Colby Cosh: At least Poilievre understands the fatal dangers of socialism

Last week, federal Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre sent out a tweet in honour of Black Ribbon Day, a European Union-originated day of “Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism.” Because Poilievre is always heavily motivated by making exactly the right people lose their marbles, the text of the tweet read thus:

“On the 85th anniversary of Black Ribbon Day, we remember the victims of Soviet Socialism & National Socialism (Nazism). May we never forget the countless atrocities committed by these socialist ideologies, and may we honour those who fought to liberate Europe. Canada must always stand against socialism for freedom and democracy.”

Politicians of the right have been rubbing the left’s nose in the “socialist” naming and origins of the Nazi party for my whole adult life and then some. My ordinary attitude toward this is “Suck it up, weenies.” The taxonomic differences between the red and black parties that tore Europe apart in the 20th century are obviously important. This does not imply that the curious similarities between the two flavours of revolutionary one-party state-cult are either coincidental or trivial.

Those movements engaged in intermittent political collaboration against bourgeois parliamentary democracy while fighting each other in the streets. States led by them participated in coordinated aggressive war as conscious quasi-allies. Their crimes against humanity have a rhyming character that only a cretin would deny, and that Europe naturally remembers with extra vividness. Sorry if that gets up your nose, Twitter historiographers.

There is nothing at all technically objectionable in Poilievre’s tweet, but you can see for yourself in the subsequent thread that it brought a rainbow of beardos, tankies and Green Party grannies out of the woodwork to complain that Nazism wasn’t real socialism. As far as I can tell, nobody whatsoever has voiced the traditional social-democratic complaint that Soviet socialism wasn’t real socialism either.

We must remember the sacred maxim that Twitter isn’t real life, but it makes you wonder — and it’s not the only reason to wonder — where the actual democratic socialists and their intellectual tradition are hiding. Maybe they’re interred next to all the old Progressive Conservatives: at any rate, it’s surprising to find that explicitly self-identified socialists seem content to append the gore-saturated rap sheet of Stalin to the historical ledger of socialism.

One is naturally tempted to take them at their word. Maybe they are just afraid to acknowledge that revolutionary socialism has multiple failure modes that lead to mass death. The truth of the relationship between “Nazism” and “socialism” is that the early Nazi party did have an influential, consciously socialist ideological layer — i.e., an internal left, one that was purged violently in 1934 by the party’s right. The same thing happened in Soviet Russia several times over between 1917 and 1953, with blows going in both directions and, yes, sometimes landing on certain unlucky nationalities. Internal spasms of purgation are an obvious inherent pathology of radical movements, whatever their proclaimed political character. If we take no other lesson away with us from the annals of the 20th century, can we hang onto that one?

National Post