The idolisation of murderers

It’s happening again. Lamp-posts in Dublin city are once again festooned with images of the blood-stained terrorist Ernesto Guevara, posted up by our friends in Socialist Youth.

Once again this cold-blooded killer is held up as a great humanitarian, a folk hero, an example of courage and action, a role-model to be emulated.

Once again the citizenry, without batting an eyelid, walks past these objectionable flyers as though there were nothing remarkable about them, as though there were no offence offered to the public by this open glorification of a murderer and a terrorist.

And once again Melancholicus shall make the comparison with Heydrich:

The image on the left is of an actual socialist youth poster displayed to the public in Dublin city in recent times. Sadly Melancholicus was unable to obtain a copy of the poster currently on view, so this older image will have to suffice.

The image on the right is a photoshop mock-up created by Melancholicus. Lest readers be alarmed, he hastens to reassure them that there is no “Irish Nazi Youth”, neither is there any such body as the “Irish SS”, nor is there scheduled a public meeting in Dublin celebrating the legacy of the man who did more than anyone else to turn the final solution from an anti-semitic fantasy into a reality of blood-chilling efficiency. This poster was, of course, never publicly displayed, nor could it ever be without immediate legal consequences. The citizenry of Dublin would never tolerate such a flyer on their streets, hanging from their very lamp-posts. Yet they tolerate Guevara. Why?

Why is it acceptable to murder in the cause of the Left, and not in the cause of the Right?

Put it another way, what is it that makes murders committed by National Socialists so odious, whereas murders committed by International Socialists are of no account?

It might be objected, particularly by his unaccountably many fans, that Guevara was different from Heydrich.

Different, how?

Let's examine the differences. Aside from Heydrich being better dressed and better groomed than Guevara, there is not much to separate them. The similarities are more striking than the differences. Guevara was passionate about International Socialism; Heydrich was passionate about National Socialism. Guevara was a literary man and composed poetry; Heydrich was an accomplished musician. Guevara loved to ride about, cutting a handsome dashing figure on his motorcycle, firing from his pistol; Heydrich loved to take to the skies in his Messerschmitt, doubtless cutting a similarly handsome and dashing figure, swooping and diving and shooting down Soviet fighter planes. After the revolution in Cuba, Guevara zealously began terrorizing the natives; Heydrich did much the same thing to the Czechs during his stint in Prague. Guevara set himself to a larger task, spreading marxist ideology and fomenting revolution throughout South America; Heydrich also set himself to a larger task: without his genius for administrative organisation, the final solution might not have been possible—at least it would not have claimed nearly as many victims. And both were “martyred” for their respective ideologies.

There is at least one difference: Guevara had much the more “hands on” attitude to slaughter, as he liked to get up close and personally involved in the deaths of his victims. Heydrich preferred to murder from behind a desk, further removed from the scene of the bloodshed.

But the real difference is that the Nazis lost the war, and history is always written by the victors. National Socialism is dead, and has been fashionably loathed ever since. While it is true that there are groups of “neo-nazis” here and there, politically these will never be more than basket-cases on the very fringe, nor will they ever be able to resurrect the ideology in anything like the form it enjoyed between 1933 and 1945. National Socialism was a creature of a particular time and place. It was peculiarly German, and peculiar also to social and political conditions prevailing in the aftermath of World War I. That being so, it does not translate well to other times or venues. Should there ever be another holocaust, it will be carried out not by Nazis, but by someone else.

Yet International Socialism is not bounded by such constraints of time or place. Despite the fact that since 1917 it has spilled more blood than the Third Reich (and continues to do so), it is tolerated and even regarded as chic; some naive souls even consider it benevolent and a great blessing on mankind. The politically-correct elites that dominate social, political, cultural and intellectual life everywhere in the West lean so far to the left that even a middle-of-the-road position is viewed as unacceptably right-wing, and anything further right than that approaches—at least in their eyes—dangerously close to Heydrich.

It might be objected that the crucial difference between these two men is in the number of their victims, the manner in which their victims died as well as the motivation behind their actions. I do not accept this.

First as to the number of their victims: is it immoral to kill by the million, but not equally immoral to kill by the hundred? Furthermore, Heydrich had the resources of an advanced military-industrial state at his disposal. Guevara lacked these resources, but can we seriously doubt that had the Bolivian army and the CIA not intervened, and had he been able to impose his will throughout South America the number of his victims would have been correspondingly increased?

As to the manner in which their victims died, there may be something much more horrifying in corralling naked human beings into a gas chamber under the pretence of receiving a shower than simply shooting them in the head with a pistol à la Che, but murder is still murder.

As to the third, Guevara’s animating ideology does not exculpate him of murder. It is no use to plead that Guevara’s intentions were good, and Heydrich’s evil. Neither is it any use to cite Guevara’s concern for the poor or the working class. No small number of the poor and the working class fell victim to his pistol, or to orders given to his henchmen. That Guevara was passionately devoted to marxism is no excuse. Marxism is an evil and toxic ideology which requires bloodletting to usher in the rule of the working class; Heydrich was no less devoted to his own ideology, which also required bloodletting in order to usher in the rule of the Aryan race. Same difference, really. Murder in order to promote a select group.

Now one final poke in the eye for the socialists. It is not uncommon for Melancholicus to encounter on campus—sometimes in his own lectures—terrorist chic, namely those thoughtless youths sporting those t-shirts emblazoned with Guevara’s iconic image. The same students who wear these t-shirts probably have no idea what sort of man their hero really was. They would probably be more reluctant to don the kind of t-shirt we see in the image below:

Hope springs eternal

With both banks and markets the world over teetering on the verge of catastrophe, there are not a few souls who fear for the future, and most justly so.

