Berlin Wall Series: Hungary

Of the countries in the former Eastern bloc, Hungary was the first which unshackled itself progressively from Stalinist dictatorship, but was also one of the first to rise up against it in the 1950s. Hungarians didn’t want the imperialist dictatorship foisted upon them by Moscow, so it took little sign from Moscow that it would not intervene for Hungarians to organise, to challenge the Party, and for the Party to know that, in the hearts and minds of so many, it had already lost.

Stalin punished Hungary for being on the side of the Axis in World War 2. Hungary had been granted territory under the Munich Agreement and supported Nazi Germany, until serious setbacks in 1943 caused the Hungarian government to seek peace with the Allies. As a result, Germany staged a coup planting the particularly nasty fascist nationalist Ferenc Szalasi in power, who with great aplomb shipped hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews to extermination camps, whilst ruthlessly persecuting opposition. However, the Red Army swept into the east of Hungary in the following year, equally ruthlessly taking land, murdering and raping civilians in their way. By this time Hungary was effectively a satellite of Berlin, so surrender by Germany was surrender by Hungary. Hungary lost all territory acquired under the Munich agreement, and some more to the USSR (now Ukraine), and half of the German minority living in Hungary were deported to Germany.

Initially Hungary was left to hold free elections, as Stalin believed Hungarian peasants would embrace communism. However, with only 17% of the vote, it became clear that “people power” would need to be imposed, so by 1948 the Red Army had coerced the government to accept more communist influence, set up the ruthless AVH (secret police) to occupy the former headquarters of Szalasi’s fascist Arrow Cross Party, with no hint of irony.

Stalin’s strongman was Matyas Rakosi, who terrorised the Social Democratic Party into merging with the Communist Party, to create a façade of “national unity” government with the so called Hungarian Workers’ Party. However, Rakosi was a loyal follower of Stalin, equally as ruthless and lives on as the man who invented the term “salami tactics” to describe how to deal with the opposition.

Rakosi executed 2000 and imprisoned over 100,000 over his time of rule, establishing primitive concentration camps and a cult of personality. The economy was bankrupted in part due to Soviet enforced reparation payments and also the forced collectivisation of the economy, with reports that by 1952 the average disposable income had dropped by one-third in three years.


However, the death of Stalin saw a power struggle between Rakosi and the reformist Prime Minister Imre Nagy, who sought more openness and less state control of the media and the economy. He advocated freedom of speech, more private sector involvement in the economy, and after the Treaty of Austria advocated a similar position for Hungary. Austria had been granted neutrality, and he sought the same for Hungary, meaning withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. Moscow promptly arranged for his comrades to put him out of his job.

Yet sparks had lit flames in the minds of some Hungarians, prompting the 1956 Revolution. For a brief period, Nagy led a reformist government, introducing a multi-party system, with freedom of speech, assembly and association, and declared withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. That was, until the USSR crushed it with tanks and guns. Thousands were killed and afterwards tens of thousands imprisoned for “crimes” of counter revolutionary behaviour. Imre Nagy was secretly tried and executed.

However, Hungarians would not forget. For over many years they could tune secretly to Radio Free Europe, BBC World Service and Voice of America. The new leader, Janos Kadar would reimpose authoritarian order, but not on the scale of Rakosi. Indeed, Hungarian communism would long be seen as more moderate than that of others with the view of Kadar that “those who are not against us are for us”, so the assumption was being that citizens were supportive of the government, unless the demonstrated otherwise. There was no longer Stalinist control of the arts and culture, and no personality cult surrounded Kadar. Collective economic units had more freedom to operate in different fields, and collective farms were permitted to have substantial privately owned plots. As a result, Hungary was better off economically than most other eastern bloc states. There is little doubt that this (relative) moderation, helped stem tension, but similarly when Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms in the USSR went further, moderates in the Hungarian Workers’ Party saw their chance at reform.

By 1988, Kadar had aged, and was succeeded by Karoly Grosz who sought to undertake moderate reforms, but he himself was overshadowed as protests emerged, foreign travel restrictions lifted and the iron curtain was first removed, as barbed wire was taken down between Austria and Hungary. There were open calls for multi party elections, withdrawal of Soviet troops and in October 1989 the Hungarian Workers’ Party finally agreed to abolish its monopoly on political power. Most notably in June 1989, Imre Nagy was reburied and the 1956 Revolution was finally seen for what it was – Hungarians standing up against tyranny, and then murdered by the USSR with the complicity of their own.

