07) COLD-WAR THROWBACK CONTINUES TO GATHER PUBLIC CRITICISM
By Johan Boyden
As the Harper Conservative government keeps up its drive to build a “Victims of Communism” memorial on Parliament Hill, this already controversial project continues to gather widespread public criticism. It seems as if not just the communists are saying: why don’t we build a monument to the victims of capitalism instead?
Last fall, the Ottawa Raging Grannies took on the so-called memorial, setting up an alternative monument to “all victims ‘thrown under the bus’ by the Harper government” with the hope that “it might inspire abandonment of the Harper government’s plan for a Monument to the Victims of Communism,” they said in a release.
The alternative monument took the shape of a bus driven by Harper with an “Out of Service” sign on the front. Little feet extended from under it, with toe tags identifying them as Harper’s targets, including Aboriginal women, democratic rights, environmental protection, the CBC, Veterans, and many others.
Canadian citizens “have also fled from Nazism, Fascism, religious extremism, dictatorships, and military juntas,” they said, calling Harper’s monument “pandering [...] for political purposes.” The Raging Grannies, who dress up in outrageous hats, long skirts and shawls covered in political buttons, are well known for their satirical songs.
Then in January, Scott Vrooman, a young comedian who has appeared on This Hour has 22 Minutes, Conan, and writes for the Huffington Post, called the monument an example of “selective empathy.”
Writing in Rabble.ca Vrooman said that, “To take one of many examples, a million of the people listed are Vietnamese. For each one of those deaths, seven tons of non-communist bombs were dropped by American planes during the Vietnam War. Those ones should at least have an asterisks in the shape of Henry Kissinger's head.”
This year marks the 40th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam war. The victory of the national liberation forces ended a series of US bombing campaigns which saw three times more ordnance dropped than during the Second World War, over Laos, Cambodia and north and south Vietnam. Kissinger acted as a key US advisor in the war.
Vrooman added, “shouldn't we prioritize the deaths of innocent people the Government of Canada was complicit in?”
Massive problem
But comedians and the Grannies aren’t the monument’s only vocal opponents. On Jan. 21, the Ottawa Citizen revealed that the board of directors of Ottawa’s National Capital Commission (the crown corporation administering federal lands in Ottawa and Gatineau) had overruled its own advisory committee’s objections to the monument.
According to the Citizen, the NCC committee on planning, design and realty “judged the location totally inappropriate,” and “didn’t think much of the winning design.” At least one of the seven member jury evaluating designs had a “massive problem” with the proposal.
Shirley Blumberg, a prominent Toronto architect, member of the Order of Canada, and part of the NCC’s jury, even called the chosen location - directly in front of the Supreme Court - “so centrally placed that it would seem to quite overshadow Canada’s true history,” and noted that it would cost at least two or three times the estimated $5.5 million to build.
Tribute to what?
The vast majority of those funds - $4 million - will come from the public purse. Apparently, individual and corporate donations just haven’t raised enough. Donors include the likes of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Jason Kenney, director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation Gregory Thomas, and Tory Senator Linda Frum.
(Senator Frum can perhaps be forgiven for only hosting a few fundraisers at her private mansion. She is also busy raising money for the Stephen Harper Bird Sanctuary in Hula Valley, Israel - land that, as the Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East note, was ethnically cleansed of its Palestinian communities.)
While the Liberal, NDP and Green leaders have all jumped on this bandwagon, most of the money raised by the glibly named “Tribute To Liberty” charity appears to be from far-right nationalist groups within the Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and Polish communities in Canada.
Even Lech Kaczynski, former Polish President, has sent Tribute to Liberty a letter of endorsement which they proudly display on their website. Under the leadership of Kaczynski’s brother and his Law and Justice Party, Poland made it illegal to possess, purchase or distribute items or recordings containing communist symbols.
Those having a Hammer and Sickle or a Red Star could face fines or imprisoned for up to two years. This law, as well as Law and Justice’s open homophobia, has garnered widespread international condemnation.
In fact, scratch below the surface of this monument and you will find a crude attempt to equate communism with fascism, and excuse fascist crimes. Nationalist Ukrainian-Canadian newspaper The Echo has been fundraising for the monument by showing “The Soviet Story,” a film which plays fast and loose with the truth to claim the USSR’s role in WW2, and the Soviet liberation of eastern and parts of central Europe, was the same as Nazi occupation and holocaust.
“Tribute to Liberty,” The Echo reports, “is an enthusiastic supporter of “The Soviet Story.” Nevermind that this January actually marked the 70th anniversary of the Red Army’s liberation of Auschwitz.
To back up their truly wild claim that communism in the 20th century killed 100 million people, the Monument supporters’ only source is a French text called The Black Book of Communism. They add without documentation almost two million from Africa, and finally drop in an extra five million out of nowhere to bring the number up to a hundred million.
As the Communist Party of Canada has pointed out, this figure also “includes the estimated 25 million Soviet citizens who perished at the hands of the Nazi invaders during World War II, defending their homeland, fighting heroically as allies of Canada.”
On this basis a giant publically-funded monument is being erected in Ottawa.
Apologizing for Fascism
The Black Book has been widely discredited as an attempt to link nazism with communism - and for its bad research. As Michael Parenti says, “To be sure crimes of state were committed in communist countries... But the inflated numbers offered by cold-war scholars serve neither historical truth nor the cause of justice but merely help to reinforce a knee-jerk fear and loathing of those terrible Reds.”
For his part Harper, of course, clearly understands and promotes this rewriting of history. Speaking at a Tribute to Liberty fundraiser in Toronto last May, he said “whatever it calls itself - Nazism, Marxist-Leninism, today, terrorism - they all have one thing in common: the destruction, the end, of human liberty.”
It would seem however, as the Raging Grannies suggested, that human liberty’s real enemy was our capitalist system which is everywhere denying people access to basic needs, jobs, as well as peace, justice and a healthy environment; and that past and current attempts to fight Marxism and terrorism by the ruling class have much more in common with fascism than with democracy.
Johan Boyden is the Central Organizer of the Communist Party of Canada. He is currently wrapping up an organizing tour across Ontario talking about, among other things, overcoming anti-communist sentiments in society. Fran Sedgwick helped with this article.
(The above article is from the March 1-15, 2015 issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading socialist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, BC, V5L 3J1.)