The Aged P

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Archive for the 'Communism' Category

You Remember That Russian Officer Who Threatened Us In Budapest In 1956? Well He’s Back!!!

 

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He’s back –that strutting Russian officer, with his bullying sidekicks, last seen in Budapest in 1956, is now in Ukraine and doing exactly the same. Of course, as in Hungary, he would claim that he has been “invited” in to defend the country against Fascist mobs but it’s all lies. He’s there because Ukrainians have dared to aspire to glance westward rather than remain a supplicant of Moscow.

In 1956 realpolitik dictated that we stood by as the Russian tanks moved into Hungary to crush the uprising – but we did have the good grace to weep for those brave freedom fighters as they were imprisoned and tortured and executed by the grim legions of Soviet terror. Indeed, throughout the west those tears were followed by a sense of shame and guilt that we just watched as they drowned.

But in 2014 there are few tears and little, if any, sense of shame. The liberal left is mute, as always in the face of Russian aggression, incensed, no doubt that the Ukrainian protestors should dare to go around toppling statues of Lenin. But what is far worse is the attitude on the right. “Russian sphere of interest” is the current weasel phrase. Until a couple of decades ago Ukraine had been a colony of the Russian Empire for centuries, we hear from many “conservatives”, so what else should they expect if they annoy Moscow. It’s like getting an axe buried in your head in the East End in 1960 because you had a few beers too many and started badmouthing the Krays – you deserved it because you were STUPID….

Or, if “armed men” are swaggering around Crimea pulling down Ukrainian flags well isn’t that the same as what happened in Kiev?

Actually – no. Power didn’t shift in Kiev because the demonstrators, armed to the teeth with assault weapons, stormed into parliament and arrested President Viktor Yanukovych and his ministers. There was violence and there were bullets and scores of people killed and wounded. But the shootings were ordered by Yanukovych and the violence instigated by his security apparatus – and when the bullets failed to intimidate the crowds his authority just melted away just as it did in Petrograd in 1917 and Tehran in 1979. The government disintegrated and the police disappeared from the streets.

There was no putsch – just a power vacuum that the anti Yanukovych elements began to fill.

Still the myth of an armed insurrection has grown legs, conveniently reinforced by the Russians with references to gangsters, neo Nazis and anti-Semites. Standard agitprop in the best soviet mould, naturally and total bullshit. But the essence of the tragedy is not Putin’s lies – as a former KGB hack it came with his mother’s milk.

The most shocking aspect of the whole affair is how so many on the right are gloating over Putin’s actions. He has become, with his anti gay and anti Islamic rhetoric the antithesis to the gelded softness of the western elite. He rides a horse, Obama rides a golf cart. He hunts animals, Cameron strokes them. He vows vengeance against Islamic terrorists, the BBC worries about Islamophobia.

Our emasculated, feminised and over sentimental me-me-me society makes many of us uneasy. But a corrupt self serving regime led by a posturing bully like Putin who feeds on grievance is no substitute for the rule of law.

Realpolitik once again demands that there is little we can do to protect Ukraine from Putin’s bullying. But for crying out loud don’t bolster the man’s ego by gleefully supporting Russia’s right to strut imperiously into anywhere that once fell under the writ of tsar or commissar.

You would have thought that we had learned that lesson with that other gangster in in 1938.

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North Korea Is Not A “Mafia State”, It Is A Communist/Marxist State

The dramatic exit of Jang Song-thaek, the uncle of North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un, has an almost Shakespearean flavour about it. Hauled out of a meeting of leadership cadres, dragged into court, found guilty and executed within the hour it would make great theatre at Stratford.

One could even picture Richard Branagh, as the Kim’s right hand man, declaiming those brutal accusations in court before Uncle Jang waited, quivering with fear as he felt the cold muzzle of the executioner’s gun against his temple.

“Despicable human scum Jang, who was worse than a dog, perpetrated thrice-cursed acts of treachery in betrayal of such profound trust and warmest paternal love shown by the party and the leader for him,”

We are told he has been airbrushed out of North Korean history and no doubt his family and staff are already shivering in their cells awaiting a similar fate.

Tim Stanley excuses the whole pantomime as yet another example of fratricide in a mafia state, likening the Workers Party to Cosa Nostra.

He is wrong.

