Left Turns On The Red Streets Of France

When I first moved to Vancouver I was struck by the street names of my new home. Some were named after battles of the Crimean War (“Alma St”, “Balaclava St”) and others from sources taken from British military history (“Trafalgar St”, “Hornby St”, “Bleinheim St”), attesting to the city’s ties to Mother England. There were several colorful names (“Dunsmuir St”, “Trutch St”, “Robson St”, “Cambie St”) that I would soon learn had their origin in local BC history. The city map itself provided a fun history lesson for this new guest, and I used it as a guide for more than just my navigation needs: it also gave me a sense of the history, the culture, the values, of my new home.

Fast forward to more recent times, and a revelation that occurred while blogging at Covenant Zone.

In what feels like another life, I used to blog regularly on the urban violence rocking France’s fractious suburbs. Early on I especially needed to rely upon internet maps to help me situate the scenes of the latest crimes I would read about, since “Seine-St-Denis” and “Clichy-sous-Bois” were place names I wasn’t yet familiar with.

I couldn’t help but notice that the neighborhoods I was researching seemed to contain several streets with familiar names indeed. I remember the first time this happened: “Avenue Salvador Allende?”, I read aloud from the tiny text on my computer screen. “The socialist Salvador Allende from Chile..? Well, France does have a left-leaning history…”

I didn’t know the half of it. Lately I’ve been indulging in some armchair traveling through the streets of Paris and its environs, thinking up historical personages and historical events and seeing if there's someone commemorating them in Paris' "banlieus rouges" ["red suburbs"]. Here’s a picturesque report highlighting the surprises that were in store for me, courtesy of GoogleMaps' mesmerizing street view feature.

What can we learn about a city, a people, from the names they choose for their streets? Let's take a left turn through the streets of some of the "sensitive zones" of suburban France, and look for some clues...

20 Years After The Fall Of The Berlin Wall, Why Is Communism Still "Cool"?

"Let us never forget Nov. 9, 1989, nor the sacrifices that made it possible," said President Obama today in his reflection on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

And let us never forget the evil that raised that wall in the first place, the evil that continues to enslave so many with tragically false promises of peace and prosperity. One wall down, but many more still to go, many nations still prisons, many souls trapped within -- with so few hammer blows being raised to rescue them, and no shortage of masons willing to raise the walls higher still.

"Communism is the death of the soul. It is the organization of total conformity - in short, of tyranny - and it is committed to making tyranny universal."
__Adlai Stevenson

Warning: the following video has some graphic content, though nothing obscene... unless you want to count the willful ignorance and moral callousness that keeps people believing that communism is "cool".

Friday Fare

As the gate swings shut on another week, we pause for some news before strolling into a pleasant weekend.

Unaware: Jonah Goldberg on President Obama's "shortcuts" comment from this week's press conference, about Churchill not using torture. "Churchill and Great Britain didn't quite take the firm stand against 'torture' that Obama and [Andrew] Sullivan suggest."

Unwelcome: Polish minister plans to extend law prohibiting the production of fascist and totalitarian propaganda so that it includes clothing and anything else that could carry an image related to an authoritarian system.

"The proposal, which could see the faces of some of the leading lights of communist history such as Lenin and Trotsky removed from t-shirts and flags, reflects a Polish view on communism far different from the rose-tinted and romantic images often found in the West.
After experiencing 40 hard years of communism, as well as the horrors of Nazi occupation, few Poles have qualms equating under law the inequities of Nazism and communism.
"Communism was a terrible, murderous system that claimed millions of lives," said Professor Wojciech Roszkowski, a leading Polish historian and member of the European parliament.
"It was very similar to National Socialism, and there is no reason to treat those two systems, and their symbols, differently. Their glorification should be prohibited.' "

Uncivilized: Media reform, taliban-style. "Any media personnel engaged in ‘anti-Taliban’ and ‘pro-western’ agendas will face dire consequences, according to the militants. After bombing schools, barbershops and CD stores — not to mention flogging and killing civilians — the Taliban have now announced their intention to ‘reform’ the media and make it ‘mend its ways’...
‘It is the duty of the media to give space and time to statements which have a positive impact on society.’ "

Unshackled: Students in 3 Washington state schools raise tens of thousands of dollars to free 120 slaves from bondage, through the International Justice Mission.

