Extremist?

I: Introduction

A week or two before I began writing out the first draft of this blog post, I received a snarky comment from an obvious right-winger who described me as an “extremist” Marxist. The comment, since deleted (apart from its snark, it doesn’t deserve to be dignified by being allowed to continue existing, for reasons I’ll go into soon enough), was on my analysis of The Last of Sheila, in which my criticisms of capitalism are far from extremist; though to many right-wingers (the extremists of their camp in particular), any criticisms, even the mildest, are deemed “extremist.”

Granted, he may have also read other blog posts of mine, such as my analysis of Conan the Barbarian, in which I go further in my capitalist critique, and take the obviously controversial position of defending such communist leaders as Stalin and Mao. Now, if my right-wing friend–‘right-wing,’ because only someone of that political persuasion would think that calling me a “commie” is an insult–had made his comment on the Conan post rather than the Sheila one, his labelling of me as an “extremist” might, from a politically mainstream point of view, have at least some validity. Instead, he chose to make his comment on a post with only moderately anti-capitalist remarks.

I must ask: why call me on “extremist” on the Sheila post–if that’s all he’d read of me–and not the Conan one, or any of the many others where I present my admittedly hard-left stance? Since my political position is controversial, I am compelled to back up my arguments with a flood of links. A clue to his choice to be snarky on the Sheila post could be found in a careless error I made in the opening paragraphs (since corrected, naturally, and so for that, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank him): I misspelled Raquel Welch’s surname as “Welsh”…twice! (Oops! I actually made a similar mistake, in my analysis of Tommy, in misspelling Ann-Margret [again, corrected]; I’m going to have to be more careful with future posts!)

Could it be that the only way he could confidently point out a “Gotcha!” was to hit me with a petty spelling mistake? After all, the realm of politics is a nebulous one, in which pointing out the errors of one’s ideological foes isn’t so clear-cut. An appeal to popular opinion, one based on decades of anti-communist propaganda (which, if you’ve read enough of my writing, Dear Reader, you’ll know doesn’t impress me at all), combined with a spelling “Gotcha!”, is apparently the best my butt-hurt commenter could do.

Nonetheless, it seems that it’s time for me once again to defend my political stance, since people like him never stop coming out of the woodwork. So in the following paragraphs, I will attempt not only to justify my defence of Stalin, Mao, and the other socialist leaders, but also to prove that, on the contrary, it is the right-wingers who are the extremists. In fact, given the aggravation of the neoliberal agenda over the past few decades, even defenders of the mainstream liberal status quo can be legitimately called extremist, as I will also try to prove.

II: A General Defence of Socialism

Let’s start by asking and answering a simple question: what does a socialist want? We can then look at the following list of answers and determine whether or not it’s “extremist.”

–the means of production are controlled by the workers
—private property is abolished
–commodities are produced to provide for everyone
—elimination of class differences, leading to…
–…no more centralized state monopoly on power, and…
–…no more money (i.e., replaced with a gift economy)
–an end to imperialism and all the wars it causes
–an end to the huge gap between the rich and the poor
–an end to global hunger in the Third World
–free universal health care
–free education for all, up to university, ending illiteracy
–housing for all
–equal rights for women, people of colour, LGBT people, disabled people
–employment for all, with decent remuneration and hours
–a social safety net in case of job loss

The capitalist is the only one who will find this list of goals objectionable, since implementing it will cut into, if not totally obliterate, his profits. He’ll also rationalize his objection to it by claiming its implementation to be impractical and unrealistic.

Actually, a study of the achievements of the USSR, China under Mao, Cuba, and the other socialist states of the 20th century will show that many, if not most or even all, of these goals were either fully achieved, or at least great progress was made towards achieving them, though you wouldn’t know that to read the lies of the right-wing propagandists who endlessly quack about how “socialism doesn’t work.”