North Korea with its gulags, famines, police repression and cowed populace is a classic Marxist state ruled by an elite which sees itself as a vanguard constructing a society of new humans, purged of all the detritus of the old times. Mo0dern Marxists would publicly disagree but be assured in private every one of them would dearly love to see our country governed in the same way where over two or three generations the slate could be wiped clean ready for the emergence of a “purer” society.
So let’s be clear about this and call a spade a spade. North Korea is not a socialist state that has lost its way. To call it a mafia state is using weasel words as a distraction.

North Korea is the ultimate Marxist state. It’s the full flowering of Communism.

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Sorry, Ed…As A Marxist Ralph Miliband Wanted To Create Soviet Britain

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UK Labour Party leader Ed Miliband is angry because the Daily Mail drew attention to his father’s Marxist views. I think Benedict Brogan hits the nail on the head…

But the key point surely is that Marxism hated – hates – Britain. It hates our institutions, our economic model, our democracy, our independent media and our freedoms. And before the Marxists and their chums lost the argument, it wasn’t just some academic debate played out around the dining tables in well-heeled north London neighbourhoods: it was deadly serious. Yes, there is something distasteful about trashing a dead man’s reputation, and by the same token something noble about the way Mr Miliband and other politicians have risen to his defence. But Ralph Miliband, however well intentioned, was on the side of those who wanted to turn Britain into something dreadful. It is a testament to how comprehensive the defeat of Marxism has proved to be that the Cold War is all but forgotten, and our politics are repulsed by its harsh truths.

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New President Of China Hails A Taxi…..Too Good To be True – And It Wasn’t….LOL..

So the great Xi Jinping taxi story (new President of China jumps into a cab to show he’s just an ordinary bloke) proved to be a hoax…..

Red faced media big cheeses in China issued grovelling apologies and, natch, airbrushed the original story from their sites.

But one of the reasons the hoax gained legs was because it sounded exactly like the type of fairy story fantasy “man of the people” pumped out by the agitprop churners of every party based dictatorship.

Beloved Leader “suddenly” decides to leave office, go out onto the street and hail a taxi. A few minutes later the cab deposits said leader outside his humble abode where Mrs Leader is in the midst of cooking noodles…..and, astonishingly, media hacks are present throughout the whole journey.

Fact is these characters are as distant from the great unwashed as any medieval monarch. China, Cuba, North Korea and the jolly old USSR – any communist regime – is based on dynastic rivalries not on any truly democratic process. The party is a divine vanguard whose members know the needs of ordinary people much better than the ordinary people themselves. But, because they claim to rule in the name of the masses, unlike a medieval king whose power came from a hotline to heaven, They have to pretend to be “just like us”…..

Maybe next time his PR guys should suggest a swim……

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What Would Erika Have Said If She Was Still Alive?

 

 

This is, or was, Erika. She was a young student who was a real revolutionary. She and thousands of other brave Hungarians came out onto the streets of Budapest in 1956 to demonstrate against the communists who ran the puppet regime that governed Hungary on behalf of the Russian Soviet Union. She holds a gun because the regime’s secret police tried to break the demonstrations. When the Russian Red Army, flying the hammer and sickle flag carried by Romany Blythe, moved in to crush the uprising, Erika and her friends fought against their tanks with rifles, sub machine guns and petrol bombs.

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They failed.

The Red Army’s hammer and sickle was triumphant and a new puppet communist regime brought back the secret police, the execution blocks and the prison camps. Erika was dead, killed in the last hours of the fighting while trying to help her wounded comrades. The dead hand of communist dictatorship gripped Hungary and the rest of Eastern Europe once again.

Western governments accepted the iron grip of Communism in Eastern Europe and Russia as a fact of life to be accommodated. Many voices in western academic and cultural circles, being of a Marxist bent, celebrated it.

Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were the first western leaders to publicly denounce those communist regimes as evil and oppressive and, by implication, illegitimate. At a time when internal stresses and strains were beginning to distort the social and economic fabric of these tyrannies the impact of external condemnation from such influential voices were important factors in causing the red regimes to implode.

And in October 1989, 33 years after the uprising, Hungary became a free multi party democracy. How sad that Erika could not have been in the crowds celebrating that moment but, no doubt ,her spirit, and those of all those other courageous freedom fighters who died with her, was smiling down from above.

What would Erika have made of Romany Blythe’s theatrical posturing and ghoulish disrespect of Margaret Thatcher?

Not much, I suspect.

Probably with as much contempt as Lech Walesa and those of his Solidarity comrades who had welcomed her to Gdansk in 1988 when it was still under communist rule.