The teens in this well-to-do suburban area have learned about families working in brick kilns in India and brothels in Cambodia where children their own age — and even younger — are sold into slavery.
"I count my blessings, because they're in such a bad place," said eighth-grader Nellie Hoehl, one of Ensey's students at Pine Lake Middle School.
...
For 10 weeks this spring, about 50 students arrived at school early each Wednesday to paint signs, write letters, sell concert tickets and plan collection dates to raise money for the IJM. That work is going on right now, and ends May 14.
"Everybody talks about it, even when it's not fundraising time," said eighth-grader Angela Moran.
...
It's even changed the way they think about money when they go shopping.
"Every time I go to buy something," said eighth-grader Casey Kovarik, "I think there's something better I could do with the money."

Will Japan Become The Next France..?

Is an 80-year old novel, and the best-selling comic book adaptation of it, influencing a generation of Japanese youth to embrace the waiting arms of Japan's communist party?

What many young Japanese view as an erosion of their economic security and employment rights, combined with years of political stagnation, are propelling droves of them into the arms of the Japanese Communist Party (JCP), the nation's fourth largest political party.

New recruits are signing up at the rate of 1,000 a month, swelling its ranks to more than 415,000. Meanwhile a classic proletarian novel is at the top of the best-seller lists, and communist-themed "manga" comics are enjoying soaring success.
...
And the job losses, financial insecurity and social dissatisfaction that are expected to go hand in hand with the current global credit crisis are expected to increase the ranks of the party further.
Spearheading the lurch to the Left are young Japanese in their twenties and thirties, who have become increasingly disillusioned with changes to employment laws which they blame for creating a climate of insecurity.
...
The [communist] party's charismatic chairman, Kazuo Shii, triggered a rush of new recruits with a rousing parliamentary speech attacking the "exploitation" of young workers, which has become cult viewing among young Japanese on video websites.
...
Another sign of the growing allure of the Left is the sudden surge in popularity of a classic Japanese novel, Kanikosen - the Crab-Canning Ship ­- about embattled factory workers who rise up against their capitalist oppressors.

Nearly eight decades after it was written by Takiji Kobayashi, a communist who was tortured to death for his political beliefs aged 29, its sales have leapt from a slow annual trickle of 5,000 to 507,000 so far this year, unexpectedly catapulting it to the top of the nation's bestseller lists.

A "manga" comic book depicting the same Marxist tale is also winning over young Japanese, with 200,000 copies sold in a year. Kosuke Maruo, editor at East Press, which publishes the manga version, said: "The story succeeds in representing very vividly the situation of the so-called working poor today.

"They cannot become happy and they cannot find the solution to their poverty, however hard they work. Young people who are forced to work for very low wages today may have a feeling that they are in a similar position to the crew of Kanikosen." Kyudo Takahashi, 31, a freelance writer from Tokyo, attributed the popularity of the story to a growing sense of displacement among his generation.

"Kanikosen was a textbook in school but we didn't read it seriously then," he said. "Now, we're reading it again because we're frustrated with the government.

"In the book, people are exploited again and again. They are not treated like humans, more like cows at a hamburger factory. That is how many people feel today. When we find work, someone is always exploiting us. We cannot feel secure about the future."

As we grow older, and live to see the death of our family and friends, humility should teach us that a tragic vision of life includes the reality that there can be no guarantees. People aren't perfect, therefore the systems they build, being imperfect extentions of their imperfect selves, will be flawed in their turn. People's reasonings, attitudes, and judgments, are as likely to fail as the light within them is likely to one day flicker, and dim. One day the candle goes out for each of us, in one way or another.

In a culture haunted by the specter of Karoshi , "death from overwork", lurking at one extreme, it is probably a natural, human reaction to swing to the opposite extreme, in order to perceive to be re-balancing the material world. They also see an emptiness within themselves and seek to fill it, they take their own lack of faith and project it onto the population as a whole, hoping that the state may bring about a new man, one filled with faith in his fellow men, that each shall share willingly of the fullness of their abilities, to each according to the least of their needs... or else.

Who decides these needs, or the extent of these abilities, who is the new super-man with sufficient brilliance that his light of reason will never fade? Who is this infallible God walking the earth whose will is forged of such perfect wisdom that it should replace our own? I can only hope the marxist Japanese start asking themselves the same questions that I once asked of myself, when I threw away my red books and false hopes in a rising sun that would shine on new men... that they start learning how to love the flawed fool they see in their mirror, and teach him how to put faith in himself.

France's Counter-Culture At Work

Truepeers' post earlier today on the undercover che guevara rescue squad reminded me of a heartening video I had originally linked to way back in November of 2006: "spooking France's che guevara fans".