Many workers’ co-ops have been achieved in otherwise capitalist societies, and they have not only survived, but they have often thrived. Private property (factories, farms, office buildings, stores, apartment buildings, real estate, etc.) already isn’t owned by the vast majority of the population; we just want to bump that small percentage down to 0%, so everyone can share all of it. (And no, your toothbrush, cellphone, TV, car, and underwear are not private property–they’re personal possessions. You don’t profit off of them, and you don’t exploit workers with them, so we “commies” don’t want to force you to share them. Please don’t hand me that idiotic argument!)

Capitalism arranges the production of commodities to make profits; communists want them to be made to provide everyone with what he or she needs—how is this a bad thing? Right-wingers claim that we can’t afford to make this change, yet billion-dollar spending in the US military, causing a sky-high deficit, is somehow workable. Our billionaire and centi-billionaire class could use their combined money to feed the world, build schools and hospitals–all well-equipped and with well-trained staff–provide affordable, if not outright free, housing, clean up the Earth, and provide well-paying jobs…but they don’t. They’d rather fly rockets out into space. Small wonder so many of us on the left dream of sticking the heads of the superrich in the guillotine (Egad!…how extremist of me!).

Right-wing libertarians fetishize the elimination of the ever-intrusive state, yet they fail to understand that the whole purpose of government is, as Lenin observed in The State and Revolution, to protect the interests of one class at the expense of the other. Usually, it’s the bourgeoisie whose interests are protected by the state, while the proletariat is held down; only in the socialist states established in the 20th century, the workers’ states, were the classes’ positions reversed. Because such a protection of class interests is the raison d’être of the state, its elimination will be possible only with the elimination of those class differences, which must remain as long as capitalism exists to preserve them. The socialist state exists only as a transitional phase, causing the class differences to fade away, before the state can totally wither away…the libertarian dream, in all irony!

The socialist states of the 20th century were working hard to bring about that withering away of the state; Stalin as a committed Marxist-Leninist wanted to move ahead with that after the end of WWII, except that the reactionary traitors hiding in his government were at work thwarting his plans. These fifth columns within had their equivalents from without: the imperialists, who were doing all in their power to reverse the gains of the socialists and bring back capitalism to the entire world. It wasn’t that Stalin didn’t want the state to wither away, it’s just that internal and external factors made that withering away unattainable in his lifetime.

The evils of modern empire are a particular bane to socialists; for this reason, it isn’t enough just to be a Marxist–one must be a Marxist-Leninist and oppose imperialism, in its US/NATO incarnation ever since 1949 and metastasizing especially since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in late 1991. How is opposing the depredations of empire “extremist”? Was the rebel alliance of Star Wars “extremist”?

III: Aggravation of Class Struggle

We Marxist-Leninists hear this tiresome series of accusations over and over again: the socialist states of the 20th century were tyrannical, totalitarian nightmares to live in; their leaders were psychopathic, genocidal maniacs who lusted after power; and they tried to ram an unattainable, utopian fantasy world down the throats of an unwilling public. Yawn.

When we try to defend our ideology, we are dismissed for spewing “tankie” propaganda against the ‘moderate’ and ‘objective’ historical analysis of mainstream liberals and conservatives. We, apparently, are the biased ones, who can’t accept that ours was ‘the god that failed,’ not them. We, apparently, have an ideological axe to grind, not them. Yawn.

First of all, let’s be fair here: there’s no such thing as objectivity in politics. Those mainstream political analysts very much have an ideological axe of their own to grind, namely, the defence of the class system that privileges them at the expense of the working class and the global poor (the only substantive difference between the liberal and conservative camps of this mainstream is that the former will tolerate more taxes on the rich, while the latter won’t, because the former are more willing to spend on social programs, while the latter are less so).

Second, the neoconservatism/neoliberalism they have been defending (to varying degrees) for the past forty years is also a god that has failed; it is, in fact, a much more failed god than communism could ever have been. Capitalism, particularly in its present form, has been nothing less than an unmitigated disaster. It’s so bad that its defenders insist that it isn’t ‘true capitalism,’ but ‘corporatism,’ for the only true capitalism is the ‘free market.’

