Prime Minister Harper on communism

Never did I dare to dream I would live long enough to hear a Canadian Prime Minister denounce communism.
Yet this is exactly what has happened: our Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, delivered the following statement at the Holodomor Commemoration Ceremony, in memory of the victims of the communist-initiated policy of genocidal starvation waged against millions in the Ukraine, and elsewhere in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s.

“I am very honoured to join you tonight in this solemn commemoration of the Holodomor. The 20th century was described by Pope John Paul II as the “century of tears.” The world was infected by a lethal combination of utopian ideology and brutal despotism. It spawned totalitarian regimes that enslaved their own peoples and sought to conquer others.

Rarely did dogma and dictatorship combine to more murderous effect than in the regime of the communist tyrant Josef Stalin. Tonight we remember and honour those Ukrainians who suffered horribly during his savage reign. The main instrument of Stalin’s persecution of Ukrainians was collectivization.

The honest and hard-working people who had tilled the rich soil of Eastern Europe successfully for centuries were forced to farm for the Soviet state. By crushing private ownership, initiative, and dignity, collectivization destroyed most of their agricultural production, and the soviets stole the rest. The result was one of the worst famines the world has ever known, millions of men, women and children - mostly Ukrainian, but also some Kazakhs and Russians – died of starvation. Those who refused to yield were slaughtered.

We in Canada are bonded to this dark chapter in human history by more than a million Canadians of Ukrainian descent, many of whom lost loved ones in the Holodomor. And so, all Canadians join us in commemorating this 75th anniversary of the terrible famine of 1932-33. Because what was done to the Ukrainian people was a mortal offence against the values we hold dearest; freedom, democracy, human rights and the rule of law.

Ladies and gentlemen, in remembering these events, we should also never forget the efforts that some made to encourage us to cast aside these values and turn a blind eye to this brutality. Between the two world wars and the long cold war that followed, apologists tried to persuade us that the ideology of communism was benign.

They said we should be neutral towards it – an “honest broker.” They said we should learn to live with it – that we had nothing to fear from the Soviet Empire. Canadians knew better. So we took a stand. We stood for freedom and fundamental human rights. We stood against oppression in Ukraine. We stood with its brave people, and those of the other captive nations of central and Eastern Europe. And when Ukraine won her freedom, we became the first western country to formally recognize her membership in the free world.

Our special kinship with Ukraine was displayed to the world again last month. At UNESCO, Canada proudly co-sponsored the government of Ukraine’s motion honouring the millions who perished in the famine and acknowledging that their deaths were caused by the brutal communist dictatorship of Josef Stalin. That was just the beginning of a year of commemorative events in Canada planned by the Ukrainian Canadian congress.

Our government welcomes and supports these efforts because remembering those who died, and why they died, is our best hope against history repeating itself.”

Why is communism "cool"?

We see them here there and everywhere: CCCP jackets, red star baseball caps, maoist headbands, hammer and sickle t-shirts … Che Guevara, Vladimir Lenin, even chairman Mao, shining like rock stars off of some groupie’s chest.

It is as if communist iconography has suddenly become a fashion trend.

What are people thinking, as they wear these things? Is it an adornment carried with all the innocence one would associate with jolly roger pirate flags? Few who display such skull and crossbones out their apartment windows or inside their vans or upon their belt buckles really fancy themselves genuine pirates, one would imagine. It is just a pose, isn’t it, maybe even a memory of childhood games, similar to playing cops and robbers, where someone has to be the "bad guy" for the play to work.

Of course, there continue to be real pirates in our world, who prey on innocent tradesmen, vacationers and other travelers. Few of the pirate flag-waving folk that we see in our fair city, surely, would ever consider themselves in sympathy with the bloodthirsty thieves lurking today on the high seas… I wonder if the same can be said for those who decorate themselves with the imagery of an even greater evil, that of communist dictatorships.

It may be that the current trend to wear hammer and sickle gear is born from a combination of sheer innocence, and ignorance; that the kids truly have no earthly idea what these images and symbols represent. Maybe they just think that communists, like pirates, have a "bad boy" reputation any rebel would find attractive. That it is to be only a skin-deep costume, soon to be displaced by some other symbol just over the cultural horizon.

I’d still be offended by their shirts, but at least I’d be willing to help rescue their dignity by filling in the obvious gaps in their education. Here is a short video I’ve made to that effect, so that their day of enlightenment may dawn on them faster than it did for me, back when I was a young-skull-full-of-mush collegian, flirting with the eternal lie of leftist ideology: that communism is somehow good for human beings.
Here is why communism is not cool, kids: