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The Nanjing Massacre, also known as the Rape of Nanjing, was the mass murder of Chinese civilians in Nanjing, the capital of the Republic of China, immediately after the Battle of Nanjing in the Second Sino-Japanese War, by the Imperial Japanese Army. Beginning on December 13, 1937, the massacre lasted for six weeks. The Japanese militarists committed atrocities such as permitting mass rape, looting and arson. The massacre has gone down in history as one of the worst atrocities committed in the twentieth century. In their maniacal drive to condemn Russia and the People's Republic of China as "authoritarian regimes," Canada's Prime Minister and the government of Canada and media remain silent about who liberated China from these monstrous deeds and the role of the Soviet Union in liberating Europe. Despite the tremendous sacrifices endured by the peoples of the occupied countries and their liberators, the government of Canada and the media in the service of the U.S. striving for world domination are purveyors of criminal disinformation about what actually took place and its significance today. Canada is marching in lock-step with the United States, Britain and various European countries and NATO allies to spread historical falsifications to justify what cannot be justified as concerns U.S./NATO warmongering and crimes against humanity in the name of Canadian values, peace, freedom and democracy. The restoration of the Nazism, fascism and Japanese militarism will not solve any crisis they are facing as they plunge the world into the abyss of wars of destruction with unknown consequences. They are erecting monuments intended to equate Nazism and communism for purposes of complying with the U.S. striving for world hegemony. This includes the rehabilitation of neo-Nazi and militarist forces in positions of power and enabling private armies and paramilitary forces to maraud, plunder and commit crimes on their behalf. The claim that Canada is not honouring Nazis but "freedom fighters against the communists," fools no one. To its utter shame, the Government of Canada no matter which cartel party has been in power, with the NDP in tow, participates in this perpetuation of historical fraud. All read from the same playbook which seeks to shamefully cover up the betrayal committed when the Munich Agreement was concluded on September 30, 1938, by Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Italy which gave Hitler the green light to first occupy Czechoslovakia in March 1939 and then invade Poland on September 1. The German-Soviet non-aggression pact signed August 23, 1939 was forced on the Soviet Union because Britain and France refused to enter into a defence alliance in Europe to stop the Hitlerites from invading other countries. These countries had already signed the Munich Pact with Germany on September 30, 1938. This outrageous act of appeasement and collaboration permitted Germany to annex the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia, ordered the Czechs not to resist Nazi aggression and gave the Nazis the green light to launch further attacks across Europe. Since 2005, on Russia's initiative, every year the UN General Assembly has approved resolutions urging an end to the glorification of Nazism and urging member states to combat practices that exacerbate contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance. The General Assembly through these resolutions has expressed its deep concern over attempts to glorify Nazism, neo-Nazism and former members of the Waffen-SS in any form, including the construction of monuments and the holding of public demonstrations. The resolutions express concern over the "recurring attempts to desecrate or demolish monuments erected in remembrance of those who fought against Nazism during World War II, as well as to unlawfully exhume or remove the remains of such persons," and noted an alarming increase in racist incidents and violence globally. Today, even the United Nations is being used to push the Anglo-American historical fraud called a rules-based international order. May the memory of those who gave their lives in the fight for freedom, peace and democracy live on in the battle of current generations for a world free of the scourge of the aggression we see today carried out by the Anglo-U.S. and European powers in the name of regime change and "responsibility to protect." It is said more people are losing their lives today as a result of the current imperialist striving for domination of the world's resources, labour, zones for investment and influence than during World War II. The need to establish anti-war governments all over the world has never been greater. Let us do our duty to the victims of Nazism, fascism and Japanese militarism and make sure we establish such a government in Canada. |
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Poland, in the thirties, relied upon an alliance of a sort with Britain and France[...]. Events proved what sort of alliance it was, what sort of guarantee the French and British imperialists had undertaken on behalf of the Polish state. On September 1, 1939 when the Hitlerites attacked Poland at 4:15 am with their planes targeting all the cities and all the villages and towns, killing thousands of people in a massive assault, the only support Britain could give was some condemnation on the radio waves and two days later declare that Britain was at war. [...]
