Ottawa Commission Worries About Offending "Communist Canadians"
Perhaps this column should be titled “How Quick they Forget” -- presuming “they” ever knew.
Believe it or not, in debating the establishment of a $1.5 million “Memorial to the Victims of Communism, ” the board and members of Ottawa’s National Capital Commission (NCC) were split over whether this title was unfair to Canadians who might be communists.
So they compromised on “Memorial to the Victims of Totalitarian Communism.”
This was still too much for the board – too narrow a definition, they felt, and still might offend Canadian communists. Back to the drawing board.
The NCC’s roots go back to 1899, and its focus is to beautify and enhance Ottawa as a nice place to live. Their driving concern today is not to offend anyone and to be politically correct.
As a consequence, in this they are offending history, common sense and the victims they seek to honor. What gives with these people? True, not all totalitarians are communists, but one can make a fair case that all communists are incipient totalitarians.
Nazism is totalitarian. So was Italian fascism. But both of these malignancies were destroyed as viable forces in WWII. Hitler’s Nazi ideology evolved from Lenin’s and Stalin’s communism – only with racial hatred replacing economic hatred.
Stalin’s communism claimed more innocent victim’s than Hitler’s totalitarianism. And Mao Zedong’s communism claimed more victims that even Stalin managed.
As for Canadian communists, while the Soviet empire survived they faithfully echoed whatever anti-west theme Moscow developed. When Khrushchev denounced the perversions of Stalin, most Canadian communists (that the NCC is so fretful about not offending today) switched immediately and acknowledged Stalin’s “mistakes” and continued supporting Soviet repression and the Kremlin’s perfidy.
When Moscow disagreed with Ottawa – Canadian communists backed Moscow.
Even after Mao Zedong was exposed as a homicidal tyrant who was screwing up his country, Pierre Trudeau, before he became an MP, extolled Mao’s virtues and ruminated about the pain and wisdom in his eyes from the misery he’d seen.
The only professional Soviet spy ever sent to prison in Canada for subverting our democracy was an elected Member of Parliament – Fred Rose, later banished to Poland.
So why is the NCC uneasy about sponsoring a memorial to the 100 million-plus victims of communism -- not just “totalitarian” communism, but communism itself?
In the lifetime of most of us, we saw what Communism did to Cambodia, where its proponent, Pol Pot, killed close to 2 million people – maybe 40% of the existing population. These were people whose crime was being literate, wearing spectacles, knowing another language, working for foreigners, not being communists.
One NCC member had the effrontery to suggest the NCC should not condemn totalitarian Communism when the Canadian government, in WWII, had sent Japanese-Canadians to internment camps. As if drawing a parallel with the Gulag.
What the NCC seems to be overlooking in continuing contortions to describe its proposed memorial (to be opened in 2011) is that Canada today is increasingly comprised of people who’ve come here to escape communism. Not to escape “just” totalitarian communism, but communism per se, which by its nature is dictatorial, oppressive, malignant, and an enemy of free choice.
I draw a distinction between “communism” and “Marxism” which is less restrictive. But neither has much to recommend it. As for the NCC: For shame.