RUSSIA: WHEN THE NEEDLES GOT STUCK?

  International Brigade deplores EU Remembrance Resolution

 YOU'VE certainly got to hand it to those few people on the British left who still stick with the idea that Russia offers some form of hope for human civilisation.  It is an idea that somehow a remnant of a golden age ideal rooted in historical Marxist-Leninism, will emerge through the person of  Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin; (a former student of law at Leningrad University and later a KGB foreign intelligence officer going on to be Director of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the KGB's successor agency). 

In this country the International Brigade Memorial Trust (IBMT) is seemingly one of those bodies dedicated to upholding the myth of this new Russian Saint Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.   As evidence of this on the 5th,  October 2019, at the LONDON AGM of the Chair Jim Jump moved a motion expressing dismay at the decision of the European Parliament to approve a remembrance resolution. 

The actual text of the EU resolution,  of which the IBMT so violently disapproves, reads as follows:

'This strand supports activities inviting reflection on European cultural diversity and on common values. It aims to finance projects reflecting on causes of totalitarian regimes in Europe's modern history (especially, but not exclusively, Nazism that led to the Holocaust, Fascism, Stalinism and totalitarian communist regimes) and to commemorate the victims of their crimes.

'This strand also concerns other defining moments and reference points in recent European history. Preference will be given to projects encouraging tolerance, mutual understanding, intercultural dialogue and reconciliation.'

Now the International Brigade resolution, which was agreed unanimously,  begins sa follows:  

'The European Parliament’s recent decision to equate communism with Nazism and to ignore British appeasement of fascism as one of the key factors leading to the Second World War has been roundly condemned by the IBMT.'   

This is the opening wording with which the International Brigade AGM motion begins condemns European Parliament’s remembrance resolution as an ‘insult’ to anti-fascists!   What this IBMT motion blatantly ignores is the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact,^[a] officially known as the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,^[b] was a non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed in Moscow on August 23, 1939, by Foreign Ministers Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov, respectively.^[8]

In the end it was the Germans that broke with this pact not the Soviets.  The British International Brigade.  However, it would good if we could conclude the crimes of the Soviet Union with a dodgy pact taken out with a neighbouring regime in the difficult circumstances of the1930s.  Any disinterested observer of 20th century history must know this cannot be the case.  As I write this I am reviewing a book 'THE RESPONSIBILITY OF INTELLECTUALS: Reflections by Noam Chomsky & others after 50 years' which which deals with what honest journalists and academics ought to be doing to tell truth to the powerful.  In this book Craig Murray* writes about 'The abdication of responsibility':  'It is worth noting the clear-eyed recognition in Chamsky's work that the Soviet Union was also a rival empire.  Even while deporing Russophobia and continual threat posture of encirclement - which Chomsky also note in his essay - I always find it is worth reminding people that Russia itself still is an empire.  Much of its current land - and I mean Russia itself, not the former Soviet Republics - was acquired in the nineteenth century by imperial conquest precisely contempororary with British acquisitions in India or indeed the westward expansion of the USA.  These territories are majority Muslim.  Russian imperialism is quite real.'  

This is indeed an inconvenient truth which the IBMT and those who sell the Morning Star may wish to forget.  It's harder to forget the mountains of  corpses in the  Ukrainian Famine of 1933-4 or Stalin's Show Trials and purges in the later 1930s, but George Orwell described in December 1945 in a penetrating essay entitled 'Through a Glass, Rosily', an attack on a Tribune's Vienna correspondent for revealing 100,000 rape cases owing to the inappropriate misbehavior of the Russian occupying troops with the local citizenship.  At that time Orwell argued that some readers of  Tribune seemed to imply that (even if true) the '100,000 rape cases in Vienna are not a good advertisement for the Soviet regime:  therefore, even if they happened, don't mention them.  Anglo-Russian relations are more likely to prosper if inconvenient facts are kept dark.'

What the wrong-headed motion, which originates from the International Brigade Memorial Trust, and is now being promoted by the Morning Star salesmen, is doing is to throw historical facts down the Orwellian 'Memory Hole'.  What these people are saying is 'don't reveal inconvenient facts' like the Ukrainian Famine in 1933-4 or mass rapes by Russian troops of citizens in occupied wartime Vienna or the purges, simply it because it will play into the hands of the enemy.

 But the trouble with this kind of cover-up is that when it gets out that it is false then people tend not to believe you even when you are telling the truth.  The Morning Star itself has few readers and it little credibility in intellectual circles.  By contrast the International Brigade has retained some degree of integrity over the years, but now by associating itself with the motion it risks bring its own organisation into disrepute:  any body who is willing to weigh the management of the Russia's Soviet gulags more favourably than the gas-chambers of Nazi Germany has surely an unenviable task?

Orwell introduced the term 'Inverted Nationalism', to explain how some people came to embrace either Germany or Russia in contrast to their own countries in the 1930s.  With some people on the left somehow the needle got stuck, and despite Russian regime now being committed to the Orthodox Church and passionate Slav nationalism these same people still cling emotionally to this Oriental despotism.  It's as if there is some deep physological need for these attachments.

*****************

*  Craig Murray is author of Murder in Samarkand (Mainstream Publishing, 2006).  Became well known when he resigned as British ambassador to Uzbekistan in protest against British collusion with the Uzbek dictatorship during the 'war on terror'.  He received the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence in 2006.