For the next six years no British soldier was ever to set foot on the soil of Poland to liberate the Polish people. While Hitler's Wehrmacht of 1,850,000 troops, 3,200 tanks and 2,000 combat aircraft, a fleet of battleships, over two-thirds of Germany's entire combat force at that time, destroyed the Polish state and massacred the Polish people, France, with its army of four million facing a German force of less than a million on the western front, waged its 'phony war' i.e., sat on its hands. The U.S. President sent a telegram to the Polish government condemning the Nazi Germans for mass bombing Polish cities. Yet it is said today that the U.S., Britain, France and others, ‘defended Poland' while the Soviet Union of J.V. Stalin "occupied Poland." They are trying to suggest to the world that Stalin was an aggressor against Poland in the same fashion that Hitler was an aggressor.
Nazi bombardment of Warsaw when it invaded Poland, September 1939.
On September 17, 1939 the leaders of the state of Poland which had landed the Polish nation into such a tragic impasse, whose political offspring are speaking today in the same chauvinist language of the imperialists, fled from Poland and were interned in Rumania. A clique of like-minded political figures were appointed as the Polish-government-in-exile, which the chauvinists today call the "continuation" of the Polish state.
The Soviet Army marched onto the territory of Poland only when the Polish state was in a condition of complete collapse. It marched onto territories of the Ukraine and Byelorussia annexed by Poland during the Polish-Russian War of 1919-1920. The majority of the population inhabiting these territories were either Ukrainian or Byelorussian and relatively less were Polish. Of a total population of 13 million people, more than 7 million were Ukrainian, 3 million were Byelorussian, more than 1 million were of Jewish origin and more than 1 million were Poles. No doubt, one of the reasons the former Polish state did not want to enter into a mutual assistance defence treaty with the Soviet Union is because the oppressed nationalities within their borders would demand self-determination and their desire to be reunited with the Ukraine and Byelorussia.
The London government-in-exile never gave up trying to re-incorporate these territories, and Polish chauvinists today still complain about the ‘lost territories.' For this they bitterly condemn Stalin and the Red Army. Polish reaction hated the loss of their conquered territories, the loss of the Ukrainian, Byelorussian and Jewish workers and peasants who the Polish bourgeoisie and landlords exploited and oppressed. It was never in the interest of the Polish nation to have annexed those lands in the first place. When they speak of Stalin's ‘invasion' of Poland, they do not mention that the Soviet Union handed over the city and district of Vilno to Lithuania, not because Vilno had a majority Lithuanian population, but because it had been forcibly wrested from Lithuania by Poland. Furthermore, it was a city associated in the historical past with Lithuania and the aspirations of the Lithuanian people. It became the capital city of Lithuania.
The former Polish state also had a bad conscience about the territory Poland annexed from Czechoslovakia. On October 2, 1938, right at the time the Munich betrayal by Britain and France allowed Hitler to annex the Sudentenland in western Czechoslovakia in the name of the German nationality living there, the Polish army marched into Trans-Olza, Czechoslovakia, occupying Western Teschen and Frystat in the name of the Polish nationality living there. The semi-fascist Polish government was at one with Hitler, Chamberlain, Daladier and Mussolini in dismembering Czechoslovakia, even if they weren't personally at Munich. They acted like brigands.
Today the Polish chauvinists leave out the
date October 2, 1938 in their official
chronicle of events leading up to the tragedy
of September 1, 1939. They want to white-wash
the imperialist geo-politics and unprincipled
manoeuvres of the Polish government at that
time precisely because they [...] are
following the same disastrous and chauvinist
course of inter-imperialist geo-politics
today.
Collective punishment for opposing the Nazi occupation took the form of public hangings, mass executions and other crimes against the Polish people.
Once Poland was under the clutches of Hitler, the Nazis perpetrated one of the worst crimes history has ever known against any nation. Poland suffered the largest number of casualties, in terms of the numbers of individuals killed per thousand population, of any country in Europe. Poland suffered a loss of about 6 million people killed. Direct extermination by mass murder, death camps and so on took some 1,750,000 Polish lives; 2,700,000 Polish Jews were exterminated; more than 50,000 out of 75,000 Roma living in Poland were exterminated; some 12,000 mental patients and mentally retarded people were murdered; thousands of Polish prisoners of war, men and officers, were systematically shot. Within the first six weeks of the nazi occupation, some 40,000 Polish intellectuals, political personalities and other leaders were shot by the S.S. in a project called "clearing the political ground." About 38-39% of Poland's 1938 assets were destroyed, estimated to be worth $49.2 billion (pre-war U.S.). Warsaw was razed to the ground. Poland suffered the highest per capita loss of property in Europe as a result of the war.