Since then, Hungary has joined NATO and the European Union, and has not looked back. Today in Budapest you can visit the former headquarters of the AVH and Arrow Cross Party. It is the House of Terror, where the story of Hungary under both fascist and communist tyranny is told. At the outskirts in the hills, is Memento Park, where you can see the grotesque statues that used to populate parks and corners in Budapest, extolling communism.

Hungary has clearly not looked back from being one of the laboratories of socialism.

Berlin Wall Season: Victims and Victors

The end of World War 2 was meant to be a victory of liberation from the hellfire of war on the European continent, and from the militaristic and genocidal tyranny of the Nazis and their allies in Italy, Croatia and elsewhere. For half of Europe it meant peace but only between states, not within. The United States initially took a fairly benign view of the Soviet Union and the Red Army’s presence across the east, Winston Churchill’s famous warning of an iron curtain being draped across Europe went largely unheeded, until the blockade of west Berlin made Stalin’s intentions too obvious to miss.

From then until 1988-1990, it was thought that the Cold War would go on forever, dictatorships always seem like that. So brutal and violent are the means to maintain control, it seems difficult to believe any could fall from that, but they did. There had been several attempts, most notably in East Germany in 1953, Hungary 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, to break from the cold bloody brutal reality of “really existing socialism”, all suppressed by the Red Army with the imperial cruelty from the dark ages.

However, once the USSR had opened up, Gorbachev had relented and let the rotten system be exposed for what it was, let people criticise and change, it became clear that none of the regimes in the east could cling to anything other than the lies and fear that were the currency of their trade. The loss in lives was not high compared to the mass murder of the Soviet Union, China or the Khmer Rouge, but the loss in life is incalculable. The lives stunted by socialism, the fear, the subterfuge, the destruction of ambition, and the corruption of talent. The talented either had to sell out to a system that wanted them to be slaves, fear for their very lives or flee. The broad masses need do little other than shut up, be obedient, and be grateful for having bread, a home and a job, for they were being constantly told how things were worse in the west, yet could hear and see for themselves a different story on illegally received TV and radio broadcasts.

The hypocritical vacuous United Nations which would speak endlessly about colonialism, be criticism South Africa for apartheid, and hounding Israel about the Palestinians, was compliant and tolerant of the evil empire’s tentacles directly controlling half of Europe. An empire that claimed it would economically and technically bury the west. A claim that is so laughable today it staggers to think of those who believed it could be true, right through the 1970s.

It was an experiment that failed every test it put forward for itself. Not only were the economies a failure, and totalitarianism placing the entire population in fear of the state, but it did not deliver the socialist goal of equality. For in every single state that claimed to be socialist, it delivered an elite living in luxury, enjoying large homes, security, overseas travel, goods and most of all, knowledge of the outside world. A vile repulsive grouping of supreme mediocrities, who lived the lives of the rich and wealthy, happily ready to gun down those who may threaten their “really existing socialism”.

The profit motive had been abandoned, commercialism almost completely extinguished, people working for the common good, and everyone in fear, whilst those in charge were corrupt and willing to spill blood to preserve what they had. One wonder why those who damn capitalism today don’t look to see that efforts to enforce a collectivist mindset become fertile fields for authoritarianism and corruption.

So today I begin a series on all of the countries stunted and corrupted by Marxism-Leninism in Europe. I do so in the order of those liberated. In that I will briefly describe how the regime came about, the perhaps most notable points in its history and how it all folded. It is history that children should all learn. For what the lesson should be is how entire countries became beholden to systems that made so many compliant, and willing to go along with it all. For as we all now, all it takes for evil to flourish is for good people to do nothing.

Berlin - before and after 1989

14 images in the Daily Telegraph

The bleakness is almost invisible today.

Remember 9th of November

Boris Johnson writes in the Daily Telegraph how we should all remember the 9th of November - the day the Berlin Wall was breached for good.

He says:

It is precisely now, when the public mood is so bitter towards bankers, so hostile to profit, so seemingly brassed off with the very idea of wealth creation that we should remember how ghastly, grim and unworkable was the alternative – state-controlled socialism.

He said it was a moral disaster, a cultural and artistic wasteland and ... "It was a complete and utter environmental catastrophe, as anyone who travelled behind the Iron Curtain will remember. I don't just mean Chernobyl; I mean the cynical way in which socialist planning obliged human beings to endure the proximity of some of the filthiest factories in the world, the roiling clouds of smoke that seeded the warts and the cancers on the skin and in the lungs and the eyes of an innocent public."

