By Renato Cristin
On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell thunderously, crushed by the unsustainability of the communist regime in East Germany and by the pressure that the states of the free world had exerted on the Soviet Union and its sphere of influence for almost half a century. The fall of the Wall was the symbol of the failure of a colossal system of imprisonment of peoples, of individuals, and their consciences, in that sort of gigantic Gulag that extended from the USSR to all the countries of Eastern Europe that had fallen victim to communism.
After the collapse of the Soviet monster, that is of the great financier of communist movements all over the world, which were therefore deprived of considerable economic means, it seemed that communism in the West could die out or at least be reduced to small groups of nostalgics, as it had happened for National Socialism and for the few Nazis scattered around the world. In fact, the Soviet system was defeated not only thanks to the actions of the West, but also because it was hated by the peoples it had subdued in so many countries, and therefore it also imploded from within. The collapse of that system should therefore also have marked the end of its ideology.
Instead, against all logic and against all historical rationality, that ideology has survived and, what is even more irrational, has in some respects even strengthened, augmenting its ranks throughout the Western world (while in China and some other countries, like Cuba, it never collapsed). Why?
Why have we seen a flood of books and articles praising communism and its nefarious leaders for decades? Almost no authorities, political, religious, or civil, raised their voices to condemn such impudence, such a display of ideological arrogance and insensitivity to the more than hundred million victims caused by that ideology.
The answer is simple and at the same time disheartening: because all over the world there is a safety net that extends to all sectors of society and which exercises a great power of influence on public opinion. Socialist-communist ideology (in all its variants) is in fact predominant today in the mass media, in the educational system (universities and schools), in showbiz, in the world of publishing, culture and art.
For many years a great personality of Soviet dissidence such as Vladimir Bukovsky argued that in order to counter this rebirth and to do justice to the more than one hundred million deaths that communism has caused all over the world and to the even more numerous people persecuted by the various communist regimes, it was necessary definitively condemn not only those crimes but also the ideology that inspired them.
For this reason, in the summer of 2019, together with Bukovsky I decided to launch an appeal for a Nuremberg for communism, with which to fulfill a moral even more than political and cultural imperative: the condemnation of communism as a regime and as an ideology, to expose its lies and prevent their spread. In fact, this ideology is still very active and dangerous, not only in its — today not many, fortunately — achievements of government, but also in its numerous political and movement forms within the liberal-democratic countries.
The Cold War was not only a military confrontation but above all an ideological war, a war between worldviews. But even though the West won it on the military and economic level, on the ideological one the game is still open and indeed, the West, understood as the homeland of freedoms, risks losing it.
And therefore, following this thesis, we must ask ourselves a crucial question: if the communist ideology is not dead, and therefore if it has never stopped waging war on the Western social, economic and cultural system, why has the free world stopped its war against this ideological enemy?
Alongside the “clash of civilizations” (according to Samuel Huntington’s definition), what I call a clash of ideologies has also been established today. The civilizational clash has been visible in the countless attacks that the various organizations of Islamic fundamentalism have conducted against the Western world since 11 September 2001. But the second clash remains hidden, concealed by skillful direction that has infiltrated all corners of Western societies and disguises it.
To this we must also add that in recent years we have also observed a progressive bonding between Islamism and communism, as it is happening for example in Venezuela, where Iranian military advisors and Hezb’allah militias have been working for years with the socialist regime of Chávez and Maduro, or as it happens in a less conspicuous but not less dangerous way in some international organizations, from the UN to the various NGOs, where a pro-Islamic orientation is intertwined with cultural Marxism, giving rise to an ideological movement that dominates, for example, the discourse on migration (the theory of Replacement Migration and the UN Global Compact for Migration are two examples of this union) or the attitude towards Israel (the recent report by Human Rights Watch is a perfect synthesis of neo-Marxism and pro-Islamism).
This Nuremberg initiative is necessary both so that the massacres and genocides of the various communist regimes and movements can be formally subjected to criminal proceedings that have not yet taken place, and to detoxify the collective historical consciousness from the poisons that communist ideology has spread everywhere. We need to rebalance the moral conscience of the Western world, of that free world that too often, out of laziness or bad faith, conceals the truth of communism, hiding its criminogenic essence.
This initiative should be developed on three levels, closely interconnected:
- A specifically cultural line (historiographical, philosophical, sociological, psychological, political and geopolitical);
- A legal line (to examine the concrete possibilities of proceeding through criminal law, both in terms of specific cases and in terms of the crime of genocide that characterizes massacres, such as Holodomor (the starvation of Ukrainian peasants perpetrated by the Soviet Union in 1932-1933); and
- A political and institutional line, which must include governments sensitive to the idea of a political and moral condemnation of communism, and the European Parliament, in order to complete in an operational sense the resolution that equates, in historical memory, Communism to National Socialism, approved by the Europarliament in September 2019.
To carry out the “Nuremberg for Communism” project, it is therefore necessary that it be received not only by people who care about political freedom, historical truth and moral justice, and not only by the organizations and foundations that defend the values and principles of the Western tradition from any totalitarianism, but also by national and international political institutions, to arrive at an official resolution condemning the crimes of communism and its ideology. For this purpose it is necessary that it be taken up and re-launched by intelligent and sensitive political leaders who have the courage to counter the “politically correct” wave that is sweeping all Western societies.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/05/the_need_for_a_nuremberg_for_communism.html