| One of my friends from the party is an extremely intelligent insightful doctor of law who grew up in Poland under the Soviets. He’s quite well known for a blog that has had quite a bit of exposure in Australian and foreign press and has published a book. Recently, he posted some articles on Facebook and wrote on another site about the 70th Anniversary of World War II in Poland, and how it was extremely poorly attended by world leaders and how Russia is still coming to grips with the USSR’s involvement in the start of the war. The fact that Russia had still not come to grips with it’s oppressive Soviets were is worring. But furthermore I think the whole world is yet to come to grips with it.
Classic example if I wore a t-shirt with the following image, or even the image on his arm band, I would probably get thrown out of most places and potentially prosecuted depending on my location:
However if I wore a t-shirt with any of the following images, it would be fine:
In fact I had my doubts that I could find a Tshirt with Stalin on it, but low and behold they are freely available on several websites. Which is more than I can say for anything at all under Stalin's rule (the freely availible bit not the website bit).
I will also make an aside here, that I will use the terms Communist and Socialist interchangeably. This is not because I do not distinguish between people who label themselves Communists and people who like to think they are not as extreme and call themselves Socialists. It is because I’ve actually flipped through some of Marx’s works and find that he uses the terms interchangeably.
After first thinking about this I stopped at Dymocks in Sydney as I had a long weekend by myself in a hotel room when on crutches and picked up a couple of books on the Soviet era, including Gulag by Anne Applebaum. (I blogged a bit about it on the 17 Sept as well). My friend also recommended this book after I had mentioned that I wanted to read up some more and didn’t want to end up with a piece of left-wing rubbish that actually supported the Soviets.
I have made my way through the introduction of the book and I am already astounded. Stalin killed more people just in the Ukraine than Hitler did Jews! And Stalin also killed Jews in the Gulag after he had run out of other groups to persecute. Worse than this, only insane people dispute the Holocaust, but until the 1980’s scholars disputed what went on in the Gulag as fabrications by those who had a political agenda to pursue. This is an outrageous point of view, especially as they would have to then take the side of the Soviet government who had more of a political point to make! The time that these concentration camps existed and their severity are amazing, there has never been and I doubt that there ever will be anything like it again.
The world has moved on, sadly, not just from the cold war, but also from World War II if the poor attendance at the Polish 70th Anniversary is anything to go by. It is sad because it was the last time that we really had to stand up and fight for freedom and self-determination. Most of Europe came so close to being ruled by dictators. As we move away from these events Western Society seems to favour more authoritarian approaches to government. This does not just scare me, but many others who believe in free society with good civil liberties.
One thing that I did in High School, that I would like to see become compulsory, is setting of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s works as texts. The final unit that I did in English was to look at foreign literature and I chose A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It was a pretty powerful novel, describing what seemed like the most dreadful day in prison as a ‘good day’ for Denisovich.
Furthermore, I keep thinking, “what on earth are we doing having such close ties with China?” Sure they are a good trade partner, but they really do treat their people appallingly. They can’t vote, they have no control over where they live or even how many children they have (forced abortions still happen in China as per the following 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). On top of this China still has work camps, and people are interred, not for being criminals, but for people potentially undesirable. Most of us who have been through a CBD any time in the last few years would know about this as there are often stalls with people trying to raise awareness about the cruel and inhumane treatment of people in these camps. On top of this anyone who watched the news during the lead up to the Olympics, would have realized, as I did that there seem to be many pro-Chinese nationalist agitators in Australia. I hope that they are mostly students who will not stay here long term as the last thing that we want in a country who has accepted refugees from a Communist state is to have people who support the state over here. Despite the appearance of free trade, China is bad news and we should not turn a blind eye to how they treat their people, their intent to expand their territory into sovereign nations such as Nepaal and Taiwan or that they are trying to propagate socialist ideas in free and democratic countries. And as far as cheap labor and massive populations that are a good market for our trade interests, why on earth are we not looking to the world’s biggest democracy, the increasingly developed India?
Needless to say I am sure that I will write again soon before I finish Gulag but even at the beginning there are so many questions we need to ask ourselves about how we view Soviet Russia and their successors such as China. |
