Communism is evil - how come its apologists get so much time, attention and space to promote this murderous, coercive faith?

"The second memorial lecture was given in January by the American political theorist Jodi Dean, who is keen to rescue the word 'communist' from its negative - and, she insists, historically inaccurate - associations..."

This is the world we're in - this quotation doesn't come from some obscure spartist website or even from communism's house journal, The Morning Star, but from the London Review of Books. From the lead article in the latest issue of this august journal.

Imagine just for a minute that the LRB's main article was from an avowed fascist arguing that Gentile's actualism and the policies of 1920s Italy were powerful, change-making forces for good and that Fascism is misunderstood and perceived negatively. No, you can't imagine it because you know it would never happen - the repainting of Fascism in bright 21st century colours is simply not something we could countenance. Not so with communism.

Time and time again - on the TV, in magazines, in film and in theatre - the evils of communism are given a different set of teeth, a new smile, a smart set of modern clothes. The millions of dead bodies on which today's communism perches get brushed aside as a detail, explained away as some sort of tragic error or, worst, seen as a necessary collateral in the pursuit of the New Man and true communism.

I understand how people who've arrived at a left-wing - even socialist - perspective might be troubled by the discovery that people who proclaimed the same faith were responsible for genocide, rape, murder, incarceration, torture and oppression. Aren't these the sins of the 'right' - the things the left opposes? So we get revisionism - I remember a bizarre seminar at university where we discussed the bewildering manner in which the number of dead bodies in Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge was parsed according to the ideological position of the calculator. My lecturer took the Noam Chomsky position - there weren't as many dead as claimed and, anyway, it was down to individual actions by bad soldiers and Pol Pot didn't know about what was going on (I paraphrase but this summarises the then academically popular apologia for one of the worst genocides of the 20th century). Portraying this - the consequence of communism in power - as somehow an historical aberration, not real communism, is precisely what Jodi Dean and her fellow travellers want to do. Just so they can carry on promoting a faith that demands coercion and oppression as well as producing, in so many tragic cases, violence, death and starvation.

Communism should not be savable through some sort of historical revisionism, it should be confined to the same place as Nazism and Fascism and its proponents treated with the same opprobrium. So long as elite journals like the LRB can lead with unchallenged communist apologia, we are a long way from seeing the murderous ideas of communism properly confined to the madder corners of obscure websites and batty college pamphleteers.

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On the causes of murder...

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The terrible attack on Gabrielle Giffords will shock us all - the attempted murder of an elected politician causes a mass intake of breath. And reminds us of the fragility of democracy. But our first response should be to turn our thoughts to the victims, their families and their friends. They are suffering and it shows no respect at all if our response to the tragedy is political.

The language of war and violence litters our political debate - we are 'fighting', 'campaigning', 'taking out', 'bringing down' - all aggressive words intended to fire up our supporters and demoralise opponents.

So when a US Democrat Congresswoman is gunned down this discourse continues for some. Instead of looking in shock, hesitating and thinking of that person's family, friends and associates, the search is on for a cause - a cause of the attack. Before any investigation, before we even know the name of the gunman, before we even know the death count...the finger is pointed. And it is a political finger.

It seems at least six people are dead, but what matters to some is to find a political source for the tragedy. Fevered shouts, name-calling and the naming of the culprit.  And in this case a nice easy target - or maybe I can't now use that word - has emerged in Sarah Palin who made the terrible mistake of putting crosshairs symbols on a map showing the congressmen and senators she wanted to target in the 2012 election campaigns. And we are supposed now to believe that this act - this terrible error - was responsible for some deranged maniac shooting down Gabrielle Giffords and around a dozen bystanders?

I do not believe for one second that this website map was intended to or acted to incite some person to the extremes of violence we have seen today. I hold no brief for Sarah Palin's politics - although I don't share some folk's irrational and violent hatred of her - and think that the cause of liberty is held back by those like her (and sadly too many her left-wing opponents) who combine it with judgmental bigotry. But I do not see in her campaigns any incitement to violence or any corrupting of America's democratic discourse.

If there is a lesson - and I would prefer to wait for investigations, to see whether we can understand why the murderer did what he did - it might lie in the language we all use. The wishing of people dead (I would have a pretty penny if I'd sixpence for every time someone publicly wished Margaret Thatcher dead), the celebration of violent acts (remember that criminally foolish student with the fire extinguisher) and the use of metaphors of war in our political campaigning - all these things could contribute to providing, for someone already minded to murder, some form of warped justification for such a terrible act.

But however much we should moderate the language of our political discourse, however much we should treat opponents as real human beings, there is no place for claiming that a debate littered with violent language causes or incites murder. It does not.

And rather than trying to create such a belief, we should instead be thinking about those shot - some of them killed. If it's your way, pray for them. Cry a little. Pause for political breath.

And show the dead, dying and wounded some respect.


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The stress, pain and anger of a crowded world - thoughts about the future from the past

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“The incidence of muckers continues to maintain its high: one in Outer Brooklyn yesterday accounted for 21 victims before the fuzzie-wuzzies fused him, and another is still at large in Evsanston, Ill. Across the sea in London a woman mucker took out four including her own three-month baby before a mind-present standerby clobbered. Reports also from Rangoon, Lima and Auckland notch up the day’s total to 69.”

So goes part of the first ‘Happening World’ in John Brunner’s wonderful, new wave SF novel, ‘Stand on Zanzibar’. And it’s odd that the events in Cumbria took my mind straight to this matter-of-fact piece of fictional reportage. The banal manner in which Brunner introduces the ‘mucker’ to the reader is really quite frightening – we’re talking precisely about the sort of event that still today causes us such shock.

In part, Brunner was trying to describe how dehumanising mass population becomes – crowdedness breeds more stress, more risk, more chance of someone running amok. And from this event, a feature of the crowded world, comes the idea of the ‘mucker’, a person – young, old, male, female, white, black, yellow – who snaps and runs riot. Brunner does not explain or analyse, he just presents the ‘fact’ dispassionately. We don’t get to explore the details of the individual cases – we just get the event in stripped down form: “…accounted for 21 victims…”

Stand on Zanzibar is intended as a warning that with numbers come more of these (and other) events – partly a simple response to there being more people and partly a greater incidence descending from the impact of those numbers on our psyches. I’m not sure I agree with Brunner’s analysis but his presentation of the dehumanising effect of crowds is both depressing and revelatory.

Crazed incidents of murder have been a feature of human society for a long while – anyone who meander the by-ways of folk music will be struck by just how many songs there are about murder. So when we look at the events of yesterday – shocked, stunned, perhaps angry – we need to ask two questions: firstly, is this just another tragic, horrible murderous rampage or something else – something preventable; and secondly, does the event speak of a human condition stretching back through history – thankfully a rare condition?

For what its worth – and I’ve made no study of these matters – I feel the answer lies somewhere between. Blaming the gun is a fruitless diversion but trying to appreciate – and maybe on occasion notice – how the stresses, the agonies of everyday life can unhinge someone might prove a more purposeful response. Supporting scientific enquiry (and I don’t mean the ‘crackeresque’, pseudo-psychiatry beloved of the media) into the motives, reason and proximate causes of the rampages – these ‘muckers’ – might prove of some value. Although, I guess the chances of preventing some future incident in some other unfortunate place are pretty slim – if not non-existent.

Right now, the best we can do is to give a thought to others suffering – to pray if that’s your thing. And to hope that those damaged by the event can gather themselves and come to terms with what has happened. And, at some point, get on with the ordinary lives that cause such stress, pain and anger.



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