Those on the Left who still probably regard Thatcher as a hate-figure, have either forgotten the history of the Cold War or possibly never understood that Communism meant the virtual enslavement of millions of people in the East European countries, who loathed its ideology as much as Margaret Thatcher herself. It is simply not possible to imagine Thatcher visiting Russia in the 1930s, like certain Left-wing useful idiots from Britain, and being taken in by Stalin’s propaganda machine. Ordinary East Europeans took a different view of her to her critics in this country. For them she symbolised opposition to Communism; indeed she was given a tumultuous welcome by the shipyard workers in Gdansk when she visited them. She wept at the sight. The shipyard workers would have been puzzled to learn of the refusal of Oxford University, her old alma mater and one of the most prestigious universities in the world, to give her an honorary degree.

Amen to that, say I – and I am sure the spirit of Erika would agree….

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Does This 1938 French Political Cartoon Foretell The USA Under President Fluke?

The Stalinists are here, says Dan Riehl, referring to Think Progress and their latest antics in the left’s Tucsonesque Rush Limbaugh/Sandra Fluke blitzkrieg.

There is no real difference between today’s un-American U.S.-based left and regimes such as Stalin’s – only they don’t quite yet have enough power. But they are busy aquiring it. You’re kidding yourself if you think otherwise. These are very dangerous people that need to be defeated for an America anything like how Conservatives view her to survive.

Sandra Fluke, a professional agitator, has become the poster girl of the left and the left supported President Obama and his administration. She appears to be a humourless, single-minded apparatchik, ruthless and intolerant of those with opposing views. Nevertheless it would be unwise to underestimate this woman. She is intelligent and has a superb feel for any political opportunity. She will no longer operate in the political shadows. She, and many like her, is the future of the Stalinist left.

You see the thing about Stalinists (or Marxists, as they should be called since the key element of Marx’s Communist version of socialism was the need for a dictatorship of the revolutionary elite) is that they are quite content to use the arena of freedom provided by parliamentary democracy to further their cause and impugn their political rivals. But once they have power that arena of free debate and discussion is dismantled and we enter the dark world of Orwell’s 1984 where it is no longer sufficient to withdraw from political activity and remain silent. Stalinists require that everyone publicly celebrates and praises the regime however degraded their circumstances.

As is often the case art can encapsulate the essence of this essential truth (largely ignored/forgotten by a complicit media that constantly revisits Hitler, Franco, Pinochet and other non Marxist authoritarian regimes)….so maybe this 1938 French political cartoon could give us a glimpse of the USA in 2037 at the beginning of President Fluke’s second term….

French anti stalinist cartoon 1938

French anti stalinist cartoon 1938

BTW….The sign reads “We are very happy”

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Syria’s Assad Is Putin’s Kind Of Guy…You Shoot Them Down, Bashar, Vladimir Will Supply The Bullets…

Of course Putin ordered the UN resolution on Syria to be vetoed. Bashar al-Assad is his kind of guy…after Putin was once a KGB operative, a member of the old Soviet secret police force tasked with smashing any hint of free speech and thought in the old USSR.

He also wants to hang on to those warm water facilities at Tartus.

Remember this photo taken of Russian soldiers in Budapest in 1956? They were in the process of restoring Hungary’s chains.

Crushing dissent with brutal violence is wired into his DNA.

Keep firing at those protestors, Bashar…you’ll never run out of ammunition while Vladimir’s around…

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You Knew It Had To Come…..”Margaret Thatcher Should Be Sentenced To Death For Mass Murder”

It’s inevitable. Mention Thatcher (or Palin or Bush or Blair) and the looney tunes pour out of the sewers.

So stand aside Stalin with your NKVD killing squads and your gulag. Get to the back Mao and your famines and Red Guards. Ignore Hitler’s SS and death camps. Forget Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge killing fields.

There’s a new mass murderer in town.

Margaret Thatcher.

That’s right. Elizabeth Farrelly’s snarky little memoir of her brief sojourn in London at the height of the “Thatcher Regime” smoked out a comment which referenced one Paul Treanor, a passionate opponent of the nation state and crusader for collectivism who uses Russian statistics to “prove” that free market economies shorten life expectancy and since Thatcher’s free market ideas were copied by countries all over the world she is clearly directly responsible for mass murder.

If the free market has caused about one-third of all deaths, in market economies, over the entire period of their existence, then the market has killed hundreds of millions of people. More than all wars, and more than the impact of a one-kilometre meteorite

Treanor believes that Thatcher should be tried and sentenced by a special tribunal and, naturally, there could only be one outcome.