Caption: Polish people greet soldiers of the liberating Red Army in 1945.
(Hardial Bains. Causes and Lessons of the Second World War. Toronto: MELS, 1990, pp. 18-23.)
Facts
Executions of Poles by the Nazis' Einsatzgruppen in Leszno, October 1939, shortly after the invasion, part of an organized campaign of mass murder throughout the country.
At 4:15 am on September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland in a massive assault. Hitler's Wehrmacht of 1,850,000 troops, 3,200 tanks, 2,000 combat aircraft and 11 warships -- over two-thirds of Germany's entire combat force -- destroyed the Polish state and massacred the Polish people.[1]
Behind the Wehrmacht followed Himmler's SS Einsatzgruppen, killing squads specializing in mass murder.
Against Poland, the Nazis perpetrated one of the worst crimes history has ever known. Poland suffered the largest number of casualties per capita of any European country. A total of about six million people were killed. Direct extermination by mass murder, death camps and other means took some 1,750,000 Polish lives. In addition, the state forces of Nazi Germany exterminated 2,700,000 Polish Jews, 2,000,000 Polish children and youth, more than 50,000 Roma, some 12,000 people deemed mentally handicapped, and thousands of Polish prisoners of war, soldiers, and officers who were systematically shot. The German Nazi Schutzstaffel (SS) shot some 40,000 Polish intellectuals, political personalities and other leaders within the first six weeks of the Nazi occupation.
Prior to the invasion, beginning in May 1939, the Nazi Operation Tannenberg, which was part of Hitler's Generalplan Ost (Masterplan East), had already identified and listed more than 61,000 Polish activists, intelligentsia, scholars, former officers and others, who were to be interned or shot, mainly by the SS. The murder of 5,000-6,000 Poles in Fordon, Bydgoszcz in October-November 1939 is just one example of the many executions the SS and the Wehrmacht carried out. Other examples include the murder of 4,143 Polish officers found buried in Katyn Forest for which the Nazis and their collaborators blamed the communists and continue to blame the communists so as to exonerate their massive crimes and confound who were the liberators and who were the criminals.
The Polish people were greatly outnumbered but fought back bravely. The state leaders of Poland fled to Romania on September 17, but the Polish people's spirit of resistance remained strong. Many Poles fought courageously in the communist-led underground Resistance. Poles formed their own patriotic divisions and fought alongside the Red Army against the Nazis all the way to Berlin.
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Despite the facts, the Hitlerites blame the Soviets for what happened to the Polish people, claiming that Stalin signed a pact with Hitler to let it happen, and Stalin invaded Poland. In fact, the Soviet Army entered the territory of Poland on September 17, only after the Polish state had collapsed, the Polish army had disintegrated, the government had ceased to function and its leaders had fled. The part of Poland the Soviet Union occupied was the territory of the Ukraine and Byelorussia that Poland had forcibly annexed from the Soviet Union during the Polish-Russian War of 1919-20. At that time, Poland was one of the 14 invading imperialist countries that attempted but failed to strangle the newborn Soviet Socialist Republic.[2] Only about eight per cent of the people in the Ukraine and Byelorussia were of Polish origin.
"As a result of the Soviet Union's timely entry into what had been territories of the Polish state, Hitler was forced to accept a line of demarcation between his troops and the Red Army, a long way west of the then Polish-Russian frontier."[3] The Red Army saved millions of people including Poles inhabiting the Ukraine and Byelorussia from a similar fate that Hitler was at that time wreaking upon the Polish people. Even the virulently anti-communist Winston Churchill publicly justified the Soviet march into eastern Poland.