But the financial crisis is not doom and gloom for everybody; the socialists are giddy with excitement, for just as orthodox Jews look for signs presaging the coming of the Messiah and as the Mahometans (the Shi’i at least) look for prodigies announcing the nearness of the Mahdi, so too the socialists are always on the lookout for signs that the fall of capitalism is nigh, a fall which according to marxist dogma must take place come what may, and which is always—just there!—on the horizon.

So grave is the current crisis threatening the global economy that the socialists are sure the promised fall is finally about to take place. Whereafter, of course, they shall step up and usher in the socialist order.

This poster (once again unfortunately cut off since the socialist A3 sheet was too large for my bourgeois scanner to cope with) has appeared on the university noticeboards of late. Just take a look at all those jolly fellows in the foreground. One is not quite sure what’s going on in the picture, but the man nearest the viewer with his hand on his forehead looks like a lost soul, so he may be a defeated and bankrupt capitalist. The others, however, do not look anywhere near as sad. These must be the victors. With a defiant mien, they have their fists raised in the air—a gesture which identifies a socialist as clearly as a funny handshake identifies a freemason.

Melancholicus thinks they are dreaming if they believe the current economic turbulence will yield a socialist paradise, where orthodox marxism reigns supreme, but imagine for the sake of argument what would happen if they actually got their way. After the orgy of bloodletting, imprisonments and deportations that must always take place wherever socialists seize complete control, we would be left with a dreary world dominated by a tyrannical and super-intrusive state, a lifeless society devoid of mutual love or trust, or the incentive to do anything of any real value, a world in which anyone’s personal initiative in whatever field would most likely land him in a concentration camp, if he were lucky enough to avoid being shot. At its kindest, such a future might be like East Germany as portrayed in Das Leben der Anderen; in its less gentle incarnations it might more resemble Oceania in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Such a situation could not prevail in the Islamic world, however, for Melancholicus does not believe that the socialists’ cherished revolution would have even the remotest possibility of succeeding in areas dominated by a resurgent and self-confident militant Islam. In his more bloody-minded moments, Melancholicus would like to see the socialists and the Mahometan go head-to-head. Who would win? Melancholicus is of the view that the Mahometan would wipe the floor with the skins of the socialists, but given the leftist facility for causing death on a scale never matched by any other power (even the Third Reich), perhaps the outcome of our hypothetical fight may not be as predictable as at first sight.

Le Pen visit cancelled

Melancholicus feels vindicated. The authorities have acted in precisely the fashion he predicted they would.

So what is this about?

Remember, gentle reader, that back in October we were talking about the socialists having their little meet to venerate the memory of Saint Che, martyr?

At the time Melancholicus sourly complained about the fact that nobody seems to mind the socialists organising public meetings to eulogise mass murderers, so long as those murderers committed their crimes in the service of left-wing politics. Being on the left, it seems, is sufficient to render their atrocities palatable, at least socially if not quite morally.

Melancholicus then predicted what would happen if someone were to organise a public meeting venerating the legacies of right-wing murderers, such as Reinhard Heydrich or Adolf Eichmann.

Well, this has actually happened! And the predictions that Melancholicus made at the time have been fulfilled almost to the letter.

Well, not quite — but almost. A student society at the institution where Melancholicus earns his living has invited a prominent figure of the European right to participate in a debate on the Treaty of Lisbon. This person is not actually a Nazi (at least not in the same league as Heydrich or Eichmann), but he is viewed as such by the left and by their hangers-on in the media. He is Jean-Marie Le Pen, the leader of France’s far-right National Front.

Now Monsieur Le Pen was not invited to this institiution to commemorate murderers of any stripe. The sole purpose of his being here was to debate the Lisbon Treaty. The visit was due to take place in March or April of this year, and Monsieur Le Pen was to be accompanied by his colleague, Bruno Gollnisch MEP. However, the visit was cancelled almost as soon as it was announced.

The hue and cry that erupted after Monsieur Le Pen’s proposed visit had become public knowledge was annoyingly predictable; people will get upset over a right-wing politician like Le Pen, but not over a left-wing murderous psychopath like Guevara. The same people who festooned the walls of the university with flyers celebrating Guevara’s bloodstained career as well as the excesses of the Russian revolution immediately flooded the halls with posters denouncing the visit of the fascist Le Pen. Fascist is a pejorative they love to throw around with alacrity. Anyone who disagrees with the politics of these people is in their eyes a counter-revolutionary and a capitalist; disagree with them strongly enough and you become a fascist.

The college authorities, sensing the danger and the possible political fallout from the proposed visit, immediately moved to quash the invitation, and so Monsieur Le Pen will not now be invited to visit these shores. Melancholicus is relieved at the outcome—not so much that the “fascist” has been banned, but that the university where he works will be spared the turbulence and upheaval of such an event; Melancholicus does not care for riots and student demonstrations and threats of violence and uncontrolled passions and anarchist thugs shouting and people’s cars being overturned and set on fire and barricades being erected and the presence of the police being required to restrain the mob in order that people might not be killed. The campus can do without these things, and on that account he is glad that Monsieur Le Pen will not be coming.

That Monsieur Le Pen should have been invited in the first place, and that by a student society is a source of wonderment to Melancholicus. Students are notorious the world over for their hard-left views.

But as for the socialists, let me see... they hold public meetings glorifying the careers of the dictatorial thug Hugo Chavez, as well as murderers like Ernesto Guevara, Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and at the same time they deny basic freedom of speech to Jean-Marie Le Pen, who never killed anyone.

Is there not a double standard in operation here?

Those pathetic loons.

The socialists are dismayed

The socialist president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, was recently defeated in a referendum on constitutional reform. Had the result swung his way, Chavez would effectively have been made president for life, with almost unlimited power.

At least the Venezuelan people were offered a referendum; Melancholicus reckons that Chavez resisted the temptation to appropriate by force what he was denied by vote, owing to fear of the international community (and particularly the US); Chavez seems to think it important at least to appear to transform Venezuela into a communist ghetto by democratic means.