"after an exhaustive test it was our system that triumphed, not just because of the material advantages of capitalism, but because a liberal free-market democracy has proved the best way of allowing individuals and families to realise their hopes, and to make something of their lives as independent and rounded moral agents. That is the freedom those crowds recognised and wanted in Berlin. It is the freedom of the human spirit, and it is worth infinitely more than some fancy BMW."

and then finally

"Remember, remember the 9th of November, and remember all the idiots – some now running this country – who supported communism in their youth. Peter Mandelson, Alistair Darling – how will you be celebrating the Fall of the Wall?"

Or indeed Keith Locke...

You may also read Richard Ebeling's piece on the Berlin Wall (Hat tip: Not PC Twitter):

"On this 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, we should remember all that it represented as a symbol of tyranny under which the individual was marked with the label: property of the state. He not only was controlled in everything he did and publically said, but his every movement was watched, commanded or restricted.

Freedom in all its forms – to speak, write, associate, and worship as we want; to pursue any occupation, profession, or private enterprise that inclination and opportunity suggests to us; and to visit, live, and work were our dreams and desires lead us to look for a better life – are precious things."

Remember, nobody was killed trying to move from the west to the east.

UPDATE: Mikhail Gorbachev reveals in the Daily Telegraph how he was advised he could have crushed the rebellion against the dictatorships in the Warsaw Pact countries, but refused because he believed in open democracy and feared World War 3 could have started from it.

He "quipped that he had "a good night's sleep" after the Wall was opened.

"I am very proud of the decision we made," he said. "The Wall did not simply fall – it was destroyed just as the Soviet Union was destroyed.""

The great shame must be that for all he did, so much has been rolled back in Russia, by a new generation of thuggish kleptocrats.

Have we not learnt from 1989?

Janet Daley in the Daily Telegraph asks:

"Why do the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, the anniversary of which we have been commemorating in a low-key way, and the collapse of communism which followed feature so little in the education curriculum and in the popular renditions of modern history?"

Indeed. She thinks those who had responsibility for curriculums and many commentators were shocked by the sudden implosion of the political system that had kept half of Europe under its jackboot for nearly half a century.

She notes that while Marxism expected capitalism to collapse, it collapsed instead, at least in its most hardened forcefully imposed form, but capitalism simply cannot:

This brings us to the delusion permitted by historical ignorance about the present economic crisis: capitalism, whatever the BBC says, has not collapsed. The banking system very nearly did, but that is a different thing: the banks are simply businesses through which capital flows. They were badly run and they failed due to mismanagement. Capitalism was badly served. But it has not – and cannot – collapse for the same reason that it cannot be overthrown: because it is not a structure that is imposed from above whose perpetrators can be forcibly dislodged.

Yes, you see capitalism is about individuals, about them applying their minds to the world around them and seeing how they can offer people goods or services in exchange for money (or goods and services), and then paying others to provide them services (with minds and hands) to assist in that production. Capitalism is simply human.

She says that if there was a greater observation of what 1989 was about (perhaps especially in Europe where far too many were enthralled by the eastern bloc as offering an "alternative way") it would teach us far more of the risks of rejecting capitalism and the human condition:

"If we had dared to look long enough at the events that followed 1989, as have many of those Eastern European countries which lived through them – if we had produced the plays and films and television documentaries and school texts that they had actually deserved – we might now have a fuller appreciation of the terror that follows from the need to extirpate individualistic impulses. An ideology that attempts to re-engineer human nature in the name of the collective good did not, as its founders had believed, require just a "temporary dictatorship" but a permanent one that bred corruption, victimisation and – most paradoxically of all – a bleak, inexorable poverty both of material goods and of aspiration which eventually became intolerable."

Indeed, nothing must frustrate the left more than the current recession NOT being a collapse of capitalism and not causing people to embrace the reality evasion of Marxism. However, it is timely at the end of this year to remind us all, and the young who knew not of what things were like in eastern Europe, of what the brave people of those lands were seeking to escape in that year.

The cold bleak crushing brutality of the steamroller of socialism.

Greens and the Khmer Rouge Part 1

Frogblog has posted about the evidence given by Rob Hamill at the trial of Duch, who operated the Tuol Sleng torture and murder prison in Cambodia. A chance, of course, to reflect simply upon the horrors of the Khmer rouge era. Estimates of numbers executed and starved to death by this regime range from 1.2 to 2.2 million people, between a quarter and a third of the population.