This hilarious 2-part outing features France's true counter-culture movement, the satirists of LaBAf ["La Brigade de l'Argent des Français", "the Brigade of the money of the french"], who stand up to their nation's moral and cultural decline with courage and a sense of humor.

(Speaking of courage, you may have already seen their work through the famous February 2006 video they made during the Danish mohammed cartoon madness, facing down a veritable army of homophobic islamists marching down the streets of Paris, and being secreted away by undercover french police before they could be lynched by the frenzied mob.)

Back in late October 2006, the freedom fighters of LaBAF confronted che guevara's cult of true believers on the streets of Paris, dropping a few historical facts about the icon of amnesiac leftists, all of which were news to his devoted groupies. The result of this crash course education was chronicled in a fun two-part video.

Will che's followers see the light, convert, and accept to wear LaBAF's anti-che t-shirts instead? Watch the videos and see!

The suspense, like che guevara himself, will kill you...

(French video but with english subtitles provided by LaBaf)

Part 1:



Part 2:

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.”

Those who forget the past…

... are condemning us all to repeat it.

Back in May we reported on the results of a recent poll of Swedish teenagers, whose high school education caused 40% of them to conclude that communism had somehow increased prosperity in the world. 90% of the teens didn't even know what the soviet concentration camps, the gulags, were.

You would think, that if anyone in the world would understand the evil of communism as it is actually practiced, compared to the fantasies promised in speeches, books and classrooms, it would be the people who had directly suffered, generation after generation, under its grinding yoke: the Russians.

You would think that, and yet according to a new poll released by the Yuri Levada Centre, you would be wrong.

When asked if Stalin was a wise leader, half of the 1,802 respondents, aged from 16 to 19, agreed he was. "Fifty-four percent agreed that Stalin did more good than bad," said Theodore Gerber, a sociologist from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "Forty-six percent disagreed with the statement that Stalin was a cruel tyrant."
...
"What we find troubling is that there is a substantial proportion of young people in Russia today who hold positive or ambivalent views on Stalin and his legacy," Gerber said. "We think it would probably be more appropriate if there was more condemnation of the Stalin era."
The poll showed 17 percent of the young people disagreed that Stalin was responsible for the imprisonment, torture and execution of millions of innocent people, while 40 percent thought his role in the repression had been exaggerated.

It shames me to admit it, but I used to be a proto-communist myself, many years ago. Thank God, I escaped its seductive charm, through a blessed combination of personal life experiences involving working closely with other people, and a lifelong fascination for studying history. There is such a stark disconnect between the glories that are promised under communism, and the awful nightmares that history reveal to be the inevitable realities of actually living under a communist system. Surely only a dishonest, or lazy, mind would fail to see this colossal disconnect, and continue to place faith in its promised utopias.

It's not "cool" to be stupid... is it?

In the case of Russia, the evils of communism unleashed nightmares statistically close to that of the two large-scale wars that ravaged the nation twice in the first half of the 20th century.
World War I: the carnage of trench warfare, the sinful arrogance of officers wasting untold lives by relying on outdated battlefield tactics in ignorance of modern military technology.
3,311,000 russians, soldiers as well as civilians, were killed in World War I; yet approx 8-9 million russians were killed during Lenin's rule following the war.
World War II: the nazis viewed the slavs as sub-human opponents, and their approach to warfare on the eastern front reflected that philosophy, causing the "great patriotic war" to become "generally accepted as being the most costly conflict in human history".
23,600,000 russians, soldiers as well as civilians, were killed in World War II; yet approx 20,000,000 russians were killed under Stalin's rule, up to and then after the war. (that number is averaged from several sources; totals are all over the map for deaths under Stalin. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, author of The Gulag Archipelago, as one example, claims a total of 60,000,000 killed!)

Maybe one of these days this kind of information can be taught in schools...

I wish it had been taught to me in my school.

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:

Communists hunt Laotian natives like animals

I see many young people these days wearing CCCP and hammer and sickle insignias on t-shirts and baseball caps, and I can't help but ask: what in the world is wrong with you?? Don't you **know** the depths of the evil that you are celebrating with your choice of apparel?

We don't have to open dusty history books to chronicle the horrors perenially part of any communist occupation of a nation, we can point to their actions TODAY and wonder why this is allowed to happen.

Here's a nightmare that, hopefully, can shame the kool kommie kids back to a more balanced point of view, getting them to put aside their red flags and (blood) red dreams and pursue a more humane approach to human rights.