A European Tribunal for Thatcher would be a sign, that Europe intends to remedy this defect of the British nation state. Such a tribunal should have the power to apply the death penalty, the most appropriate penalty for mass murder.

Of course, being a tankie, Treanor would be quite familiar with tribunals imposing death penalties. He would also assume that statistics published by the Soviet Union were totally honest, though others might disagree. But the true significance of his ill constructed ramblings has nothing to do with facts and figures or with constructing a case.

It is about the construction of a narrative. A narrative which aims to sabotage the argument for individual responsibility and limited government that underpinned Thatcher’s policies – for what worried the collectivist consensus was her popular appeal and the impact her electoral successes had on subsequent political generations.

So the counter myth of brutal Thatcher capitalism gained currency in those elite circles that had the most to lose from the decline in state power – the cartels….the bureaucrats, the academics, the planners and the pressure groups who all depend on the public teat for their well financed comforts.

Treanor’s looney tunes ramblings are merely a useful tool to justify their convictions – and in today’s climate it is more than likely that some BBC documentary maker or Hollywood producer could use them as the basis for a smooth piece of Michael Moore style agitprop that would mainstream the concept of Thatcher and her free market ideas as the willing agents of the grim reaper.

They wouldn’t deny the slaughters of Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot, they would merely slip her into the discourse using the sly concept of equivalence.

The Stasi support group GRH are only the tip of an iceberg, comrades….

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Why There Is No “Occupy Pyongyang” Movement

h/t GlobalSecurity Org

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“Child 44” – A Chilling Snapshot Of The Marxist Nightmare That Was Stalin’s Russia

Since the eruption of the banking crisis in 2008 and the justifiable public anger in the UK & USA at the amount of taxpayers money that had to be pumped into the subsequent bailouts there has been a marked revival of anti-capitalist, class war rhetoric and a renewed interest in the ideas of Karl Marx.

At the same time the bombastic posturing of the former KGB agent Vladimir Putin who now rules Russia with the help of a gang of vindictive and sticky fingered ex secret policemen seeks to restore the reputation of that archetypal left wing dictator Josef Stalin who spent thirty years claiming to have constructed the world’s very first perfect socialist where all men were equal and where all the means of production were controlled by the workers themselves – or rather, since it would be impossible to run a business dependent on the fluctuating wishes of the masses – controlled by the officials of the Communist Party claiming only they knew the “true” wishes and feelings of the working classes.

Russia and communism are both getting a big media makeover.

Which is why every sane man and woman in the west should read “Child 44” by Tim Rob Smith

Read it and realise the true nature of Russia in the 1930s and early 50s, the society that lay behind the Five Year Plans and People’s Arts festivals and the edifice of lies and hypocrisy that was shored up by the Bolshevik hacks and their brutal enforcers – and the useful idiots in the west who fell hook line and sinker for the whole sham.

It is essentially a crime novel in the police procedural mould, a hunt for a serial killer of children in Russia during the 1940s and early 50s during the latter years of the Stalin regime. Or rather the non hunt because the Communists claimed to have created a new kind of society where poverty and greed had been abolished and therefore crime no longer existed. If crimes were committed they were deliberate anti Soviet counter revolutionary acts, political crimes – therefore almost all policing resources were poured into the political police, the NKVD /MVD. Everyday policing was left to the underfunded and despised Militia. It followed that if an act could not be considered a political crime then it just drifted under the radar.

The novel is about an up and coming NKVD officer who upsets his bosses because he wants to track down a serial killer. He continues this obsession even after he is transferred to a dead end Militia placement.

It is a cold story set against the background of the moral vacuum of Soviet Russia where the only imperative is to survive the dead weight of an oppressive and secretive regime. There are disturbing snapshots of the darkness within the NKVD/MVD – one of the most chilling moments is the description of NKVD “specialists” (i.e.torturers) leaving the Lubianka at the end of their shift, going home to their families after a day of breaking bones and smashing bodies as if they were office commuters.
Read it if you can – then keep it burned in your memory next time you see somebody waving a hammer and sickle claiming to represent “the workers” – or watch Putin posturing on a Russian TV clip….

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posted by david in Books,Communism,Criminals,History,Law,Russia and have Comments Off on “Child 44” – A Chilling Snapshot Of The Marxist Nightmare That Was Stalin’s Russia
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