of Communist regimes, including over 20 million in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Its sponsor, Sweden's Goran Lindblad, also proposed a memorial day to remember those who were killed by Communist regimes, though this resolution failed to reach the required two-thirds majority. Posted by: Anonymoose 2006-01-27 |
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