The Spanish Communist Party this morning celebrated a new stamp. The new stamp celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Spanish Communist party. Three days ago, the Mayor of Madrid, Almeida (PP) opened a new statue to the Spanish Legion and said some kind words about its founding general, Millán Astray. The Ciudadanos Deputy Mayor, Villacís, also went along.
The Spanish Legion, as opposed to the Army or the Navy, didn’t have a neutral role in the Civil War or end up fighting on both sides: it was on Franco’s side and some nasty things happened along the way. The Spanish Communist Party doesn’t like talking about what happened at the Paracuellos massacre, or the role played by its former leader Santiago Carrillo.
Not to worry, neither the Post Office nor the Mayor of Madrid mentioned any of that. They just commemorated each institution. Both sides benefit.
Each side’s selective history and creation of new cultural and media objects winds the other up in the 21st Century, 30 years after Spain had almost completely forgottten about the Civil War, because the stamp and the statue both become media objects, with significance for today’s tribes and today’s politics, as soon as the images and words are published on Twitter, making iPhones around the country vibrate with notifiactions five seconds later, generating instant and exciting tribal outrage.
The left was outraged the other day about the statue, the right is outraged today about the stamp. While Mayor Almeida gave a speech about the statue, as of this writing, neither the Deputy Prime Minister, Yolanda Diaz, a member of the Communist Party, nor the Consumer Affairs Minister, Alberto Garzón, who wrote a book called Why I Am A Communist, had so far mentioned their new multi-coloured ideological stamp.
If you search hard enough on the Internet, you will find there is a European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism, which is apparently celebrated on August 23 each year. The idea is to condem both totalarian ideologies and regimes.
The original document from 2009 states: “Europe will not be united unless it is able to form a common view of its history, recognises Nazism, Stalinism and fascist and Communist regimes as a common legacy and brings about an honest and thorough debate on their crimes in the past century”.
Both Twitter and the iPhone were in their infancy in April 2009. The financial crisis that would give us a decade of live-streamed populist polarised politics in the West had only just happened.
As well as two communist ministers in the current Spanish coalition government, there are several communist MPs in the Spanish Parliament, plus Podemos. Pablo Iglesias said just the other day: “the only ones who really defend liberal democracy and the rule of law when things get tough are the communists”.
The communist grouping in the European Parliament is called The Left in the European Parliament (Podemos, United Left, Bildu, France Insoumise, the Portuguese Communist Party, the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia, etc.). No Nazi MPs. “Obviously not!”, you might say.
Why is the rejection of one ideology so obvious in modern European politics but the rejection of the other, not so much? Both had totalitarian regimes responsible for the killing of several million people during the 20th Century. Those regimes were ultimately defeated.
Why do we still have communist MPs when all the Nazis ones are long gone? What is the fundamental difference in their ideas and history? Why is the rejection of communism not as obvious? Why is it, indeed, still welcomed by some? Perhaps we have to go to the roots of each.
Might it be that the core of fascist ideology is thuggish xenophobic hatred and outright rejection of others just because they are others, while if we go back to the start of communist ideology, to Marx, before the totalitarian experiments in Soviet Russia with Lenin and Stalin, we still find at heart a theory about class struggle and structural economic injustice imposed on workers?
And so some people on the left believe there might still be something in that, given all of the economic injustice and structural imbalances in the 21st Century, and notwithstanding the problems communism has had with economic reality along the way?
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