Third, anti-communist critics are way too overconfident in the sources they rely on. These sources were the propagandistic product of the Cold War. It’s often said that in any war, hot or cold, the first casualty is the truth. This is especially true of anti-communist Cold War propaganda. History is written by the winners; in fact, in the early 1990s, history was even ‘ended’ by the winners.

Though it isn’t well-known by the general public, most of the sources of anti-communist propaganda are laughably inadequate in terms of facts. I refer to such dubious sources as Robert Conquest, The Black Book of Communism, Mao: The Untold Story, Ayn Rand, George Orwell, Leon Trotsky, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Milovan Djilas, and Nazi propaganda. You can click on the links for criticisms of these various writers, but to put it briefly, they essentially wrote fiction, directly or indirectly, literally or metaphorically.

My fourth and final, but by far most important, point is that none of the above writers’ critiques adequately, if at all, take into consideration the enormous pressures put on the socialist states to restore capitalism, making revolution to have been all in vain. Capitalists disingenuously claim that their economic system involves no coercion: if you don’t like your job, you can quit and find another (no thought is given to the fact that for most workers, almost every other job they’re qualified for, if it’s even available, is hardly any better, and often worse…some choice!). Socialism, apparently, has a monopoly on state coercion.

Such an obtuse generalization ignores the history of 20th century socialism right from its inception in the Russian Revolution, almost immediately after which came the Russian Civil War, during which armies from all over invaded Russia in an abortive attempt to force capitalism back on the Russian workers and peasants.

Now, Russia won that war, but at great cost. Not only did many on their side die from the war, but also of starvation resulting from the war’s privation and from another of pre-industrial Russia’s many bad harvests. These are the kinds of difficulties that force many communist parties to become authoritarian: with the threat of future invasions or other forms of counterrevolutionary subterfuge, leaders like the Bolsheviks found it necessary to end all sectarian bickering to ensure the steady sailing of the Soviet ship through treacherous waters.

An article on Stalin I found in the bourgeois media, which is of course heavily biased against him (and against Putin, by the way), nonetheless has the surprising decency to acknowledge how misunderstood he’s always been. It admits that, contrary to popular belief, Stalin wasn’t motivated by a mad lust for power (he incidentally tried to resign as General Secretary four times), but was genuinely committed to implementing Marxism-Leninism. (It also acknowledges that the death count of the Great Purge of the mid-to-late 1930s was far lower than the right-wing propagandists would have us believe.)

The article acknowledges the genuine fear that Stalin and the Soviets had of more attempts by the international bourgeoisie to restore capitalism, either by force or by cunning, but what the article gets wrong (or…what it fabricates?) is that these fears were largely unfounded. Just because the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union wouldn’t happen until 1941 doesn’t mean the Russian communists had little, if anything, to fear during the intervening years. The failure of European socialist revolutions in the late 1910s and early 1920s was the tip of the iceberg.

Socialism in One Country, an idea that started not with Stalin but had precedence in Lenin, meant focusing, for the time being, on a defence of the USSR against the very real possibility of future invasions. For fascism, a true form of violent political extremism and an outgrowth of capitalism, was emerging not only in Italy and Germany but also in a number of other European countries in the 1920s and 1930s.

Fascism, properly understood, is the ugly face of capitalism, once the liberal veil of politeness has been removed. Capitalists only pretend to care about freedom and democracy; as long as their class interests are secure, they wear the liberal smile. Threaten the security of their class privileges, though, as the Soviet Union had done in the early 1920s, and the capitalists get tough–hence, fascism.

Such contradictions as that between communism and fascism necessitate the aggravation of class struggle. This inevitably leads to communist leaders having to make harsh decisions. These harsh decisions, in turn, have a distorting effect on socialism.

If we had our way, unimpeded, we communists would just have focused on realizing that list of goals I outlined above at the beginning of Part II. The global bourgeoisie, however, has to this day been so relentless in forcing the imperialist agenda on everyone, thwarting almost all attempts at socialist gains, that we’re forced to react to their extreme. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction: capitalist harshness results in communist harshness. In my heart, I don’t like violence; but it isn’t a question of liking it–we simply have no choice in the matter.