The easy target is to throw stones at Keith Locke. It is fairly well known that in his naïve youth he cheered on the Khmer Rouge victory in Phnom Penh as a liberation. Of course he was not the only one, the Lon Nol military dictatorship that had been overthrown was corrupt and brutal. Nobody missed it at the time, it was hoped things could only get better. Few paid any attention to stories coming out of Khmer Rouge occupied territory of the Maoist autarchy imposed on the local population, although images from the early 1970s showed the uniformity and order that they had imposed (ironically published approvingly by a Chinese state propaganda pictorial magazine).

However, my concern is not Keith Locke. He was young and naïve, better to forgive that and his statements about nuclear power only being safe under socialism, and cheering on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, than to dwell a quarter of a century or more later. My concern is also not Sue Bradford, who was cheerleading on Maoist China in the early 1970s, the Khmer Rouge’s chief source of funds, arms and ideology. Imagine if a senior National MP had cheered on Pinochet, Franco or Salazar in his youth and how that would be treated by the Greens, but I digress.

It is this statement

“For us in the West what we have to get our heads around is that the Khmer Rouge learnt their ideology in Paris and were able to seize power because Richard Nixon personally ordered a secret bombing campaign that killed half a million. And that US foreign policy, in particular their determination to never forgive anyone that drives them off, allowed the Khmer Rouge to occupy Cambodia’s UN seat until 1993 rather than the government installed by the Vietnamese invasion that ended their rule.”

This statement evades certain facts, and would make you think that it is all the fault of the West and the US that the Khmer Rouge came to power. This is, at best, a side effect of failed policies, and there are others who can carry far more blame.

Yes the Khmer Rouge learnt their ideology in Paris, at the Sorbonne, along with many other Marxists. Radical Maoism was de riguer among many academics, vile as it always has been. However, the Khmer Rouge was active before the US bombings. Why did the US bomb Cambodia in the first place? Because it was being used by the North Vietnamese as a bypass route to infiltrate South Vietnam. “Neutral” Cambodia was a staging ground for invasions of South Vietnam. The US response was to use bombing and then invasion to close the borders, and buy time. The bombing killed between 100,000 and 600,000 (half a million is a high estimate), and certainly gave the Khmer Rouge propaganda to attract illiterate peasants to fight for them. The US backed the overthrow of Prince Norodom Sihanouk (a very slimy long time friend of Kim Il Sung) and supported a corrupt and brutal strongman called Lon Nol. His antics also helped fuel support for the Khmer Rouge. However he achieved the primary goal, securing the borders of Cambodia and wiping out North Vietnamese forces in Cambodia.

The Khmer Rouge was backed solidly by Mao, China supplying explicit financial and material support. The USSR was more interested in Vietnam. So it was China that enabled the Khmer Rouge to fight against Lon Nol. However, it was Lon Nol himself who was so corrupt, incompetent and cruel that caused many Cambodians to join the fight against him. Note that Prince Sihanouk himself backed the Khmer Rouge as well – the “neutral” Prince backing radical Maoists so he could continue to enjoy the trappings of power. The US did not back the Khmer Rouge, it unfortunately backed its hopelessly incompetent and immoral opponents.

So the US was guilty of foolishness in Cambodia, because its goal in Vietnam propelled victims of its actions (and its friend’s actions) to support the Khmer Rouge. However, to say Nixon enabled the Khmer Rouge to seize power is evading two key points:

1. Had the Khmer Rouge not had Chinese support, it may well have failed to takeover, avoiding the massive loss of life its regime caused.
2. The US from 1970 to 1975 armed, funded and backed the Lon Nol military regime, which whilst bad, fought the Khmer Rouge. Had Lon Nol remained in power, it would have been corrupt, and far from free, but would not have been as murderous. A similar analogy is Korea, where South Korean dictatorships and military regimes ran the country from 1953 through to 1988, but which was far less deadly than North Korea for its people.

The truth is that China provided succour to the Khmer Rouge, the US lamely fought against it, but the biggest supporters of the Khmer Rouge were often Western academics.

The Greens skirt over the Khmer Rouge years. The years when umpteen Western academics embraced the Khmer Rouge, including the fool Malcolm Caldwell who decided to go visit them, and got murdered as a result. The years when leftwing pinup Noam Chomsky declared stories of mass murder and starvation from Democratic Kampuchea as CIA propaganda (the man has slithered in evasion of this statement ever since). This thesis talks of the "Standard Total Academic View on Cambodia" being "Democratic Kampuchea symbolized their wildest hopes and dreams. From the classroom to the politburo, the new Kampuchea was, to these scholars, theory becoming reality" says Sophal Ear.

You see the Khmer Rouge represented the idealistic vision of so many on the left. More on that in Part 2.