Today, the modern-day Hitlerites, masquerading as democrats, continue to spread the vicious lies that "Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union secretly conspired to divide Poland between them." Those lies, meant to equate the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany and discredit and split the anti-fascist front led by the communists, were first put forth by Hitler himself in a speech declaring war on the Soviet Union, when he referred to "secret protocols" to divide Poland. Then after their defeat, some Nazi war criminals being tried at Nuremberg resurrected the "secret protocols" in a bid to escape punishment but the Presidium threw them out as a forgery. It was only when the U.S. took up the mantle of Hitlerism during the Cold War and became the modern day master of Goebbels' big lie technique that Hitler's concoction about "secret protocols" became a so-called historical fact.[4] This has now become official Canadian propaganda as well.
The real historical facts clarify why Hitler attacked Poland. In 1939 Poland was an imperialist country formed from the disaster of the First World War by Britain and France through the 1918 Versailles Treaty. "One of its ambitions was to add the rich agricultural regions of the Ukraine to Polish territory and extend Polish territory 'from sea to sea,' from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea.[...]The Polish landlords and bourgeoisie dreamed of restoring the Polish empire of medieval times."[5] Financed and armed by the British and French monopolies who wanted to regain their lost profits and privileges seized by the workers and peasants' revolutionary forces, the Polish rulers attacked the Soviet Union in 1918, occupying large parts of the Ukraine, Byelorussia, and Lithuania.[6] During the following 18 years of semi-fascist Polish rule, the Polish landlords and industrialists viciously exploited the workers and peasants in those regions.
As inter-imperialist war clouds loomed over Europe, the Polish ruling circles refused to see the world as it presented itself, especially the German Nazi imperialists who made no secret of their desire to conquer Europe so as to conquer the world, and their racist contempt of the Polish people. The Polish elite considered Britain and France to be their allies and the Soviet Union their avowed enemy. The Anglo-American and French imperialists wanted to ensure their own leading roles in world domination. They followed a policy of appeasing Hitler and egging him eastward to attack the Soviet Union, rather than organizing collective security with the Soviet Union against the avowed eastward expansionism of Nazi Germany into industrial, oil bearing and rich agricultural regions, hoping that it would become bogged down in a protracted war rather than grow fat from robbing the Soviet Union of its wealth.
For its part, Poland hoped that Hitler would somehow go East and attack the Soviet Union without seizing Poland first, and that from the spoils of war Poland could also capture Soviet territory. Poland refused to settle outstanding border questions thus keeping the Soviet defence line against the Nazis as far east as possible. The Polish state refused the Soviets permission to enter Poland to stop the impending Nazi advance and make it more difficult. Instead of taking all measures necessary to defend the people against the disasters of an obvious Nazi invasion, the Polish rulers, harbouring deep illusions about Hitler's intentions and blinded by anti-communism, preferred instead to engage in fanciful manoeuvres for advantages favouring their private interests.
In attacking Poland, Hitler was both taking up the Anglo-American policy of going East and implementing his own plan outlined in Mein Kampf , to increase Germany's "living space" (lebensraum) by taking over the Ukraine as part of his plan to enslave the entire world. Hitler made his barbaric intentions toward Poland very clear. Only ten days before the attack, Hitler in his Obersalzburg speech instructed his generals to "send to death mercilessly and without compassion men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space (lebensraum) which we need."[7] Tragically, in the end, Poland paid very dearly for its ruling class leaders' imperialist ambitions, anti-communism and rejection of Soviet assistance.
The Anglo-U.S. and European powers and reactionary Polish ruling circles continue to spread the same lies that the Nazis did, and try to throw mud on the wartime exploits of the Soviet Union so as to accuse the communists of crimes against humanity. On September 1, 2009, Polish President Lech Kaczynski called for "glory to all the soldiers who fought in World War Two against German Nazism and Bolshevik totalitarianism." Soon after the April 10, 2010 crash of a Polish airliner near Smolensk, in which Kaczynski and 95 others died, the Polish rulers and others around the world used the tragedy to resurrect the old lie that the Soviet Union and not the Nazis committed the wartime Katyn Forest Massacre. Such deliberate disinformation ignores the fact that it was the Nazis who killed six million Poles and that it was the Red Army together with an allied Polish Army that finally liberated Poland from the Nazi occupiers.
Monument to Polish partisans and German anti-fascist fighters in Berlin. The relief at right depicts a Soviet soldier, a soldier of the Armia Ludowa (Polish People's Army) and a German anti-Fascist.