It is naïvely assumed that the unjust executions of the Great Purge were the responsibility of Stalin, whose ‘stubborn’ devotion to ‘utopia’ wouldn’t tolerate mere ‘political dissent.’ Speaking of traitors and conspiracies conjures up images of a paranoid Soviet government. It’s paranoia, however, only if the suspicions are ill-founded.

First of all, the bulk of the unjust imprisonments and executions of the Great Purge were not Stalin’s fault, but were rather the fault of the likes of Nikolai Yezhov, the quisling head of the NKVD whose treasonous persecution of innocent Soviets and pardoning of genuine traitors wasn’t even realized by Stalin (who as leader of the gigantic USSR couldn’t be expected to have omniscience over the goings-on of every department to which he’d delegated authority) until much later.

Capitalists narcissistically assume most people agree with them, and so the ‘victims of communism’ are supposedly just regular people. Of those punished legitimately for counterrevolution, these capitalist sympathizers–kulaks, Trotskyists, crypto-Nazis, etc.–were actually a small percentage of the Soviet population, and they were genuine traitors and enemies not just of the Soviet leadership, but also of the working class and peasants of the entire USSR.

Kulaks, resisting the necessary collectivization of agriculture, were hoarding grain and killing livestock during the famine of the early 30s. In other words, they were assholes who deserved punishment. Trotsky was such a power-hungry, narcissistic piece of shit that he actually wanted to enlist the aid of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan just to oust Stalin. As a Jew, Trotsky should have been purple-faced with shame; don’t expect me to feel sorry for him for getting that blow to the head with Mercader‘s ice-axe.

Could you even begin to imagine what would have happened if the fifth column sneaking around in the USSR, pretending to be good communists, had succeeded in their conspiracy? Something far worse than the injustices of the Yezhovshchina would have happened: a successful Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union would have dwarfed the 27 million Soviet deaths that actually occurred in WWII.

Nazis would have carried out an ongoing enslavement, brutalizing, and genocide of Slavs, an ethnic group Nazis hated on a level comparable with their hatred of Jews. Stalin’s unflinching leadership, indefatigably pushing for industrialization to build and prepare the Red Army for the upcoming Nazi menace, not only prevented such a horrifying alternative, but also saved Europe from fascism.

Normally, people get called heroes for doing things like that.

The justification for the aggravation of class struggle doesn’t end with the Soviet Union, though. North Korea got bombed to the Stone Age in the early 1950s, giving the Kims more than legitimate reason to begin a nuclear weapons program to prevent the US from ever mass murdering them again. Cuba has suffered an economic embargo ever since the 1960s. China has endured a similar embargo and military threats from the West, justifying their nuclear arms program begun by the beginning of the 1960s. Just after having repelled the French colonialists, Vietnam had to endure such horrors of American imperialism as napalm. The CIA helped the right-wing dictator Suharto murder up to a million Indonesians, regardless of whether they were actual communists or just suspected ones. These are just a few examples of imperialist atrocities that get far too little mention in the bourgeois media.

IV: Voting Doesn’t Work

Many will wonder, given the violent, forcible nature of revolution, why people like me won’t simply opt for voting for a leftist political party. After all, isn’t revolution by its very nature extremist, and voting the moderate, reasonable solution to today’s political ills?

Please refer back to the title of this section for an answer.

Bourgeois democracy is nothing more than an illusion that voters have a choice in who will lead the country. Even if the most radical of candidates is voted in, he or she will never challenge the essential class structure of society. This illusion of democracy is one of a myriad of techniques that the ruling class will use to keep the masses at bay. The face of capitalism has a liberal smile, a libertarian sneer, and a fascist scowl. When the people finally see past the illusion and fight in the streets for change, that smile turns upside-down and we see the ruling class in all their repressive ugliness.