Vietnam invaded Cambodia for various reasons, including a border incident, concern over the Khmer Rouge treatment of ethnic Vietnamese (Vietnam knew only too well what was going on there), Soviet support for Vietnamese expansionism (as Vietnam was not backed by China – as was seen in a brief border war between the two in 1979).

You may find it odd that a party that opposed the US overthrowing the Saddam Hussein dictatorship, overthrowing the Taliban dictatorship and includes many who opposed the US kicking Iraq out of Kuwait, so warmly receives (or at least glosses over) Vietnam invading Cambodia.

Let me be clear, the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia was moral, purely because it ended the Khmer Rouge horror, even though nobody could dare claim that the Socialist Republic of Vietnam was free or respected individual rights, it fell short of the mass executions of the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge had been brutal to Vietnamese on both sides of the border. However, overthrowing the Khmer Rouge does not fit well with Green Party rhetoric against imperialism and war, particularly since the government installed by Hanoi was little more than an extension of its own.

The Greens claim the US allowed the Khmer Rouge to occupy the UN seat of Cambodia rather than the Vietnamese installed regime because of a fit of pique at losing the Vietnam War. This is an element of truth evading several facts and with the wrong motive.

The seat at the UN was held by the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea, shared by the Khmer Rouge, FUNCINPEC and the KPNLF, the latter two being royalist and anti-communist. This was maintained because China and the US both vetoed Soviet and Vietnamese requests for the seat to be taken up by the Hanoi led government. Of course when the Cold War ended, all of this fell away. Vietnam had withdrawn from Cambodia, and the pro-Vietnamese government engaged in a coalition with FUNCINPEC and the KPNLF, whilst the Khmer Rouge tried to continue fighting.

So why the history lesson? Well it is understandable to write about Rob Hamill testifying at Duch’s trial. It is a tragic NZ element to one of the most vile events of the 20th century. Indeed so vile it demonstrates that what is worse than war is government turning on its own people. However, the Greens couldn’t use the occasion to simply deplore the Khmer Rouge, deplore Maoism and condemn totalitarianism and communism. No. It was used to blame the United States, by selective use of the facts and evading the fundamental blame for the Khmer Rouge – Marxist scholars, Chinese Maoists and the embrace of the ideology that individuals only exist for the greater good.

The Greens implicitly endorse the Vietnamese invasion and conquest of Cambodia, because it overthrew a murderous tyranny, but don’t support the US doing the same in Afghanistan and Iraq.

So, why would the Greens selectively report history to bash the US? Why not bash China for providing the greater succuour to the Khmer Rouge? Why not bash communism generally? Why ignore the US backing of the Khmer Rouge's opponents over sustained periods? Why not slam the apologists of the regime from leftwing academia (which included your own)? Why not criticise Norodom Sihanouk for letting Cambodia be a vehicle for Vietnamese communist insurgency (attracting US attention), and then being a vehicle for the Khmer Rouge to have legitimacy?

Or better yet, why not shut the hell up about a party and government that represented an idealised vision of a society without any capitalism (money was abolished), without carbon based energy, where everyone was equal, there were no possessions, where peasantry had been raised to the highest level, where everyone was meant to get what they needed, and nobody was rich. Then ask yourself, before the consequences of this vision were obvious, would you too have supported it?

20 years since the PLA turned on the people

20 years ago there was much optimism in many parts of the world. Mikhail Gorbachev had ushered in a new age of freedom and openness in what was then the Soviet Union, and had made it clear to the former Soviet satellites in eastern Europe that what happened to the politics of those countries was up to them - no longer would the USSR intervene as it had done explicitly in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 (and less explicitly on many other occasions). Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia were already moving rapidly forward, as it appeared the Cold War was fading away. This was watched by tyrants in all "really existing socialist" states that remained, as the regimes in Romania, Bulgaria, East Germany and Albania all clung on in Europe, whilst in Asia, Pyongyang, Hanoi, Beijing and Vientiane remained defiant.

Mikhail Gorbachev sought to end frosty relations with China by visiting Beijing in May 1989, the coverage of which was significant, as Gorbachev brought with him a message of openness to government, and an end to the totalitarian tentacles of single party rule involving itself in most aspects of life. It was a message noted by students in Beijing, which brought about protests in Tiananmen Square calling for similar reforms to bring freedom of speech and an end to the unfettered rule of the Communist Party of China.

The events of 2-4 June 1989 in Beijing are well known. I have blogged before about it, one noting a report from the then Radio Beijing English Language Service which you wont hear on the modern day China Radio International. I don't intend to repeat it.

