May be republished, in whole or in part, with attribution.
The Red Patch shop, named for the prison uniforms of Canadian Communists unlawfully imprisoned during World War II, would remind the official custodians of Canadian heritage that, for as long as Communism and organized labour have existed in North America, they have been on the receiving — not the dealing — end of physical violence and state repression.
We must lack the Department's discriminating moral intelligence, as it seems to us that for a country to memorialize the victims of distant socialisms when it has serially and brutally created socialist victims on its own soil is itself minor monument to moral hypocrisy.
Our disappointment shifts to alarm when we consider that anti-Communism as a political programme is first and foremost the core mission of fascism itself, whose military alliances took the form of “Anti-Communist Pacts,” whose legionnaires styled themselves “Volunteers Against Bolshevism,” and whose ghastly punk scene lives out its fitful afterlife under the slogan, “Rock Against Communism.”
We recall not only that Communists were Hitler’s first political victims (prefigured in the murder of Rosa Luxemburg by far-right paramilitaries in 19191), but that the extermination of European Jews was itself indissociable from the paranoiac Nazi fixation on Communism as the universal corrupter of the social fabric (“the Judeo-Bolshevist menace”). In its origins, namely the mass killings of Jews in occupied Soviet territories by the gruesome Einzatsgruppen, the Holocaust was enabled by the directive, “Have them shot as partisans” (that is to say, as Communists).
We caution that to vilify Communism necessarily invites flirtations with and rehabilitations of this purest and most dangerous form of anti-Communism. We would have hoped, if only for decorum's sake, that the authorities would refrain from any anti-Communist theatrics until they were prepared to come clean about the identities of the “victims” who found such avid welcome in this “land of refuge.”
We find it disheartening, at a time of generalized hardship caused by contradictions of the “free-enterprise system,” to witness the resurgence of the hoariest Cold War bogeymen whose aims are patently not a sober reckoning with the past, but rather a manipulation of public opinion in the present. It would be tempting to dismiss this as an innocent exercise in diaspora electioneering if it did not clearly prefigure attacks on the social and economic rights of working people. For it takes no great effort of demystification to discern that the goal of this public memorialization is to discredit the very notion of social transformation through organized political struggle.
We wonder how this gimmick will be received by the millions of Canadians with ancestry from regions of the world shaped by national liberation struggles, who will surely have a different perspective on the October Revolution and fate of a Communist bloc which, whatever its mistakes and failures, proved so generous in moral and material aid to the Third World.
(As others have remarked, courting the Ukrainian diaspora in this manner seems especially insulting to the memory of those militant Ukrainians who courted the wrath of the Canadian authorities precisely because of their Communist sympathies;2 meanwhile, to invoke “Communist” crimes in the martyred nations of Vietnam or Cuba is to display some entirely novel combination of tone-deafness and duplicity.)
Many will wonder why the Department could not bring its penetrating moral gaze to bear on other causes of human misery. To some canonical list of “capitalist” victims (Gabor Mate usefully draws our attention to the colonial plunder of the Congo basin for its mineral wealth, ongoing since 1880 and today pitifully misrepresented as “tribal conflicts”), one could append India’s 53 million victims of British colonial man-made famine (murdered, says one scholar, “by the theological application of the sacred principles of Smith, Bentham and Mill”), or the victims of an Irish genocide which A.J.P. Taylor first and most strikingly likened to Auschwitz (“for two years, all of Ireland was Bergen-Belsen”).
We accept, in very schematic terms, that Canada is inhabited by diasporas from countries subjected to a physical violence and repression by the bureaucratic apparatus of the no-longer-revolutionary Soviet state (the degree to which the People's Democracies realized or betrayed the “idea of Communism” having been subject of wild debate among Marxists at least as far back as Trotsky). We will refrain from venturing into the endless controversy over the class nature of “really-existing socialism,” or the crimes of Stalinism, except to note that “Communist crimes” should be problematized for the simple reason that counterrevolutionary violence is almost invariably chronologically and causally prior. Soviet terror in particular was at least partly the result of a siege mentality brought on by the Great Power competition of late European imperialism (about which there was certainly nothing “socialist!”), in which the self-proclaimed workers' state was ringed by hostile powers (Germany, Japan) whose appetite for its destruction had been amply demonstrated by their interventions of 1917-20. Considering the ignoble part played by Canada in these failed campaigns, which only fuelled the cycle of political violence in Russia's Civil War, present-day moralistic handwringing over the “evils” of the Communist experiment seems an intolerable piece of historical chicanery.
Finally, the fact that the USSR’s collapse was essentially a failure of its federalism — its inability to accommodate national minorities, historically incorporated into the Russian superstate by conquest, within a workable political relationship — should give the the overseers of a rickety Canadian federalism, which is far from achieving a just and stable political settlement with the subaltern Quebecois or the Indigenous survivors of colonial genocide — pause for thought. Those who took flight from former Soviet satellites can then be conceived as victims, less of “Communism,” than of the general postwar settlement and Allied realpolitik: in this manner too were French, Greeks3 and Italians, all longing for some transition to socialism, forcibly ejected from the socialist experiment by Allied horse-trading and reintegrated into the world market under conditions of criminality and repression.
We commend the Department on the haunting aesthetic beauty of the design and are satisfied that it will be a simple matter, once working Canadians regain control of their representative institutions, to re-dedicate the installation as a “Memorial to the Victims of McCarthyism, Exploitation, Apartheid, Settler Colonialism, and Counterrevolution.”
~Ulysses Jochamowicz
1The inclusion of Luxemburg — an exemplary victim of political violence — in the list of placenames proscribed under Ukraine’s “de-Communization” laws exposes the essentially vengeful and chauvinistic nature of this measure; far from a wholesome transcending of authoritarian or Russian-imperial vestiges, this campaign bears the hallmarks of a hysterical lashing out by a right-wing oligarchy against its defeated class and historical enemies.
2Louis Lang, “Liberals Advance Despicable Memorial Project” TML Weekly no. 9 (March 18, 2017): "the largest migration of Ukrainians to Canada, 170,00 people, occurred between 1891 and 1914.[3] From 1924 to 1939 the roughly 70,000 Ukrainians who migrated to Canada came from Poland and Romania, which had fiercely anti-Soviet, anti-communist governments. The resettlement of Ukrainians in Canada following the Second World War, some 34,000 people, was the smallest, and more Ukrainians have since migrated to Canada following the collapse of the Soviet Union.[4] To label all Canadians with Ukrainian origins, whose community has always been a fighting contingent of the Canadian working class for its rights including in the communist and workers' movement, as "victims of communism" is unacceptable."
3 "From the outset, Roosevelt had backed Churchill’s dispatch of British troops in 1944 to crush the main body of the Greek resistance. …Marshall was soon instructing the American embassy ‘not to interfere with the administration of Greek justice’, as mass execution of political prisoners proceeded. Twenty years later, with a junta in power in Athens, Acheson instructed locals that there was ‘no realistic alternative to your colonels’, since Greece was ‘not ready for democracy’": Lawrence Wittner, American Intervention in Greece, 1943–1949, New York 1982, pp. 12–3, 71