The death-grip that the American ruling class has on their country is so tight that a mere social democrat like Bernie Sanders hasn’t a prayer of winning the Democratic candidacy, let alone getting elected so he can have a chance at enacting his only modestly progressive reforms. He is, however, useful to the ruling class as a kind of liberal lasso to throw around the necks of the more gullible of the progressive camp; when he loses to the likes of Hillary or Biden, enough of these gullible types will be expected to vote for such hucksters, leading often enough to a victory for the DNC.

On the right side of the aisle, someone like Trump can pretend to campaign for change, not being part of the Republican political establishment. Still, he’s a member of the billionaire class, and anyone with a modicum of understanding of class analysis will know that, even though Trump opened his big mouth a lot and blurted out comments to embarrass the American political establishment (the real reason they hate him), he could still be counted on to keep the political status quo essentially the same (e.g., bipartisan, billion-dollar military spending, corporate tax cuts, pro-Zionism, anti-immigrant policies, etc.).

In Canada, Justin Trudeau speaks with all the usual politically correct liberal verbiage, but commits the usual imperialist and neoliberal crimes, too (e.g., giving haven to Ukrainian fascists, putting a gas pipeline through aboriginal land, selling weapons to Israel to kill Palestinians, and to Saudi Arabia so they can kill more Yemenis, etc.). I call my country’s prime minister “Turdeau” for a reason.

No, voting won’t make the necessary political changes; recall how the Russian people’s attempt to vote back in the communist party was thwarted by the American ruling class in 1996. Mao meant it when he said “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” and “revolution is not a dinner party.” We cannot expect the capitalist class to allow us to legislate them out of their wealth.

Class war is not a mere excuse for communists to engage in “extremist” acts; class war is a reality. The capitalist class has been winning this war over the past forty years, and they’re continuing to win this war as we speak. In fact, they started the whole class war by taking over from where our feudal lords had left off: it is now up to us “extremist” communists to end this war.

V: Utopians?

Right-wing propagandists often say that we socialists are dreaming of an impossible-to-attain utopia, rather than the truth, which is that we’re trying to make life better for everyone, as good as is humanly possible. In this way of presenting a straw-man argument, right wingers are, however unwittingly, exposing their own black-and-white thinking: either we accept the total shit, TINA world of capitalism, or we fantasize of a perfect world…what utter nonsense.

Marx had already made it clear in The Communist Manifesto that there is a difference between utopian and scientific socialism, of which we communists espouse the latter. Marx says, ‘The significance of Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism bears an inverse relation to historical development. In proportion as the modern class struggle develops and takes definite shape, this fantastic standing apart from the contest, these fantastic attacks on it lose all practical value and all theoretical justification. Therefore, although the originators of these systems were, in many respects, revolutionary, their disciples have, in every case, formed mere reactionary sects. They hold fast by the original views of their masters, in opposition to the progressive historical development of the proletariat. They, therefore, endeavour and that consistently, to deaden the class struggle and to reconcile the class antagonisms. They still dream of experimental realization of their social Utopias, of founding isolated “phalanstères,” of establishing “Home Colonies,” of setting up a “Little Icaria“—duodecimo editions of the New Jerusalem, and to realize all these castles in the air, they are compelled to appeal to the feelings and purses of the bourgeois. By degrees they sink into the category of the reactionary conservative Socialists depicted above, differing from these only by more systematic pedantry, and by their fanatical and superstitious belief in the miraculous effects of their social science.

‘They, therefore, violently oppose all political action on the part of the working class; such action, according to them, can only result from blind unbelief in the new Gospel.’ (Marx, III: Socialist and Communist Literature, 3. Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism)

We don’t merely dream of a perfect world, violently take over countries, then ‘force’ our unattainable ideals on a largely unwilling public. Like scientists, we thoroughly scrutinize the inner workings of capitalism (as Marx did in his three volumes of Capital), we examine the dialectical shifts in history (as Marx did, and as Stalin did), and we analyze how the drive to seek out new markets in foreign countries leads to imperialist competition and war (as Lenin did in Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism).