It is worth noting that China is freer now than it was 20 years ago, not least because the advent of cellular phones and the internet has made it more difficult to control information flows to the public. However, the Chinese government has also loosened up, criticism of officials and debate about how policies are implemented appears. While questioning the rule of the Communist Party can still land you in prison or worse, the appearance of protests and the reporting of protests about situations and issues at the local level shows progress. There is little doubt that as Chinese gain property rights and prosperity they are more demanding of government. This is something unheard of when Sue Bradford went to Maoist China in the early 1970s.

Yet it isn't enough - China has two vibrant examples of free, open Chinese societies on its doorstep. Hong Kong is within its grasp, and flourishes with the rule of law and a quasi-democratic system of government in a free society. Taiwan has a vibrant liberal democracy and free society. The Communist Party of China, which essentially is running a corrupt state capitalist system (rather like an organised crime syndicate, as it is not accountable) fearful about what would happen if it "let a hundred flowers bloom". However, it is, in effect, slowly letting the screws loosen - even if questioning its rule remains taboo.

Reports after the Tiananmen Square massacre range in deaths from the low hundreds to the thousands. The most memorable image being the one man standing in front of the row of tanks. It is true for evil to be done it simply requires good men to do nothing, but in this case it was the People's Liberation Army that turned on the people. Chinese people still get arrested, imprisoned, tortured and executed for challenging the government, and the behemoth of the Chinese government and Communist Party of China can still bulldoze over people, leaving no trace of where they have been, with no accountability.

The BBC has an audio archive to remember the events.

It is time to take a moment to wish for more freedom in China, and gently remember those who strived for that which so many of us take for granted.

Hungary 1989 - the iron curtain was cut

Today is the 20th anniversary of the day the Iron Curtain was cut. It followed Hungary's own movement towards freedom that paralleled that of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev. Karoly Grosz had become General Secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party in May 1988, and began a process of liberalisation.

Widespread protests in 1988 calling for democracy saw multi-party elections announced in February 1989. Along with that came freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of association and the right to form competitive trade unions. In April 1989, the USSR agreed to withdraw all Soviet troops from Hungary by 1991.

However it was the removal of barbed wire between Hungary and Austria, and the "shoot to kill" policy of border guards on 6 May 1989, that saw the Iron Curtain pulled to one corner, and the light of the West draw thousands.

You see passport holders in the Warsaw Pact countries had freedom of movement between those countries. East Germans notably could travel freely to (then) Czechoslovakia and onto Hungary, and now onto the West. 30,000 did so between May and September 1989, before the geriatric thugs in the dying German Democratic Republic (GDR) put up their own restrictions on travel to Hungary. East Germans kept fleeing to Czechoslovakia, which had its own border closed in October before protests by hundreds of thousands in the streets saw Erich Honecker himself deposed by his own party.

Then the Wall came down.

Today I am in Budapest, by pure coincidence. It is a thriving city of free people, as it always should have been, and a city that remembers what it went through from the terror of a brief period of fascist rule in 1940, to Soviet imperialism, the 1956 uprising and its crushing and the sheer terror of never knowing from one day to the next whether the state would turn on you next.

Budapest has a Museum of Terror, dedicated not to terrorism as we know it, but the terror of the period of Hungary under dictatorship - from its own fascism to Nazi occupation. to the Soviet occupation and its socialist stooges. It includes pointedly, a long list of those who were the foot soldiers in this police state, the prison guards, the "judges" who proclaimed death sentences and the secret police men and women who bullied their own people. It was designed to name and shame those who "were only following orders" and so did what most would think was unthinkable - murdering, imprisoning and torturing in the name of "the people" and "the party" and "the revolution".

Today is a day worthy of celebrating, for it is remarkable to think that this once Marxist Leninist dictatorship is today a free member of NATO and the European Union. It is also worthy remembering that most of the former Soviet Union itself, at best has only just started really having some of that freedom, at worst is under a similar level of tyranny, with a different name. The philosophical and political battle for freedom in the former Soviet bloc is far from over.

The OTHER deniers

Holocaust deniers are well publicised and hassled for their vile beliefs, albeit that they SHOULD have the legal right to hold them and express them.

However there is another group of deniers, the Stalinist deniers. These are the small group of fanatics for totalitarianism that live in the free world, but deny the evidence of the thousands of Russians who suffered terrible ordeals under Stalinism and CONTINUE to deny the evidence of the North Koreans who escape. They claim Alexander Solzhenitsyn was a neo Nazi, they excuse labour camps, executions and political oppression. They treat Saddam Hussein as a hero

They are so radical that even Arthur Scargill, mate of the former USSR, expelled them from his own Marxist party.

