Executive Director Scott Hargreaves writes A Memorial to Victims of Communism in his weekly newsletter to members.
The IPA has taken some steps towards having the Victims of Communism Day recognised in Australia (and not just at the IPA!). My work will be done when students have the opportunity to commemorate it in schools, even if only in the context of ‘compare and contrast’ with Nazism, its mirror-image of totalitarian genocidal madness.
In the November 2022 IPA Review, you will find an article by David Cragg on communism’s death toll (100 million), why we should mark Victims of Communism Day, and why the forces of freedom need to be much more active in opposing modern-day communist thought and political organisations.
You may or may not be surprised to learn that David is a life member of the ALP and a trustee of the Victorian Trades Hall & Literary Institute. He cut his teeth in the Cold War era when anti-communists of the labour movement formed coalitions with conservatives and liberals opposed to the communist ideology and associated geopolitical threat. He, and the legacy of that coalition, have much to teach today’s defenders of freedom.
You will also see a remarkable illustration we commissioned from legendary cartoonist and artist, John Spooner. John has prepared what you might call a study for a Victims of Communism memorial that could be built in Australia. It is something that could actually be built near the other important memorials in Canberra. Or perhaps it could be strategically placed opposite the embassy of the People’s Republic of China?
Here is a sneak preview:
It seems to me young Australians need educating – and older Australians need reminding – of communism’s bloody record during the 20th century, and the continuing horrors of life under today’s Marxist regimes. This is not the time to explain at length why the Marxist ideology is inseparable from the Leninist and Maoist violence and genocide it practices – but it is.
You can’t find a T-shirt featuring Hermann Goering in the Amazon Store but you will find multiple versions of a Che Guevara T-shirt. Even though, as his biographer has noted, the Cuban revolutionary communist once in power ‘promoted book burning and signed death warrants for authors who disagreed with him’ (to name but one item on his charge-sheet).
Just a few years ago, a NSW union official and ALP pre-selection candidate was happy to show on his Facebook page a photo of him wearing a Lenin t-shirt, with the hashtag ‘#revolution1917’. He was by no means embarrassed about it. Perhaps not surprisingly, he was an official with the Australian Education Union.
Physical memorials are a great weapon in the battle of memory over forgetting. Some have already done it. When I visited Washington DC in 2018, I was able to view the Victims of Communism Memorial designed by Thomas Marsh and dedicated to ‘the more than one hundred million victims of communism’. The centrepiece is a three-metre bronze replica of the Goddess of Democracy, erected by students during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. The goddess carries the torch of freedom, which would be uplifting, if we did not know the history of what happened to the brave men and women whose protest was crushed by the Chinese Communist Party.
John Spooner’s memorial is in a different register. The victims are literally bearing the weight of what looks like a corpse in the manner of a Che-like revolutionary; or the load of, to use John Spooner’s words: the ‘decaying tyrant’s ideology’. For me, no one standing in front of it could deny its truth. It is magnificent. In his very thoughtful article David Cragg explains:
The reason to remember man-made atrocities has been put simply and eloquently by Jewish communities around the world to explain why they commemorate the Holocaust: ‘never again’. All of us would be well advised to join our local Jewish community in remembering the insane horror of the Nazi genocide, and to consider in the same breath the other ideological source of inhumanity throughout the 20th century, Marxism-Leninism – even as its cruelty continues today in some parts of the world.
DC is also the home of the memorial to the Holodomor, the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s that Anne Applebaum definitively established could only be the consequence of the deliberate policy of the Soviet communist state. David gives the critical context:
The Soviets spent 20 years demonising and then physically exterminating a class enemy, the ‘kulak’ (wealthy peasant), primarily in Ukraine. Historians and agrarian economists since then cannot agree that the ‘kulak’ ever really existed in any meaningful sense – but that did not stop a generation of urban Young Communists (Komsomol) from showing their toughness, backed by Red Army bayonets, in field excursions to confiscate all food found in rural villages.
Recommended Reading:
This 1999 international bestseller draws on archives from the former Soviet bloc to uncover the practical outcomes of Communism across the globe: terror, torture, famine, mass deportations, and massacres. In a strikingly detailed account, the book offers a comprehensive effort to document and analyze the crimes of Communism.