After communist revolution, state-planned economies are set up to replace the profit motive with a system that benefits everyone. Some changes in the way of doing things succeed, while others fail; when failure occurs, we adjust our methods to see if things go better; if not, we adjust them again and again until we succeed. This is the scientific method applied to socialism, hence “scientific socialism.” We’re not dreaming, we’re doing. The black-and-white capitalist mentality imagines that “socialism doesn’t work”; the nuanced, dialectically-minded socialist admits, “Socialism has had problems, but it has also had many successes.”

Let’s look at some of those successes, starting with the Soviet Union. The Bolsheviks started with a huge area of land that was, by modern standards, backward: mostly agrarian, with peasants living off the land, without electricity or modern farming technology. Thanks to such efforts as Stalin‘s three Five-Year Plans, the Soviets industrialized and transformed that backward part of the world into a modern, nuclear-armed superpower by the time of his death…a time period of about two and a half decades!

Such an achievement is nothing short of impressive, yet when you come to think about it, it makes perfect sense: people can do amazing things when they all help each other, which is a lot more than when they slavishly work for one egomaniac at the top who overworks and underpays them, then takes almost all of the credit for the success of that work.

Elsewhere, we can find the achievements of Cuba, which took an island controlled by a right-wing dictator, infested with prostitution, illiteracy, and poverty, and transformed it into one with the best health care in the Third World (even sending doctors to people in need in countries around the world), with housing and education for everyone. This has all been achieved in spite of the strangling economic embargo imposed on Cuba since the 1960s.

China’s transformation from the ‘sick man of Asia’ to the second-largest economy in the world has been a rocky one, but ultimately just as sure a one as the two others just mentioned. Though things started out badly with the Great Leap Forward (the wildly exaggerated death toll of which was mainly the fault of a bad harvest; and if the right-wing propagandists want to emphasize bad policy decisions of the CPC as having exacerbated the problem, we can respond by saying the American economic blockade against China, hoping to help bring about the Sino-Soviet split, was also a factor), eventually the industrialization and modernization of China has worked out beautifully.

The CPC has lifted millions of Chinese out of extreme poverty, and regardless of how leftists choose to think of ‘Socialism with Chinese characteristics,’ one cannot deny that the country’s transformation over the past forty years is yet another impressive example of the superiority of state planning over the anarchy and chaos of the “free market.”

Finally, though the Nordic Model of the Scandinavian countries, and the social democracy of Venezuela and Bolivia, are not socialism as it’s properly understood in the Marxist-Leninist sense, the success of their free healthcare, free education, and other social programs is proof that the achievement of these progressive ideas is far from being a pipe dream. The capitalists are just too greedy and selfish to be willing to let them succeed, hence all the imperialist attempts to sabotage the efforts of the left-wing governments in places like Latin America.

VI: Fascism

In the previous sections, I went over the contrast between the good intentions, the goals, of socialism, and the pressures placed on socialist governments that had a distorting effect on them, forcing them to take on authoritarian measures they’d never have wanted to take on had the imperialists left them alone. Let us now contrast left-wing intentions with right-wing ones.

What do fascists want? Let’s list their goals:
–strengthening one’s nation against foreign influence
–imperial conquest of foreign nations to achieve the above end
—class collaboration
–use of violence to achieve the above ends
–national chauvinism, bigotry, and xenophobia
–a strong, authoritarian state to achieve these ends
–achievement of all the above ends to safeguard capitalism from socialist revolution

Put another way, fascism is capitalism, nationalism, and authoritarianism gone mad. Fascism is extremist…and it never really went away at the end of WWII.

Though some Nazis were punished during the Nuremberg trials (really, little more than just a show to placate the many victims of Nazi murder), many more Nazis were not only left unpunished, but were actually given prominent jobs in the American and West German governments to help the capitalists fight the Cold War.

Matters got so tense between East and West Germany during the 1950s and early 60s that, to avoid war, the Berlin Wall was erected. The East German name of the wall gives a hint as to its real intention: The Antifascist Protection Wall. It wasn’t so much about ‘trapping’ anticommunists and preventing them from defecting, as the right-wing propagandists would have you believe (although a legitimate wish to prevent brain-drain was part of the reason); it was about keeping fascist spies out of the GDR.