In Caracas, over 100,000 people marched against Chavez and against his attempt to turn himself into a communist dictator; clearly the Venezuelans are not as enthusiastic about their president as are the socialists of the Emerald Isle.

Yesterday, Melancholicus attempted to do some Christmas shopping in Dublin (bad idea), and on his weary pilgrimage through the streets, his eye was drawn to the forlorn and mournful-looking flyers posted up on lamp posts by the Socialist Party “After the Referendum: Where now for the Venezuelan Revolution?” and advertising the inevitable public meeting to chew the fat regarding how best to help their buddy Hugo.

Moreover, Chavez is only playing the socialists for support; Melancholicus is of the opinion that Chavez is more interested in Chavez than he is in socialism.

If proof were ever needed, this attitude on the part of Irish socialists shows only too clearly that the triumph of socialism is the only thing that matters. That the Venezuelan people, exercising their democratic right, have in no uncertain terms indicated their repugnance for Chavez’s socialist republic, does not seem to trouble the consciences of these indoctrinated and thoughtless idiots, who would be quite happy to help Chavez along with his ambition to become dictator for life, if only Venezuela could thereby become another Cuba.

Why don’t these fools emigrate to Cuba, since they seem so enamoured of communist government?

Chavez is clearly a dangerous man, and the result of the referendum is merely a setback to his plans, not the end of them. He will keep trying, by fair means or foul, until he achieves his aims — or until someone stops him.

Which brings to mind a certain piece of English literature apposite to the situation:

Brutus opens the letter and reads:

“Brutus, thou sleep’st: awake, and see thyself.
Shall Rome, &c. Speak, strike, redress!
Brutus, thou sleep’st: awake!”

Such instigations have been often dropp’d
Where I have took them up.
‘Shall Rome, &c.’ Thus must I piece it out:
Shall Rome stand under one man’s awe?
What, Rome?
My ancestors did from the streets of Rome
The Tarquin drive, when he was call’d a king.
‘Speak, strike, redress!’ Am I entreated
To speak and strike? O Rome, I make thee promise:
If the redress will follow, thou receivest
Thy full petition at the hand of Brutus!

— from Julius Caesar (Act II, scene 1), by William Shakespeare.

WANTED: George Hook, for crimes against intelligence in broadcasting

Melancholicus is often exasperated listening to the ramblings of this man on Newstalk 106 while stuck in rush-hour traffic on his way home from the university in the evenings.

To be fair, Hookie is a competent broadcaster, an engaging personality, regularly interesting and informative, and in the battle for Melancholicus’ attention with RTÉ’s Drivetime programme, he wins more often than not.

But yesterday evening’s edition of The Right Hook really took the Fortnum & Mason. George’s guest was the actress and human rights activist Vanessa Redgrave; and while some might have considered the conversation more of a fawning session than an interview, what annoyed Melancholicus most of all was the unthinking soft leftism evinced by Hookie throughout.

Perhaps his slot on Newstalk should more aptly be re-named The Left Hook?

Ms. Redgrave was in Dublin yesterday, speaking in her capacity of human rights activist at a dinner for the Irish branch of Amnesty International. Neither Hookie nor Ms. Redgrave seemed in any way sensible to the glaring fact of Amnesty’s having contracted a wee bit of a credibility problem through their well-publicised advocacy of so-called “abortion rights”.

But anyhow, that’s not the issue.

From the beginning, their discussion of human rights abuses and the activism designed to fight such abuses focused on fashionable left-wing causes. After the obligatory shot at the Nazis (to be fair, the Soviets came in for a good deal of criticism as well), the so-called “war on terror” was addressed. What astonished Melancholicus was that here the criticism was directed entirely at the US, Britain and Israel. Now while Melancholicus would certainly be at one with Hookie and Ms. Redgrave on the illegal British and American-led invasion of the sovereign nation of Iraq, that’s beside the point. Britain and the US are hardly pure as the driven snow, but they are most assuredly not the leading abusers of human rights in the world today (unless of course one would describe state-sponsored abortion services as an abuse of human rights, but one couldn’t really see either Hookie or Ms. Redgrave losing much sleep over the number of abortions carried out in these countries daily). The detainees of Guantanamo Bay received excessive attention, the CIA was duly slated over the issue of extraordinary renditions, but not a single word was said about the appalling human rights abuses that take place on a routine basis in Muslim countries. Likewise, not a word was said about the horrendous treatment of Christians and other religious minorities in the same. Even while Hookie and Ms. Redgrave were on the air, Mrs. Gillian Gibbons, 54, a teacher from the UK, had already begun her sentence in a Sudanese prison. Her crime: she allowed her class in Sudan to name a teddy bear Muhammad, for which she was arrested and convicted of the charge of “insulting Islam”. As she languished in her cell, there were protests in Khartoum by crazed sword-wielding fanatics calling for the unfortunate woman’s execution. Yes, it was not sufficient to send Mrs. Gibbons to prison: these prehistoric savages wanted to cut off her head!

If that is not an abuse of human rights, then Melancholicus does not understand the meaning of the term.

Hookie also drew attention to his guest’s socialism, and that in a positive light. Melancholicus was not surprised to hear that Ms. Redgrave is a socialist, but he was more than a little bemused by the fact that neither Hookie nor Ms. Redgrave seemed aware that socialism has been responsible for some of the most outrageous violations of human rights in the twentieth century. To add the icing to the cake, Hookie then pressed his guest for her views on New Labour’s betrayal of its socialist roots in Britain. Melancholicus cannot recall Ms. Redgrave’s comments at this point, but by then he had heard enough.

They were like peas in a pod, the two of them; soft leftists, idealistic and irenicist, but totally lacking in any grasp of the real situation in the world as far as human rights are concerned. As such, they are indistinguishable from the countless millions of other soft leftists which make up a goodly share of western society. These people mean well, but they really haven’t a clue. That much should be obvious, when one squanders precious airtime waxing indignant over Guantanamo, and that in the very shadow of the real elephant in the room, now looming totally unnoticed.

