Left spin | Communism for dummies: Smartly selling a murderous ideology, false gods like Che

Last week, the cat lapped up milk. Also, CPM general secretary Sitaram Yechury sang the eulogy of his ideological masters, the Communist Party of China (CPC), in a letter.

Both would have been equally unsurprising had Yechury’s luxuriant praise not come on the back of a devastating pandemic originating from China (from most accounts, from its biological weapons labs in Wuhan). Besides, China has been engaged in a series of violent conflicts from Doklam to Galwan to Pangong Tso with Yechury's own nation, India.

Brazening out all these inconvenient realities, Yechury wrote, “Progressive people look forward to the People’s Republic of China under CPC’s leadership pursuing a peaceful foreign policy, consolidating good neighbourly relations, contributing to peace and stability in South Asia and the world.”

He topped it by claiming that China’s economic recovery after Covid was a “lesson for the world”.

Coming from the head of India’s largest Communist party, it is predictable but still distasteful, given the current context.

But here is the more problematic bit: a very small yet vocal section of young Indians are getting drawn to the far-Left. Certain urban Indian campuses like JNU and Jadavpur University have always been Leftist strongholds. But three recent developments have fed the trend.

First, sustained propaganda by the Left and so-called ‘liberal’ intelligentsia against Narendra Modi has subliminally convinced many urban, English-educated youngsters that the “vernac” onslaught of nationalism and Hindutva will wreck their neat world of “coolness”.

Second, live television and social media in the United States, which these young stars follow more than their own local content, made ousting President Donald Trump a civilisational mission, that too by far-Left, violent means. These channels and videos openly celebrated anarchy on the streets, smashing of statues, burning of cars and mass robbing of shops.

Many departmental stores owned by black Americans were burned and looted in the name of black victimisation.

But the third trend of wokeness perhaps captures most eloquently the organised intellectual thuggery of the Left. Every idea whom a small group of frustrated, attention-seeking, violently intolerant individuals hiding behind LGBTQIA and other marginalised identities deem offensive is cancelled. Every person who puts forth or backs that idea is cancelled, his or her career damaged or destroyed. It is like an intellectually blinkered lynch-mob moving from one book to the next treatise with chainsaws or sledgehammers, spoiling for a kill.

Gullible youngsters are never encouraged to question the motives of the far-Left. They are told that the Leftist ideology is one of compassion, dissent and resistance, standing for the poor and the underdog. They are made to believe that Communism best anchors their anger and angst, insecurities and creativity.

Alas, generations have quickly been disabused.

Here are a few basic questions young men and women should ask themselves and their ideologues, and do some research on their own before plunging headlong into a blinding certitude:

1. If Communism is pro-poor, why do Communist nations not trust the poor to vote?
2. If Communism cares for the underdog, why have the poor voted it out across the democratic world, including India?
3. If Communism is pro-minorities, why does a Communist nation like China kill Uighur Muslims, ban beards and Muslim names, send millions to detention camps?
4. Why do most mass killers of modern history — from Stalin and Lenin to Mao, from Kim to Ceaușescu, from Pol Pot to Milošević — come from the Left? Even Hitler’s Nazi party started out as the National Socialist German Workers’ Party or Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterparte. While mercilessly killing or expelling thousands, Idi Amin furiously nationalised institutions, spurned Britain and moved to the arms of the Communist Soviet Union.
5. Why doesn’t Communism give people their basic right to practice religion when they are in power, but allies with Islamist regimes like Pakistan internationally?
6. If Communism is the best economic solution, why are most communist or socialist countries poor? Why did China have to open its economy and indulge in the most capitalistic practices around the world to become an economic superpower?

These are not comfortable questions. Certainly not for millions of youngsters who have been culturally brainwashed to wear Che Guevara T-shirts and caps believing him to be this hotly idealistic revolutionary.

Alvaro Vargas Llosa, the author of The Che Guevara Myth and the Future of Liberty, captures a very different, sinister Che in one of his pieces for The New Republic: “In April, 1967, speaking from experience, Guevara summed up his homicidal idea of justice in his ‘Message to the Tricontinental’: ‘Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective and cold-blooded killing machine.'"

Llosa writes: “In January, 1957, as his diary from the Sierra Maestra indicates, Guevara shot Eutimio Guerra because he suspected him of passing on information: 'I ended the problem with a .32 calibre pistol, in the right side of his brain…His belongings were now mine.;"

Basically, Che enjoyed killing. He carried out many of the executions personally.

A 2004 movie that gave further rocket fuel to the Guevara legend is The Motorcycle Diaries. It is based on Che’s travel diary, Notas de Viaje.

The film projects Che as the darling, budding revolutionary. It cleverly blacks out the deeply racist bits from his book.

"The blacks, those magnificent examples of the African race who have maintained their racial purity thanks to their lack of an affinity with bathing, have seen their territory invaded by the Portuguese…The black is indolent and a dreamer; spending his meagre wage on frivolity or drink; the European has a tradition of work and saving."

As for the wokes who wear Che T-shirts at the Pride March, here is the news. Guevara was involved in the creation of the first labour camp in the Guanahacabibes peninsula in 1960, where thousands of homosexuals were later imprisoned.

Che’s friend and boss Fidel Castro, another Communist icon who kept Cuba in gruelling, romanticised poverty, viewed queers as deviants.

“We have never believed that a homosexual can personify the conditions and requirements of conduct that allow us to consider him a true revolutionary," he said. "A deviation of that nature clashes with the concept we have of what a militant Communist should be.”

Some jokingly call Communism the fourth Abrahamic religion. In its ideological rigidity, lust for solutions based on violence, bigotry toward the ‘non-believer’, it often surpasses the worst medieval instincts of the other three. But it has probably the world’s best advertising and machinery at its disposal, and the young are its prime target audience.

That is the chilling bit.

This is the first of a three-part series on the truth of Communism and other Leftist ideologies, as these are sold to Gen Z and millennials

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Abhijit Majumder