Fascism has continued to pop up in various forms over the years. I mentioned above the Canadian accommodation of Ukrainian fascists, who have revived such ahistorical forms of Nazi propaganda as the Holodomor hoax, a canard spread through Hearst‘s fake news, and later spread by that liar, Robert Conquest.

My analysis of Conan the Barbarian (link above) highlighted the fascist/right-wing libertarian agenda of the film-makers, who even did Nazi salutes on the set; and incidentally, my aim in writing up that analysis was not ‘to prove’ a right-wing agenda so obvious to any film analyst, and subtle only to those moviegoers who pay no attention to themes and symbolism, watching it for mere entertainment; my intention was to demonstrate the film’s social effects, the dangerous allure of subliminal fascist symbolism.

Indeed, many of the slanders directed against socialism have Nazi origins. Consider the ridiculous conspiracy theories of Wall Street and Jacob Schiff supposedly supporting the Bolsheviks, of “Judeo-Bolshevism,” and the like. Why would a capitalist bastion like Wall Street support anticapitalist revolutionaries, just because of some bigoted nonsense about “the Jews”? Schiff was an anti-tsarist and Zionist, not a communist.

Another slander thrown on communists was the Katyn massacre, which when disregarding the ‘official’ narrative, and being researched thoroughly, leads to who I’d say were the real perpetrators: though Soviets did execute some Polish soldiers (no women or children!), presumably for having committed certain crimes, the killers at Katyn were in all probability the very Nazis who slandered the Soviets. (People have, at least, shown the decency to admit that the similar massacre in Volodymyr-Volynskyi was indeed perpetrated by the Nazis, and not by the NKVD).

To be fair, it’s hard to take a firm line on what happened when the evidence is so foggy and often contradictory. Still, we need at the very least to consider the political agenda of the ‘official’ version every bit as much as that of the Soviet self-defence. It’s interesting how those who found the bodies were Nazi murderers who (reliable of sources!) blamed it on the Soviets, then the Soviets said it was the Nazis who did it, and now, in our neoliberal, increasingly fascist-sympathizing era…apparently, it was the Soviets after all! (When Gorbachev, of all people, is corroborating a Nazi accusation, we shouldn’t be too trusting of the sources.)

Yet another attempt at moral equivalency between fascism and communism is the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact over Poland in 1939. I’ll let the links give you the details, but to make a long story short, many non-aggression pacts were made between the capitalist West and the fascists (i.e., Munich), Stalin never got chummy with Hitler (the epic fighting between their two armies that ensued soon after should be enough to prove the point), and their pact bought Stalin some needed time to get ready for the inevitable Nazi invasion of the USSR.

VII: Who Are the Real Extremists?

You might have noticed, Dear Reader, a recurring theme in this blog post: the creeping emergence of fascism, a true form of extremism. As I said above, it never went away; the loss of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy was a mere setback.

Such things as Operation Paperclip, anticommunist propaganda disseminated throughout the Cold War era, Operation Gladio, Canadian accommodation of Ukrainian fascists, White Nationalism, and “MAGA” are all manifestations of one form or another, be they more subtle or more blatant, of a resurgence of fascism, the kind of thing I saw an allegory of in my analysis of The Boys from Brazil.

Fascism, however, is only the tip of the iceberg. Other reactionary elements in the politics of the past forty years, generally deemed more ‘moderate,’ are also helping to push our world in an extremist direction.

In my Conan analysis, I discussed how right-wing libertarianism, though not identical with fascism, is on a continuum that inevitably leads to it. Indeed, it is common for libertarians to slide over to fascism, or to at least a sympathy for it. Now, who are the extremists?

The past forty years has been a shift rightwards from libertarian origins (i.e., Reagan and Thatcher) to at least fascist tendencies (e.g., Trump, Bolsonaro, Marine Le Pen‘s near-win, etc.). The DNC, having always been bourgeois in spite of the right’s idiotic characterization of it as “socialist,” moved particularly to the right during the Clinton years, a move continued by Obama and Biden.