Talk about straining out a gnat and then swallowing a camel. Our Lord used those words against the Pharisees, but in a different time and context they could be applied just as fittingly not only to Hookie but to most of those who ply their trade in the newspapers and on the airwaves. And so the consensus of soft leftism continues undisturbed, and the five-hundred pound elephant continues to evade detection.

More idiots and their propaganda

The 90th anniversary of the 1917 Russian revolution on October 25th went unmarked by Melancholicus (although he was aware of the date), as the socialists themselves held their peace on that day. Moreover, Melancholicus was glad of the opportunity not to have to note yet another anniversary, especially not one so evil as this.

Now, however, Melancholicus notes to his displeasure that the socialists had not forgotten their cherished anniversary: they had merely postponed their celebrations so as not to interfere with their observance of the feast of saint Che, martyr.

Now the communists are ready to celebrate in great style. The walls, pillars and billboards of the university are festooned with this poster, replete with pictures of Lenin and Trotsky, two murderers if ever there were any (once again apologies for the incompleteness of the image; the original was printed on a typical socialist A3 sheet, which is beyond the scope of my little bourgeois scanner).

The revolution is commemorated as the event “when workers took power”. This of course is absolutely false. “Workers” of any stripe did not take power in 1917 — the bolsheviks did. There is a difference, but one which is conveniently overlooked by the enthusiasts of communism.

The poster advertises the inevitable public meeting; this is due to take place tomorrow, 7th November, in room G109 in the Newman building. Melancholicus is amused by the choice of venue. It is a medium-sized classroom, smaller than the room in which he teaches his module on early medieval Ireland. At most they can expect a crowd of between thirty and forty people, if they even get that many. Still, it is a source of relief that this toxic ideology is not more popular than it is among the students of this university.

The posters advertising this meeting have been paid for by the Socialist Party. This is a political organisation which makes no secret of its admiration for Lenin, for Trotsky and for the bolsheviks. These murderers are held up by the socialists as enlightened teachers of truth; they are presented in the incessant public meetings as examples to be admired and emulated. The Socialist Party in Ireland lacks the numbers and the political clout to impose revolution, Russian style, upon this country; nevertheless, there is no doubt that they would give their back teeth to see October 1917 taking place in Ireland. The fact that such an event taking place here is wildly improbable should not detract our attention from the sobering fact that there are those living among us in this society who ardently wish it, and who, given the opportunity, would be every bit as delighted to spill the blood of “the bourgeoisie”, the religious, the reluctant, or anybody at all less than enthusiastic about the revolution, as were Lenin, Trotsky, Guevara, and countless other utopianist killers. In such a communist paradise, Melancholicus would definitely be for the chop, and that on several grounds — he is an observant Christian, whereas the communists seek to abolish religion (every religion except Marxism-Leninism, of course). He is an academic by profession, and intellectuals of all stripes are considered far too bourgeois to be of much use to the proletariat. In any case, historical precedent shows that scholars and university professors are usually placed fairly high up on the list of those designated as potential counter-revolutionaries and are hence ripe for murder. Furthermore, Melancholicus is publicly on record, on this blog and elsewhere, as being unsympathetic to socialism.

I am wearied with asking the same question over and over again: why does our society tolerate such public sympathy for and identification with an ideology that has caused more suffering and death than any other system of totalitarian oppression in history? What would the public reaction be if such posters were to appear celebrating the anniversary of the rise to power of Adolf Hitler, or the anniversary of the Wansee conference? Yet the principle is the same. Why are we horrified by the murderers of the right, and not by the murderers of the left?

Why, in a civilized society, in which human rights and liberty ought to be upheld, is an organisation like the Socialist Party allowed to exist?

The true face of socialism - yet again!

Lest we forget — this from Catholic World News:

Imprisoned Viet Catholic priest denied Bible, sacramental wine

Hanoi, Oct. 31, 2007 (CWNews.com) - A Vietnamese Catholic priest, imprisoned for "spreading propaganda against the socialist state," is being denied access to the Bible, pens and papers, and wine for celebrating Mass behind bars.

The BosNewsLife service, which provides news of Christian prisoners of conscience, reports that Father Nguyen Van Ly remains in solitary confinement in a prison camp in northern Vietnam. The jailed priest has warned his sister that she should not put his clerical title on packages sent to him, because prison authorities refuse to recognize his priestly status. The reason, he explained, is that the government insists that it "does not imprison the Church's people."

Father Ly was sentenced to an 8-year prison term in March 2007, after a court found him guilty of criticizing the Vietnamese government and sending his criticisms to pro-democracy workers abroad.

Father Ly, who has now spent 14 years in prison, gained international prominence in 2001 with a letter to a US congressional committee in which he detailed human-rights abuses in Vietnam and argued against American approval of a bilateral trade pact.

Human rights abuses, you say, in a socialist state? How could that even be possible, since the dogmas of marxism are guaranteed to yield an earthly utopia to all who live by them? Time and again we see the socialists reveal themselves in their true colours. Father Ly has been punished for failing to joyously affirm the socialist hegemony with a remarkable abuse of his human rights. He has committed no crime. Except that in a socialist state, it is a criminal act to express criticism or disapproval of socialism.

For all its trenchant atheism, socialism is nothing else than a religious cult writ large. The “proletariat” is its god, and marxism is its dogma. Political theorists and revolutionary demagogues are its priesthood. Its sacraments are bloody purges, show trials, imprisonments, confiscations and executions. It commands a kind of absolute obedience to and total trust in its leaders found in no Church, and it does not tolerate even the existence of any religion different to its own.

And now Melancholicus really must stop harping on about socialism, or he’ll never write anything else.