Notes
1. Much of the German military equipment used in the invasion was built by U.S.-owned companies such as Ford, General Motors and Focke Wulfe (ITT).
2. An estimated seven million Russian men, women and children were killed during the 1918 invasion.
3. Hardial Bains, Causes and Lessons of the Second World War (Toronto: MELS Institute, 1990).
4. Poland had concluded a non-aggression pact with Germany in January 1934, the first state to form such an alliance with the Nazi administration.
6. These included oil giant Royal Dutch Shell, the Metro-Vickers arms trust, and the big banking houses such as Baring, Hambros and Credit Lyonnais. Soon-to-be U.S. President Herbert Hoover also had large investments in Czarist Russia.
7. E.L. Woodward & Rohan Riftlep (eds.), Documents on British Foreign Policy: 1919-1939, 3rd series (London: HMSO, 7:258- 260, 1954).
(TML Archives. Photos: Colin Smith, Wikipedia)
Government of Canada Engages in Historical Fraud
September 1 marks the anniversary of the invasion of Poland by the Hitlerites in 1939. Instead of condemning the Nazis, reactionary forces such as the Government of Canada use disinformation to rehabilitate the reputation of Nazi war criminals and to cover up who were the victims of fascism in whose name the peoples of the world declared "Never Again!"
At this time of
year, they use the anniversary of the
German-Soviet non-aggression pact signed on
August 23, 1939 to claim that this was an act
of appeasement, not a tactical move for the
Soviet Union to buy time to arm itself for an
inevitable confrontation with the Nazis. They
remain silent on the Munich Agreement signed
on September 30, 1938 which gave Hitler the
green light to launch aggression against the
peoples of Europe.
The disinformation about the non-aggression pact signed between the Soviet Union and Germany is used to spuriously lump together China and Russia into a category they call "authoritarian regimes" to claim that the Anglo-American imperialists are the champions of peace, freedom, democracy and human rights while communists and fascists are the same.
Trudeau pathetically claims that it was the Soviets and not the Nazis who invaded Poland in September 1939 and started the war in Europe. It shows how the same powers that appeased the Nazis in 1938-39 are up to their same tricks today. The big powers of Old Europe actively appeased the Nazis and permitted the invasion of Poland, while the Soviets fought to defend that country and its people at every turn. Nothing is going to change those historical facts. Ultimately, this disinformation about the causes of World War II is to justify and commit similar crimes in the present. That also will not succeed. The memory of the peoples cannot be erased at the stroke of falsifications of history coming from the likes of those committing crimes against humanity today.
The statement issued by Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, on what Canada has declared is "Black Ribbon Day, the National Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Communism and Nazism in Europe," is a shameless example of historical falsification for purposes of creating historical fraud today. The statement says amongst other things:
"Today, we join people from around the world to honour the victims and survivors of communism and Nazism in Europe, and pledge to continue standing up for all those who still face violence and oppression at the hands of authoritarian regimes."
According to the Prime Minister, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, signed on August 23, 1939 between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany "resulted in the division of Poland and the annexation of the Baltic states as well as part of Romania by the Soviet Union." The falsifiers declare that the Soviet Union is to blame for the crimes against humanity committed by the Nazis. The statement says:
"Across Central and Eastern Europe, millions of people suffered tremendously under totalitarian regimes, including Jewish, Romani, Slavic, disability, and LGBTQ2 communities. They were robbed of their basic human rights, forced to flee their homes, and murdered. Many of those who escaped the Soviet and Nazi regimes found new homes in Canada and have helped shape the strong and diverse country we know today. Their stories remind us that we all have a responsibility to ensure atrocities like these never happen again.
"This year, we also stand in solidarity with the Ukrainian people, who continue to face brutal violence from Russia's illegal, unjustifiable, and expansionist war of choice in their country. Canada, together with our Allies and international partners, will continue to support Ukraine and stand up for democracy and human rights everywhere.
"On behalf of the Government of Canada, I encourage all Canadians to pay tribute to those who have suffered or lost their lives to totalitarian and authoritarian regimes -- past or present. Together, we must continue to reject extremism, intolerance, and oppression, while promoting human rights, freedom, and democracy here in Canada and around the world."