It is called the Stalin Society, led by an Indian migrant to the UK called Harpal Brar. He chairs the Communist Party of Great Britain Marxist-Leninist.

That party supports Robert Mugabe and Kim Jong Il.

What bloodthirsty warped scum. Are they deranged, stupid or just plain evil?

Chavez threatens to not sell oil to the USA

Go on you Marxist thug.

Given CNN reports "United States is Venezuela's biggest oil customer and one of the few countries that can refine its low-quality crude. Venezuela accounts for up to 15 percent of U.S. crude imports". I think it's fine for a socialist to say he's not going to sell to his biggest customer, especially since his product is hardly that well sought after.

He's looking to remove term limits and put the Central Bank under his control, as well as reduce working weeks (given that the work ethic there isn't high according to some reports that wont help). Nice little recipe for more authoritarianism, and more wasting of money following a grand vision for "the people".

Keep watching political science students and economic students - learn how a country can be wrecked by socialism, and pity the average Venezuelan, the welfare state that has been built is unsustainable.

90 years on - repent, apologise and be wary

25 October 1917 and the left worldwide got perhaps one of its biggest boosts with Lenin's revolution, overthrowing the embryonic liberal democracy in Russia to create one of the most bloodthirsty and imperialist governments in history. The Soviet Union murdered and starved over 30 million of its own, and spawned the murder and starvation of 10s of millions more - but it was cheered by Western advocates of the "dictatorship of the proletariat".

^

Invariably working either as academics or trade unionists they enjoyed the personal freedom of the West to campaign for its overthrow, treating the stories that came from dissidents of the horrors of Lenin's murderous adventures as being "propaganda". Others denied the stories of horror from Maoist China, or simply ignored them, like Green MPs Keith Locke and Sue Bradford, both of whom have pasts of ignorantly sympathising with brutal dictatorships.

^

Some signs came in the 1930s when tales of the horrors under Stalin were floating out, but, like Hitler, Stalin was seen by far too many in academia as showing a new way - a strong creative state marshalling the energy of the population for the greater good. Sympathisers for Hitler quickly shut up following the war, albeit ignoring that National Socialism and Marxism-Leninism had far too much in common - both being socialist, both demanding total state control and complete intolerance for any hint of dissent. However, Stalin still had a following.

^

Some of that following was eroded following the suppression of the popular revolts in Budapest and Prague in 1956 and 1968 respectively, but around the same time there was also the swallowing of Maoist propaganda, seeing Red China as a great model for a new society - again treating the tales of misery as Western propaganda, and even the likes of Noam Chomsky, being a sceptic of the murders of the Khmer Rouge.

^

However, right through till the end of the Cold War, the West remained filled with those who looked east, so to speak, and smiled - who at best ignored the blood of those tortured, murdered, starved by the Marxist-Leninist experiment in Orwellian social reconstruction, or at worst cheered it on. Some of those the Maori Party now defends are part of this ilk.

^

Trevor Loudon, much criticised by those on the left, has so much on his blog about today's defenders of the murderers of communism that I cannot hope to rival it.

^
Those who have glorified, sympathised with or cheered on the USSR, Red China, the former Eastern Bloc, Democratic Kampuchea, North Korea, Cuba (I'm looking at you Matt Robson) can only today claim one of three reasons for their support for such vileness:
- Stupidity ("I was wrong");
- Shame ("I was immoral"); or
- Pride ("I believe in the violent overthrow of free liberal democracies and suppression of dissent").
^
The cheerleaders for bullying Marxism live on today and are seen in power in Zimbabwe, Venezuela and Bolivia, as well as the tired old regimes of Cuba and North Korea (whilst China and Vietnam transform into one-party corporatist capitalist states).
^

Neil Lyndon in the Sunday Times has said "We were all deluded. We were all mistaken. We were all - to varying degrees - off or out of our heads. We owe the world an apology and some acts of contrition. " He comments how when visiting Prague in the 1960s he "had sensed the presence of the secret police in shadows and of informers among the neighbours."

^

"Leninism has been defeated almost everywhere in the world, but the postwar generation of baby boomers who went so far left in the 1960s now control this country’s leading institutions. Their taste for totalitarian simplicities and weakness for millenarian terrors has been digested into modern feminism, environmentalism and global warming. Many remain absolutely unrepentant about their past because they have been so successful in the present (one of the sweeter fruits of victory is never having to apologise).