Straight from the horse's mouth

A fortnight ago Melancholicus lamented the fact that in our society, while the murderers of the right are justly excoriated for their crimes, the death-mongers of the left are given a free pass. Admiration of the militant left is fashionable; such is the veneration in which revolutionary murderers are held that our holy father Pope Benedict has been lashed in the media for beatifying the Catholic martyrs of the Spanish Civil War, even though those martyrs were the victims—not the perpetrators—of atrocities.

For some reason, recollection of the Soviet purges, the executions, the gulags (not to mention the extermination of the kulaks, in which fifteen million souls perished), the appalling slaughter of an entire nation by the Khmer Rouge, the extraordinary loss of life suffered by the Chinese under Mao Tse Tung—need I go on?—fails to evoke the same chills of horror as recollection of the death camps of the holocaust.

Melancholicus deplores this obscene double standard, and is gratified to know that he is not the only one to have noticed it:

... The day after that singing on the bridge, some of us hung red flags and banners bearing the hammer and sickle from the windows of our rooms. On the outside of my door I pinned up a poster of Lenin, emblazoned with the words he spoke to the Second All-Russia Congress on October 26, 1917, the day after the revolution: “We shall now proceed to construct the socialist order.” Not long after, when I opened my door in the morning, I found the poster in shreds on the floor and a bucketful of horse manure dumped on my threshold.

Fully deserved, I now think. If I had been walking along Silver Street last week and had seen some young student twits toasting the 90th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, I should have been tempted to push them off the bridge into the river. So far as I am concerned today, they – and we, 40 years ago – might just as well have been marking the anniversary of the Nazis’ Kristallnacht and bellowing out the chorus of their Horst Wessel marching song.

What were we thinking of? The Prague spring had not yet been crushed by Soviet tanks, but even so we all knew about the Soviet purges, the show trials, the executions, the extermination of the kulaks, the murderously suppressed revolts in Poland and Hungary. Solzhenitsyn had already published One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and Orwell’s Animal Farm were older than we were.

... Much that I did in my youth can now make me shout aloud with shame; but not much is more mortifying than to think I once toasted mass murderers, torturers and totalitarian despots. How to explain it?

... Bolshevism and the Russian revolution may have disintegrated in ruins but the generation that raised its toast in the direction of the Kremlin 40 years ago has triumphed. Leninism has been defeated almost everywhere in the world, but the postwar generation of baby boomers who went so far left in the 1960s now control this country’s leading institutions. Their taste for totalitarian simplicities and weakness for millenarian terrors has been digested into modern feminism, environmentalism and global warming. Many remain absolutely unrepentant about their past because they have been so successful in the present (one of the sweeter fruits of victory is never having to apologise).

... While Günther Grass, the German author, is excoriated for having joined the Waffen SS at 17, Alan Johnson, the health secretary, is benignly patted on the back for admitting that he was once ideologically aligned to the Communist party of Great Britain. While the Daily Mail is routinely vilified for its prewar support for the Nazis, The Guardian’s role in cheer-leading for a succession of Marxist tyrants from Mao and Pol Pot to Castro and Mugabe is rarely questioned.

Read it all.

So you still think socialism is harmless?

Melancholicus is reluctant to row out into the deep and dangerous sea of the Spanish Civil War, since this is a subject which even today can still spark off hot passions.

Holy Mother Church stirred up some of those passions when today she beatified 498 Catholic martyrs of the Spanish Civil War.

A group calling itself the ‘Association for Historical Memory’, allegedly set up in Spain to preserve evidence relating to the civil war, has reacted with unusual fury to the beatifications. Melancholicus would like to know more about this Association, as it appears to be interested in telling only one side of the story, namely that of the left. The mere suggestion that there is in fact another side seems to have filled them with fury. They have dared to claim that the Catholic Church “accepts only its role as victim and not executioner”. This attitude Melancholicus finds contemptibly rich, since no-one is better than the left in practicing a monopoly on victimhood. And the left, eager to bleat incessantly about crimes committed against itself, will never acknowledge its own crimes, merely plead that its violence is either morally justified, or exaggerated for political effect by its enemies.

It is clear from the reaction of the leftists that even to mention the victims of leftist violence is simply not permitted.

It seems that the attitude that any violence in the service of the left is good and noble is still widespread, and as long as that attitude persists, those who do not share the ideology of the leftists will always be under threat of such violence, and that the leftists can be counted upon to resort to violence if they think they can get away with it.

Is the membership of this ‘Association for Historical Memory’ at all aware that, during the Red Terror in Spain before the final victory of the Nationalists, nearly 7,000 clergy and religious were murdered by Republican forces, or by groups fighting on the Republican side? These included 13 bishops, 4172 diocesan priests, 2364 monks and friars—among them 259 Claretians, 226 Franciscans, 204 Piarists, 176 Brothers of Mary, 165 Christian Brothers, 155 Augustinians, 132 Dominicans, and 114 Jesuits—and 282 nuns. In some dioceses, the numbers are overwhelming: in the words of Julio de la Cueva, “in Barbastro 88 percent of the secular clergy were murdered, 66 percent in Lerida, 62 percent in Tortosa, 44 per cent in Segorbe, about half of the priests in Malaga, Minorca and Toledo.” There are accounts of the faithful being forced to swallow rosary beads, being thrown down mine shafts and of priests being forced to dig their own graves before being buried alive. Is the Association going to tell us, in all seriousness, that all or even most of these were criminals, engaged in violence and terror against Republicans? Do they really expect us to believe such an absurdity, for which there isn’t a tittle of evidence?

Let us now see what grand exploits the brave heroes whose memory is so cherished by the Association for Historical Memory were up to. I wonder, have they bothered to keep any of the following atrocities in their “Memory”?

• An eyewitness to some of the persecution, Cristina de Arteaga, who afterwards became a nun, commented that they [i.e. the Republicans] “attacked the Salesians, people who are totally committed to the poor. There was a rumour that nuns were giving poisoned sweets to children. Some nuns were grabbed by the hair in the streets. One had her hair pulled out.”