To equate communism with Nazism and accuse the Soviet Union of invading Poland and starting World War II is an unconscionable act which betrays a very dirty conscience indeed. It is not a simple or innocent revision of history. It is a heinous act of conscious historical fraud to push the criminal war preparations the same countries that initially collaborated with Hitler to attack the Soviet Union in the 1930s are carrying out today against Russia, China and the peoples of Europe, all over again.
It Must Not Pass!
Aim of Imperialist Propaganda
About Human Rights
Disinformation on the issue of what constitutes human rights, how they are violated and by whom, is rampant. The aim is to deprive people of an outlook which establishes a vantage point that favours them. So long as people use the imperialist conception of human rights as a reference, they remain caught in a world of old controversies which does not take them and their needs into account.
The greatest
negators and violators of human rights blame
communism, first and foremost, and what they
call autocratic and authoritarian regimes, as
well as religions that they portray as barbaric,
medieval and backward. All of it is based on
Eurocentric values defended by the European
colonial powers and the missionaries at their
disposal who declared the doctrine of discovery
and terra nullius to justify
expropriating the Indigenous populations,
committing massacres against them and genocide
in those countries where they hunted Indigenous
peoples down in order to seize their lands.
Propaganda distorting the essence of what constitutes a human right and how it gets affirmed is one of the main ways the ruling circles in the liberal democracies established by the imperialist and former European colonial powers strive to discredit and malign communism. According to them, individuals lose their human rights under communism and can only keep them under capitalism. The premise is that theirs are not autocratic regimes which violate human rights with every law and action at home and abroad, but democratic regimes beyond reproach.
Communists fight for a polity based on the collectivity of rights as a principle. This is needed to ensure that individual and collective rights, and the general well-being of society, can be guaranteed. It is impossible to speak of rights by virtue of being human outside of such a framework.
Part of the disinformation promoted by the ruling circles is that people, as individuals, exist in society as single individuals. This is not the case. We are all born to society and thus exist as individuals and collectives, both together. They cannot be separated. And we are dependent on society for both our individual and collective well-being.
Human rights belong to all humans by virtue of being human -- that is a modern definition. Existing rulers reduce human rights to whatever exists or does not exist in law, with its "reasonable limits" and "exceptions" based on "threats to national security." Who defines the limits, what constitutes a "reasonable limit" and under what conditions and circumstances, or the "exceptions" is covered up.
Rights also belong to individuals and collectives by virtue of the concrete conditions of the individual and collective. A woman, for example, belongs to the collective of women with rights belonging to women by virtue of their being women, such as everything related to childbirth and the well-being of children. These are not "women's problems" but matters for which the society is responsible so that individual women can live in peace.
We see in the
U.S. today the brutal attack unleashed by the
U.S. state on women concerning abortions and
health care in general, yet individuals are said
to have human rights. But absent their rights as
a collective, one can see that their individual
rights cannot be met. The same could be said of
workers, youth, oppressed nationalities and
whole countries whose sovereignty is infringed.
By blocking and attacking collective rights and, more broadly, the collectivity of rights, liberal democracy cannot provide for the human rights of individuals or collectives or the general well-being of society. This is readily apparent today when looking at any issue of human rights, like the right to housing, health care, a livelihood, education, and other collective rights.
It is also evident that liberal democratic institutions have failed. Their legitimacy lies in tatters. The conception of rights as conceived under liberal democratic regimes has come under brutal attack by governments themselves which have been reduced to their police powers, having discarded all the civil aspects of their rule. Rule of police powers, of impunity, has become the norm, as is the case in Canada and the U.S.
Far from being able to provide rights and address the many conflicting interests evident in life today, conditions of civil war at home and imperialist war abroad are intensifying. Communism and all those fighting for it today recognize that what is needed is to harmonize the rights of the individual with those of the collectives by putting them on a par, not one above the other but providing an equivalence, on par. The rights of all individuals and collectives also need to be harmonized with the general well-being of society.
Advancing the fight for communism and human rights involves putting the collectivity of rights in first place, most notably the individual and collective right to govern and decide.
Communism and Human Rights
Hardial Bains addresses the international
seminar on Communism
and Human Rights, Toronto, March
27, 1995.