^

Indeed it says it all that "While the Daily Mail is routinely vilified for its prewar support for the Nazis, The Guardian’s role in cheer-leading for a succession of Marxist tyrants from Mao and Pol Pot to Cas-tro and Mugabe is rarely questioned"

^

Almost teasingly, the Guardian on Saturday had an interview with Castro, where he denies the torture or imprisonment of political dissidents - just those under the command of a "foreign power". Teach me for buying the Guardian doesn't it?

^

So, as Neil Lyndon has suggested, on the 90th anniversary of Lenin's revolution, is it not time to those who cuddled up to murderous brutality to repent and apologise for what is at best a mistake, a worst colluding with oppressors who rivalled and surpassed the Nazis in their violence and totalitarianism.

^

oh and while your at it, point a finger at those who aren't ashamed, and as what they would do with our freedoms given half a chance?

Greens continue to ignore Camp 22

So the Greens had a "day of action against genocide" on Bastille Day.

^

How absolutely disgusting.

^

How dare Metiria Turei claim that current policy on aborigines is akin to the Holocaust, akin to the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians, akin to the Hutu genocide against the Tutsi, akin to Saddam's slaughter of Kurds, akin to Year Zero in Cambodia (not strictly genocide, but was mass murder of people according to a stereotypical group), or even akin to policies towards Aborigines in the 19th century? She diminishes what the word "genocide" means - the deliberate or reckless killing of a large number of people of a particular ethnic group.

^

and how can she remain ignorant of Camp 22, No. 14 Gaechun camp, No. 18 Bukchang camp, No. 15 Yoduk camp, No. 16 Hwasong camp and No. 25 Chongjin camp - all slave labour camps, enslaving children as political prisoners? The silence from the Greens is deafening.

^

So go on, email them all. Start with metiria.turei@parliament.govt.nz and then Jeanette.Fitzsimons@parliament.govt.nz sue.bradford@parliament.govt.nz keith.locke@parliament.govt.nz nandor.tanczos@parliament.govt.nz and sue.kedgley@parliament.govt.nz

^

While you're at it, get Rodney Hide and Heather Roy to support this too, they have every reason to do so. The North Korean gulags are an atrocity that should not be tolerated in the 21st century, and we should not let concern over its nuclear weapons arsenal blind us to this. I don't expect Winston Peters to give a damn as foreign Minister, I mean honestly, you really think MFAT would dare ruffle feathers by allowing him to send a formal protest to Pyongyang about it?

^

More importantly, would those who proclaim NZ's "independent foreign policy" on something as virtually meaningless in real terms as nuclear armed ship visits, want to stick their neck out and have New Zealand demand the closure of North Korea's gulag? If not, why not?

Residents Action Movement invites friend of dictators

Residents' Action Movement or RAM portrays itself as some genuine community based organisation that represents the concerns of the average Aucklander. RAM is anything but.

^

RAM is basically a reborn version of the Alliance, and is nothing short of foaming at the mouth raving socialists. I know this, I spoke to one prominent RAM member on the phone a few years ago who was convinced that tolling the motorway extension north of Orewa was an international capitalist conspiracy whereby Transit, the World Bank and others were going to make big money out of it. This isn't just wrong, it's delusional.

^

This madness is now seen by RAM inviting self-proclaimed fan of the Soviet Union, and former sycophant of Saddam Hussein - George Galloway - to talk about peace.

^

Galloway once said to Saddam Hussein "I salute you", while Iraq was occupying Kuwait. Yes, Galloway warms to peace lovers. The Guardian quotes him saying "Yes, I did support the Soviet Union, and I think the disappearance of the Soviet Union is the biggest catastrophe of my life"- that bastion of peace that invaded all of eastern europe, Afghanistan and waged proxy wars worldwide. In 1999, he met with the murderous rapist Uday Hussein and joked with him. On top of that, Galloway is anti-abortion.

^

Meetings are being held on 27-29 July with Galloway. Perhaps someone who cares about peace would ask him why he met Uday Hussein, and why he misses the Soviet Union, which enslaved people, denied freedom of speech and executed political opponents at will.

^

Galloway is a vile apologist for murderous regimes, meeting Uday for a nice talk given the numerous reports about him (including from the leftwing Guardian) is repulsive. His sympathy for the Soviet Union after all of the horrors committed by it is despicable.

^

It speaks volumes about RAM that it is inviting him, and I hope Aucklanders will note this when they vote later this year.