• On the night of 19 July 1936 alone, some fifty churches were burned. In Barcelona, out of the 58 churches, only the Cathedral was spared, and similar atrocities occurred almost everywhere in Republican Spain.


• The parish priest of Navalmoral was put through a parody of Christ’s Crucfixion. At the end of his suffering, the militiamen debated whether actually to crucify him or just shoot him. They finished with a shooting. His last request was to be allowed to face his tormenters so he could bless them.


• The Bishop of Jaen and his sister were murdered in front of two thousand celebrating spectators by a special executioner, a woman nicknamed La Pecosa, the freckled one. The Bishop of Almeria was murdered while working on a history of Toledo. His card index file was destroyed.


• In Madrid, a nun was killed because she refused a proposition of marriage from a militiaman who helped storm her convent.


• In El Pardo, near Madrid, a group of militiamen became drunk on communion wine while trying the parish priest. One militiaman used the chalice as a washing bowl as he shaved himself.


• Although rare, it was reported that some nuns were raped by militiamen before they were shot.


• The priest of Cienpozuelos was thrown into a corral with fighting bulls where he was gored into unconsciousness. Afterwards one of his ears was cut off to imitate the feat of a matador after a successful bullfight.


• In Ciudad Real, the priest was castrated and his sexual organs stuffed in his mouth.


• Also in Ciudad Real, a crucifix was shoved down the throat of a mother of two Jesuit priests.

Melancholicus has only this to say to these protestors: shut your filthy, lying mouths, you hypocrites and sons of hypocrites. The Church has beatified only those of her personnel who were murdered, often by cruel and inhuman methods, during the conflict of 1934-37. She has not beatified Franco, for goodness’ sake. So why the fuss?

The fuss of course proceeds from those for whom the Church can only be an oppressor, never a victim; those for whom the clergy are no more than enemy combatants that must be killed at any price, never innocent men simply carrying out the duties of their state.

It is clear that the wholesale slaughter of bishops, priests, monks and nuns was carried out not for military reasons, or even because the Church may have sided, or have been perceived to side, with the Nationalists.

The slaughter was occasioned by nothing other than a hatred of the Church and her clergy — a hatred for the Catholic religion itself, a hatred which manifested itself in such bizarre displays as one sees in this photograph (original here), which shows leftist troops shooting a statue of Christ.

Yes, shooting a statue. And that obviously because it represents Our Lord. If this does not indicate a virulent—not to say irrational—hatred of the Christian faith, then what does it indicate? In military terms, this is simply a waste of ammunition. But this is not a military act, it is a symbolic act.

Because they could not murder Christ Himself, they turned their fury on His representatives—even upon those who were most far removed from political life, who spent their time hidden away from the world in silent prayer, monks in their monasteries, and cloistered nuns. Even though these could not have had less to do with the political controversies that convulsed Spain in the 1930s, they were nonetheless dragged from their enclosures and mercilessly done to death.

There were sufficient numbers of anarchists and communists among the Republican forces during the civil war to ensure that in the chaos of the war, the Church would indeed be targeted. This much was inevitable. To the fanatical ideologues of socialism, the clergy are indeed the enemy, and must be done away with. After all, the revolutionary hero cannot proceed to construct the socialist order while there are still men in soutanes going about, instructing the people in doctrines that contradict socialist dogma, and filling their heads full of all that counter-revolutionary nonsense about Jesus and heaven and eternal life.

Today the same element holds sway in Spanish society. The spiritual descendants of the murderers of the 1930s are just as trenchantly opposed to religion as were their forebears. Except that today, as it is no longer possible for them to shoot the clergy, to throw them down a mine shaft or to bury them alive, it is necessary to shout down the Church and to portray her as the practitioner of every barbarity, in order to claim for the left the status of unique and only victim of the violence of the Spanish Civil War. The right is always expected to acknowledge its crimes and be contrite; the left never. And unless the Church of God toadies up to the left and plays by the left’s rules, she is denied a voice.

How narrow-minded, mean-spirited and small-souled must they be, who cannot stomach even the memory of the martyrs who suffered in the passion of Spain!

Omnes santi martyres Hispaniae, ora pro nobis et pro universo mundo!

Read the whole thing, from Catholic World News, here.

The problem with Marx...

... is that he’s such a marxist!

No, seriously... we must delcare in all honesty that marxism is inherently toxic.

Melancholicus was recently discussing the origins of socialism with his brother Conor, who is an historian. While the politics and social views of we two brothers are in many ways divergent, we are at one in our appraisal of socialism.

The conversation turned to Marx and his legacy. Conor favoured a partial exoneration of Marx on the grounds that he (Marx) could not have been aware that his political philopsophy would be the blueprint for terror and murder on a global scale. But now, ploughing with mounting horror through Marx’s cold-blooded and merciless prose, Melancholicus cannot but declare that Marx must have known exactly what he was doing.

Yes, Melancholicus is now reading the Communist Manifesto. It was presented to him for study in philosophy class in seminary, but owing to sloth and human weakness he failed to read it. Now he is reading it for the first time, and — proh dolor! — it is even more blood-curdling than he feared it would be.

This is not the place for a detailed philosophical dissection of the manifesto; suffice it to say that many of Marx’s prescriptions for the communist utopia are so contrary to human rights and even to human nature that there is no doubt they could not have been implemented without the application to society of extraordinary violence.

This violence, to the communist, would be good and moral, because it would usher in the “dictatorship of the proletariat”. The “proletariat”, of course, is a philosophical concept. Let us not confuse Marx’s proletariat with any person or group of persons, since no persons whatever have any rights in the communist system. Should a working man express a grievance, or complain that some aspect of the system simply does not work, he becomes thereby a counter-revolutionary and therefore a legitimate target for execution.

Communism is ultimately an expression of the belief that something is if I say it is. Marx attempts, in the pages of this obnoxious document, to decree into existence a new order of being, a new reality, where the laws of nature (at least as they concern man) are altogether different from the laws of nature as ordered by reality.