Indeed, liberals—never a group to be trusted by us on the left–have moved dangerously to the right in recent years. They’ve supported Democratic politicians who have been banging the war drums against nuclear-armed Russia and China, against the former because they were sore losers over Hillary’s loss to Trump in 2016, spreading a spurious accusation of Russian meddling in the election.

It should be common sense that we don’t want to start WWIII, which could easily turn nuclear and wipe out all life on the planet. We communists, in direct contrast to the liberals and conservatives, want peace with Russia and China. We’ve always wanted peace: the first thing the Bolsheviks did on seizing power in the November revolution was to get out of WWI. We’ve generally fought wars only because we had to, as the Soviet Union did when the US was helping the fundamentalist mujahideen thwart attempts to make Afghanistan socialist. Look at the mess that country is in now.

I ask again: who are the extremists now?

People need to be reminded that reality isn’t fixed in a state of rigid stasis: reality is fluid, ever-changing from one state of being to another; this is why we Marxists are dialecticians. What seems moderate now can become extreme later, and vice versa. Thirty to forty years ago, communism was almost universally regarded (by me, too, back then!) as extreme; now, more and more people are reconsidering socialism. Libertarianism was seen as moderate back then; now that we’re in the death-grip of neoliberal privatization, austerity, and extreme wealth inequality, the so-called “free market” is clearly understood to be not all that free. History is repeating itself.

Unlike the paranoid Nazi notion of “the Jews” being the root of all evil, the communist notion of imperialism is a very real evil, one especially evident over the past thirty years, since the catastrophic dissolution of the Soviet Union, something most Russians never wanted.

Without the USSR to demonstrate a real alternative to capitalism, not only could neoliberalism thrive unchecked, but the US/NATO imperialists could do anything they wanted with impunity. Despite promises made to Gorbachev that a reunified Germany would not result in a NATO move eastward, such a move very much resulted, starting quite soon.

In the nineties, they took Yugoslavia. The demonizing of Milošević was used to justify regime change there, which would become a major foreign policy tactic of the US and/or NATO. 9/11 gave a perfect rationalization to start carving up the Middle East and thereabouts, hence, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and all the US military activity in Africa. Killing, killing, killing.

Who are the extremists? I ask again.

Added to the extremism of imperialist war is the lukewarm effort to deal with climate change. The US military is the worst polluter of them all, the “free market” allows deregulation so corporations can pollute the earth, the sky, and the water with impunity, while we the common people are expected to reverse the problem with such puny measures as using paper straws. On top of this, our anti-covid masks are littering the earth everywhere.

The best that bourgeois liberals can do to warn us of the dangers of climate change is to film a tepid and occasionally-funny satire, Don’t Look Up, in which the metaphor for the ecological disaster is a comet hitting the Earth. Meanwhile, Leonardo DiCaprio may have ditched his private jet to fly to COP26, but why does the pro-environmentalist have a private jet in the first place?

So, we have endless imperialist wars escalating to a very possible nuclear WWIII, and foot-dragging responses to climate change…hmm. Note also how the green capitalism of Musk’s Tesla had the motive for the Bolivian coup…lithium. What are the roots of these extremist problems?…capitalism. The endless search for profit causing not only so much suffering, but also threatening our planet’s very survival.

But apparently, Marxists are the extremists…I see.

VIII: Conclusion

In previous posts, I made the analogy of a runaway train racing to a cliff where the bridge is out; I used this analogy to describe our current political dangers. For the sake of argument, I’ll say that we see the train shooting from left to right. After all, this train represents capitalism.

Of all the passengers on the train, the right-wingers are walking or running to the front. The liberals are staying in their seats. Moderate progressives are walking to the back. Anarchists are walking faster to the back. We Marxist-Leninists, however, are running as fast as we can to the back, then jumping off the last car.

We aren’t extremists. We’re reacting to today’s extremism in the only appropriate way.