By: Dr Štefan Šumah
Have you ever heard of a leftist condemning the criminal acts committed by socialists of all kinds (communists, Bolsheviks, Maoists, etc.) around the world during and after their rise to power? I have not. Unfortunately! Of course, some leave various socialist parties in protest, but not because they have recognised the madness of socialism, but purely for personal reasons, primarily because they apparently did not receive the share of the spoils, they believed they were entitled to. More than one hundred million victims of the Red Terror around the world. The Great Famine in Ukraine, gulags in Siberia, mass starvation due to the Great Leap Forward in China, the Red Terror in Spain, the killing fields in Cambodia… maybe a little regret over certain atrocities, but no condemnations from the prominent intellectual leaders of the left.
Even in Slovenia, more and more evidence of communist crimes during and after World War II is coming to light. Documents, mass graves, testimonies… Not even the destruction of a large part of the archival material can stop the truth anymore. Yet, all of this is still not enough for Slovenian leftists to acknowledge it. Instead of breaking ties with the murderers and torturers of their own people, some even proudly declare themselves their successors, others bow before their monuments, and still others celebrate the founding of the Communist Party or even wear shirts bearing the likenesses of mass murderers like Che or Tito. Some even claim, “They did not kill enough.” What they all have in common is that they enjoy attending partisan masquerades where they celebrate mythological victories that have little to do with the truth.
They have even abolished the Day of Remembrance for the victims of the communist regime, seek to ban already prohibited Nazi or fascist symbols (and in this, they want to include the Carniolan Eagle, which was a symbol of the region of Carniola centuries before World War II), yet they are unable to condemn the red star and the crossed hammer and sickle, which belong in the same category.
The left’s problems with self-reflection, denial of the truth, and short historical memory are not unique to the Slovenian left but are almost pathologically present among most leftist intellectuals across Europe. Just as prominent figures of cultural Marxism like Horkheimer, Adorno, Fromm, or Marcuse in Germany, or Althusser and Deleuze in France (who at least did not defend or justify them), were unable to condemn communist crimes, the writer and philosopher Sartre, a Nobel laureate considered one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century, even defended Bolshevik brutality in his works. When the crimes of communism were clearly proven with documents and testimonies, he still urged the French to judge communism by its intentions, not by its actions. And even the respected English academic Hobsbawm, a prominent member of the British Communist Party, could not bring himself to condemn any of the communist crimes up until his death. For both Hobsbawm and Sartre, the cruel actions of socialist revolutionaries stemmed from the “necessities” of that time.
Expecting our leftists to condemn the communist crimes during and after World War II is pure utopia. If top intellectuals, whose achievements cannot be denied despite their political views, can calmly turn a blind eye to facts and evidence that reveal the criminal nature of socialism, or even justify these crimes as historically necessary, what can we then expect from our leftists, whose intellectual capacities are significantly limited in comparison?
In short, such examples show us how far one can go in approving the crimes committed by the left. Or, as Scruton aptly put it, “This tells us something important about leftist movements, which seem to have a prerogative that religions claim: namely, to simultaneously approve of a crime and cleanse the conscience of those who committed it.”