Therefore we cannot exonerate Marx, as though he could not have forseen the crimes committed in his name by over-zealous disciples. He could not have failed to know, by dint of sheer common sense if by nothing else, how the utopia of the workers would be brought into being, and how it would be sustained, were his ideas implemented in practice. He cites previous revolutionary upheavals; he was not ignorant that common to all these upheavals was a vast amount of bloodletting.

Further to the point, we cannot exonerate those persons alive today, who, upon reading the bloodthirsty text of the Communist Manifesto, and with the hindsight of nearly a century of communist violence and terror to warn them of the consequences, still persist in believing that Marx’s ideas will bring about an earthly utopia — if only they can be correctly implemented! — rather than the precise opposite, and that in the pages of Marx one finds the magic pill which will cure all the social, economic and political ills of mankind.

All historical precedent has shown that any attempt to create heaven on earth is doomed from the beginning to abject failure, and the more fervently one strives for an earthly heaven, the closer one comes to realizing an earthly hell.

Some people never learn...

Unfortunately the scanner could not cope with the full-size image: socialists like their flyers to be as large and visible as possible, so the original was printed on A3 paper. Melancholicus’ scanner can only deal with A4 documents, so a goodly portion of the image has had to be cut away. The blurb at the top announces a “4oth anniversary public meeting”. The box at the bottom provides the time and venue of said meeting, which took place in the same building of the university where Melancholicus works.

This eulogy of a man who was a deranged and bloodstained ideologue was organised by the Socialist Party, whose very frightening website can be viewed here (caveat lector). Until the recent general election, this communist organisation actually had representation in the Dáil, in the person of Joe Higgins (a former seminarist, incidentally, which background he shares with Melancholicus — but there the resemblance between us ends). In this year’s election, however, Higgins failed to retain his seat, and his party is once more consigned to the political wilderness. Te Deum laudamus...

The meeting advertised took place yesterday while Melancholicus was meditating on St. Luke, so he is unable to report on how well attended this left-wing gathering was, or on what was said. But that it took place at all should be a sobering reminder to all who value liberty and independence that the forces of oppression, violence and revolution are still at work in the world. The red enemy has not gone away; he is merely waiting for a more opportune time to reveal himself in his true colours. While some of us might be tempted to laugh at the buffoonery that is socialism, and to mock the tiny handful of true believers that still consider the deranged rantings of Marx and Lenin to be the answer to every social and economic ill that has plagued the world since the dawn of civilization, we would do better to treat these people and their agenda seriously, not deride them as the relics of a utopian political experiment that has failed miserably in every society in which it has been tried. That socialism has failed consistently since it was first hatched in the brains of madmen is evident; that some people will continue to cling to an ideology which has been proven false time and time again seems to be a sad reality; but we must never forget that, however weak socialism may become in the wax and wane of political life, it continues to desire power and control over every aspect of human existence from conception to death (and even beyond: socialism is aggressively atheistic, and wishes to deny even the possibility of an afterlife to those in its unmerciful grip). Melancholicus wishes to warn his readers: Socialism is inherently totalitarian. It is in and of itself a tyrannical and inhuman ideology. Should anyone desire proof of this assertion, they have only to review the track record of socialism in the twentieth century. No other political system (with the possible exception of the ideologues of the Third Reich) has come so close to such an absolute denial of human rights and the dehumanization of entire societies, as we see in socialism. The repeated efforts to put the philosophies of Karl Marx and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin into practice have resulted only in poverty, oppression, misery and death — death on a mass scale, unparalleled in the number of its victims by any other system of oppression in world history.

The socialists have an answer to this charge, of course. They have to have an answer to so grave a charge, or there would be no justification in continuing. They blame the excesses of communist government on this man, who is a convenient scapegoat for the red left — they can dismiss as one man’s baleful influence what in reality is typical of the system as a whole. Joseph Stalin was not an aberration of socialism; he was not socialism gone astray, as it were. Rather, he was socialism brought to its logical plenitude. To deny this is to be ignorant of history, or else cold-bloodedly mendacious.

Anyway, back to Guevara. The Socialist Party has organised a public meeting. Melancholicus even saw flyers affixed to lamp-posts in Dublin city centre, advertising similar gatherings devoted to examining how the ‘legacy’ of Guevara is still ‘relevant today’. The word ‘revolution’ always appears openly and unapologetically on these advertisements. We can see that the socialists are quite unrepentant, and have not changed their tune one iota since the days of Stalin, Mao and Guevara. Guevara is held up, not as an aberration to be avoided, but as an example to be imitated. Of course the socialists will ‘spin’ their hero, so as to make him attractive to the soft leftists of today, people such as George Hook and Jim Fitzpatrick. Only those details of his biography which render him sympathetic to contemporary sensibilities will be aired; his championing of the rights of the poor, his opposition to the Battista regime, and of course the happy manner of his martyr’s death — which last ensures that the cult of Che will continue long into the future, for every movement needs its martyrs. There will be no mention of his murders, or the time he spent as commander of the La Cabana fortress, imprisoning and shooting men and women without even a pretence of the procedure of law. There will be no mention of the violence and terror visited by this romantic revolutionary on hundreds of ordinary innocent Cubans.

Now let us examine the scene in another way. Suppose flyers should be posted up in the streets and in the hallowed halls of academia announcing a public meeting to assess, in a positive and sympathetic light, the political legacy of, say, Reinhard Heydrich or Adolf Eichmann. What would happen? Would the good people of Dublin simply pass by, going about their personal business as though these flyers advertised nothing less innocuous than a pop concert? Would the staff and students of the university wherein Melancholicus earns his crust permit such flyers to be exhibited publicly on university property?

