One phrase from a decade ago which I'll never forget hearing a BNP activist use when discussing the morality of Hitler's actions in the Holocaust: 'rightly or wrongly', as though it were a quaint debating point. Let's be clear: it was 'wrongly'. There aren't two equally-valid opinions here. Those actions were evil. The phrase jarred with me, because it attempted to somehow defend Hitler by reducing mass-murder to a debating point.
Are we agreed on that? The brutal mass-murder of millions isn't something which we should be having a soul-searching debate about: that regime my family members fought to save our nation from must be condemned. The very suggestion of debating such matters makes us recoil in horror, because it is to take the most solemnly awful of truths and to imply that they are otherwise. It is to turn facts into something malleable, to downplay the suffering of millions.
Can we now take that standard on which we've just (hopefully) agreed, and apply precisely the same standard to Communism and the extreme-Left just like we do the extreme-Right?
Take Josef Stalin, for example. We'll never know how many of his own people he butchered; records weren't properly kept. But it's overwhelmingly likely that he killed more of his own people than Hitler killed in the Holocaust. I'd never heard until I stumbled across it today that he got a 13-year-old girl pregnant when he was 34. Strange the things that aren't common knowledge.
Now, it's true to say that his ideological hero Karl Marx didn't do any of that himself - but Marx did write “there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.”
He also said that “No great movement has ever been inaugurated Without Bloodshed. The independence of America was won by bloodshed, Napoleon captured France through a bloody process, and he was overthrown by the same means. Italy, England, Germany, and every other country gives proof of this, and as for assassination, it is not a new thing, I need scarcely say.”
That ideology, which cost tens of millions of lives in the old Soviet Union, and millions more wherever undiluted communism has been exported - including China and Cambodia, should be consigned to the dustbin of history in a similar way to the ideology of Hitler (I don't much care for 'moral equivalence' arguments, because the evil of the one isn't dependent upon the evil of the other, but it's an easy shorthand).
Yet the EU Commission President will, on Friday, give a speech in Trier to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx's birth. To do otherwise, a Commission spokesperson suggested, would 'come close to denying history'.
No, it would not. There's a difference between acknowledging the existence of an evil within society and participating in an event commemorating it. Another means of acknowledging this fact of history would be to publicly refuse the invitation, out of respect to Communism's victims.
Juncker's spokesperson goes on to say that “I think that nobody can deny that Karl Marx is a figure who shaped history in one way or the other."
That phrase - "in one way or the other" - for some reason triggered my memory of the BNP "rightly or wrongly" phrase. Just as with Hitler, the appropriate choice was 'wrongly', it's not equivocal: the shaping of history by a mass-murdering bloodthirsty Communist ideology isn't 'in one way'; it's the other.