From the Huntington News comes this story of a film documenting oppression of Indiginous Hmong Laotians by the communist government of Laos being successfully screened-- despite a cancellation demanded by Vietnam:

The 6th session of the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues [PFII] is held in the United Nations Headquarters and announced a record of participation by governments, UN agencies, Indigenous representatives and NGOs, over 2500 participants are attending.
...
"How can an UN agency, the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, obey one member state -- to hinder our voices to be heard, I can not understand this," said Kue Xiong, preseident of the Lao Human Rights Council, one of the sponsors of the other special event which got cancelled upon request by the Vietnamese Mission to the UN.
"We come here because we thought that one of the mandates of the PFII is to raise awareness and to disseminate information on Indigenous peoples, but I see only a silent wall, and no letter to us with a formal explanation why it was cancelled," he said...
...
One of the films, "Hunted Like Animals," covers rights abuses documented by Huntington News Network with reporting by Rebecca Sommer and others. The film, produced with the support of the US-based Hmong-Lao community, documents the systematic military aggression against the Hmong ethnic minority hiding in the jungles of Laos, and the reasons why thousands of Hmong from the jungle fled to Thailand. ... “Even though the UN has no access to the over 7700 current Hmong refugees in the camp, and no access to the conflict areas inside Laos — this film brings the words and testimonies of the Hmong Lao out to everyone,” Sommer told HNN.
...
Additional High-8 footage, shot and narrated by Hmong hiding in the jungles of Laos, is interwoven into the film like a tapestry, and gives graphic evidence of the ongoing and increasing aggression of the Lao PDR military, including artillery and chemical warfare.

The film can be seen dis-assembled at Youtube; below are links to some of the horrific clips.

It should be seen by as many people as possible, especially by young people who think there's something "cool" or "romantic" about their flirtation with communist idealism. Take a look at what it is like to live in the real thing, kids:

[Warning: extremely gory and disturbing content]

Hmong refugees-Hunted and tortured -merciless!

Hmong refugees-We are not rebels

Hmong -military attack in Laos

Hmong Refugees-Attacked With Chemical Weapons

"Everyone has heard about the drama of the Vietnamese boat people, but Laos, which became Communist in the aftermath of the events of 1975 in Vietnam, has seen a proportionally larger section of the population take flight. ...
Around 300,000 people (10 percent of the population) have fled the country, including well over 30 percent of the Hmong minority in the mountains (around 100,000 people) and about 90 percent of all intellectuals, technicians and officials. In Communist Asia, only North Korea in 1950-1953 saw a larger share of its population flee the country."
[The Big Black Book of Communism, "Laos: A Population in Flight", pg 575]

Swedish teens: "What's so bad about communism?"

It seems that North American schools aren't the only ones turning out reprehensively ignorant students. This report from Yahoo News suggests that Swedish kids are, if at all possible, even more dangerously stupid:

A majority of Swedish teenagers don't know what communism is and don't know which countries neighbour their own, a poll published Wednesday showed, raising questions about Sweden's education system.

Ninety percent of teens aged 15 to 20 don't know which foreign capital is closest to Stockholm, 90 percent don't know what the Gulag is, and 40 percent think communism has increased prosperity in the world.
"They have a lack of understanding for basic concepts such as dictatorships and democracy, and that is unsettling. There must be a major change in their level of knowledge, and schools in particular must take responsibility," Camilla Andersson, the head of the Information About Communism organisation that commissioned the study, told Swedish news agency TT.
...
[Schools Minister Jan Bjoerklund] said he planned to propose more history lessons for students, and would recommend that the Holocaust and crimes committed in the name of communism in the Soviet Union be mandatory elements of the history curriculum.
The results of the study, published in daily Dagens Nyheter on Wednesday, also showed that 50 percent of the 1,004 teens questioned didn't know that Berlin was the capital of a country bordering the Baltic Sea, 82 percent didn't think Belarus was a dictatorship and 43 percent said they thought communism had claimed fewer than a million victims in the 20th century.
Fifty-six percent said they didn't know if Western market economies were democratic societies, and 22 percent said communism was a democratic social structure.

Maybe my initial sense of outrage is misplaced; for all I know, these are "good" students, who might well be successfully parroting the information fed to them by their professors, eager to brainwash a new generation in the left's latest attempt to "practice communism correctly", unlike those misguided and mis-informed 20th century marxists like Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, Fidel Castro, Lenin, Krushnev, and Every Single Other One Of Them.