The following article was originally published in February, 1995, in preparation for the International Seminar on the topic: Communism and Human Rights, held in Toronto on March 27, 1995.
Besides concentrating on Modern Definitions as a general topic, the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) also pays serious attention to the theme Communism and Human Rights.
One of the most important arenas in which ideological struggle has broken out is that of human rights. The bourgeoisie of all countries is screaming itself hoarse that communism violates human rights. It is even suggested that communism, as a result of a quality inherent to it, is the enemy of human rights. Communism and human rights, according to these critics, are like oil and water. The two do not mix.
Is it really true that communism is the violator of human rights and that communism and human rights do not mix? This, of course, is not true. Communism is the condition for the complete emancipation of the working class, a condition for the emancipation of entire humanity. How can it be that communism -- which is the condition for the complete emancipation of the working class -- can violate human rights?
The modern definition of human rights stipulates that all human beings have rights by virtue of their being. Besides this, there are human beings who also have rights by virtue of their conditions, for example, women by virtue of their womanhood or the disabled by virtue of their concrete objective condition or the national, linguistic, religious and other minorities on account of their own concrete objective reality.
Communism, in its modern rendering, presents the Collectivity of Rights as the basic condition for the defence of all rights, whether they are inviolable and belong to all people by virtue of their being human or whether they belong to them because of their concrete objective conditions. If people as a collective nation or country do not enjoy the collectivity of their rights, how can they enjoy any other rights? The U.S. is attacking Cuba's collectivity of rights while screaming about the absence of human rights there. The Democratic People's Republic of Korea and many other countries such as Iran are also being threatened on similar grounds.
Collectivity, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, means:
"1. Collective state or quality; collectiveness ... Every unsocial act or sentiment tends to overthrow that collectivity of effort to which we owe all.
"b. ... The whole taken collectively; the aggregate, sum, mass... The collectivity of living existence becomes a self-improving machine.
"2. Collective ownership, collectivism in practice... I vote for the collectivity of the soil...and of all social wealth.
"3. The collective body of people forming a community or state.
"...The State is the real collectivity...the State is everybody, it is the country. 1884, Rae, Contemporary Socialism -- 149: "An omnipotent and centralized political authority -- call it the State, call it the collectivity; call it what you like -- which should have the final disposal of everything."
Collectivity of Rights, like "collectivity of soil" or "collectivity of social wealth" or an "omnipotent and centralized political authority" is something which exists and must belong to all. What quality should a person have before that person can partake of the Collectivity of Rights? The person just has to be a human being. This is the broadest definition which can be given as it includes all people without exception by virtue of their being human. Not only does communism provide these rights to all as a matter of course, but it agitates for this definition at all times and under all conditions. This being the case, can it be said that communism and human rights do not mix?
The bourgeoisie provides an extremely narrow definition of what is a human right. According to the founding fathers of the U.S., such a right only belongs to the "natural aristocracy," to those who excel in the capitalist market. To eliminate the capitalist market through the socialization of the means of production is considered by the bourgeoisie to be a violation of "human rights." This is why it is preaching and demanding, including by force of arms, that every country in the world must have a capitalist system with an "open door policy" through which the big powers can enter and do whatever they wish.
Communists put the Collectivity of Rights on a pedestal for the simple reason that what is needed is to harmonize the rights of the individual with those of the collectives by putting them on a par and the rights of all individuals and collectives with the general well-being of society. Individual or collective rights or the general well-being of society make no sense if the Collectivity of Rights is not put in the first place. How can the bourgeoisie support human rights when it demands that the Collectivity of Rights must be negated?
Communists fight for a polity based on the Collectivity of Rights as a principle. They consider the Collectivity of Rights to be the guarantee of the rights of the individual and their collectives and of all individuals and collectives and the general interests of society. Only the Collectivity of Rights has the power to coordinate and subordinate all rights to the opening of the door to the progress of society.
CPC(M-L) engages in discussion on Communism and Human Rights as an important contribution to the discussion on nation-building in the 21st century. CPC(M-L) invites all concerned to participate and develop the discussion on Communism and Human Rights.
(Hardial Bains Resources Centre)
(To access articles individually click on the black headline.)
Website: www.cpcml.ca Email: office@cpcml.ca