Of course not. There would be an outcry. The Gardaí would remove the flyers immediately and arrest those who posted them. There would be a spate of horrified correspondence on the letters page of The Irish Times. The incident would be aired and condemned on the RTÉ news. It would appear, with equal condemnation, on Prime Time and on Questions & Answers. The Taoiseach, and even the President, would feel it necessary to make a public statement condemning the flyers and the meeting they advertised. The meeting, for its part, would not be permitted to take place. The whole affair would probably attract the attention of British, and perhaps even continental, news sources. And why?

Because Heydrich and Eichmann were active representatives of a regime which wrought brutal murder and mass slaughter on a scale never before seen, all in the name of a warped racial ideology. The organisation to which they belonged is, since 1945 if not before, considered synonymous with evil.

But Guevara was an active representative of a similarly brutal and murderous regime — which kills not in the name of racial superiority, but of class struggle. Why is murder in the name of class struggle morally acceptable, while murder in the name of race struggle is not?

Surely it is a reprehensible thing to commit murder, irrespective of racial or political ideology. But why does the public exhibition of flyers extolling Guevara as a hero not excite in our people the same revulsion they would surely feel on seeing similar flyers lauding Heydrich or Eichmann?

Why in our society are the death-mongers of the left given a free pass?

Remembering the revolutionary

Yesterday, apparently, was the 40th anniversary of the death of this man:



While driving home from work yesterday evening, Melancholicus listened to a feature on Guevara’s life and times on Newstalk 106. Even though George Hook and Jim Fitzpatrick were talking about a dangerous revolutionary, they treated him like a celebrity — as though Guevara were one of the great humanitarian figures of the twentieth century, which he was not.

The moral of the story is this: it happens that men often commit acts of bloodshed and mayhem for a political cause. If a man carries out these acts in the service of the politics of the right, he will be universally reviled as a murderer and a terrorist. But if the same acts are carried out in the service of socialism, the perpetrator is extolled in the press and on the airwaves as a hero and a freedom-fighter.

Is there not a strange double-standard at work here? But Melancholicus will not say any more, since this says it better:

"To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary ... These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate. We must create the pedagogy of the The Wall!" — Ernesto 'Che' Guevara

"The Wall" meaning the wall that Che Guevara so happily put people up against to shoot them.

But Che didn't always bother with the wall. One of his favored methods of killing was to tie his victim to a chair, gag him, walk around the room a bit ranting at him, and then slowly walk up, pistol in hand — and splatter the victim's brains and skull across the room while his companions watched.

Why do I bring all this up? Well yesterday, I noted Val Prieto's piece on Che's cheerful everyday execution of Christians during his "glorious revolution" in Cuba. In response to that, some faux-liberal left-wing twit posted an incoherent rant on his blog about me, Fulgencio Batista, George Custer, Ariel Sharon, and King David.

Yeah, you got it. Instead of just acknowledging that Che was a sadist and a mass-murderer, the guy changed the subject to the JOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOZ!!!!!

What is it about totalitarian hate-freaks that whenever they're confronted with the monstrous crimes against humanity committed by one of their heroes, they think they can make it go away by changing the subject? And what is it with their creepy fascination with Jews, anyway?

Mind you, I can sort of understand bringing up Batista, the man who Fidel and Che toppled. Batista was a gangster, a thug and a thief. He killed political opponents and cracked down hard anyone objecting to his thuggish regime.

On the other hand, anyone who's looked at what's happened on that island over the last 50 years knows the truth: Fidel has killed and tortured and imprisoned far more people than any dictator in Cuban history. He has also created more poverty and suffering than any other Cuban leader in history. Yet still people make a hero out of his buddy, the sadistic murderer Che Guevara?

Oh thank you Che! You helped replace a brutal thug named Batista with an even more brutal thug named Castro! And in the process you helped make the poor of Cuba even poorer, helped further suppress free speech, and were proud to institutionalize torture and terror for everyday Cubans! On top of all those glorious things, you wrote poetry!

Che, you looked so handsome and dashing on your motorcycle! But you were even more handsome and dashing when you were terrorizing Cuban peasants, blowing their skulls to bits with your personal sidearm! You romantic Stalin-loving poet you!

The twit anti-semite apologist for Che also had the audacity to say that Che was a "symbol" for "Latin Americans." Yes, certainly he is, and the Latin Americans at Cubanet will be happy to tell you just exactly what that symbol means to them: Just click here to read what these Latin Americans have to say about the "symbol" Che.

And here's what some other Latin Americans have to say about the symbol Che.

Che Guevara was a murdering pig. If you're an apologist for him, you're an apologist for a murdering pig — and an enemy of human rights.

Now I wonder what Messrs. Hook and Fitzpatrick would have to say about that?

The incipient violence of the left

Once again the apostles of tolerance and liberalism have shown themselves... well, intolerant and illiberal. This from Catholic World News:

Graffiti carry threats against Pope

Naples, Oct. 5, 2007 (CWNews.com) - Threats against Pope Benedict XVI have been scrawled on the walls of buildings in Naples, Italy, a few weeks before a visit there by the Pontiff.

Graffiti reading "Death to the Pope" and "Death to Ratzinger" have appeared in the Italian city, where Pope Benedict is scheduled to make a one-day visit on October 21. Italian police officials believe that the graffiti were the work of leftist groups.

In April of this year, death threats against Archbishop Angelo Bagnasco of Genoa prompted police to provide the archbishop, who heads the Italian episcopal conference, with police protection. Those threats-- which also came in the form of graffiti, as well as anonymous letters-- were thought to be the work of militant homosexuals, angered by the Italian hierarchy's opposition to a bid for legal recognition of same-sex unions.

It is interesting that those who demand tolerance and acceptance for their own beliefs and practices are loath to extend the same courtesy to others who might think differently. So much for freedom of thought, never mind freedom of speech. Anything which opposes the onward march of the leftist agenda must be ridiculed and, should that fail to work, threatened with violence. Further comment is surely superfluous.