People's Democracy

         Shop-Soiled Anti-Communist Propaganda

Sitaram Yechury

WE are entering a period which is seeing a concerted aggressive anti-communist propaganda blitz being mounted both domestically and internationally. The reasons for this are not difficult to understand.

Internationally, the US imperialist occupation of Iraq and the incendiary war unleashed by them has met with a severe reaction of condemnation and opposition worldwide. While the massive anti-war protest movements across the globe galvanized millions of people, the vindication of their opposition came when the rationale for launching such a war by US imperialism and its allies was shattered with no weapons of mass destruction being found. Further, the capture of Saddam Hussein had nailed a lie that he was personally masterminding the resistance of the Iraqi people. US imperialism and its allies particularly UK were literally caught with their pants down. It has now been proved beyond any shadow of doubt that the war against Iraq and its subsequent occupation was undertaken on the basis of well-designed fabrications. The real motives were to establish US hegemony in all respects – military, political and economic.

In such a situation, it was necessary for US imperialism to launch a counter offensive to try and blunt the edge of public criticism against its actions and designs. The 60^th anniversary of the landing of the troops of the western allies in Normandy during the Second World War was used as the peg to launch a massive propaganda blitz hailing that event as being decisive in the defeat of fascism.  George Bush Jr. and his drummer boy Tony Blair, both seeking reelection were quick to pounce on this opportunity to declare the imperialist west as the resolute upholder of democracy in the fight against both fascism and communism. The landing of the second front during the Second World War at Normandy in 1944 was portrayed as the turning point of the war that decisively defeated Nazi Germany and its Italian and Japanese allies.

The truth of the matter, however, is entirely different. It is by now well documented, and we shall recollect some of the crucial evidence of this documentation in a subsequent article in this series, that the second front landed at a time when it became clear that the Soviet Red Army had trounced the Hitlerite invasion of the Soviet Union and was close to reaching Berlin to seal Hitler’s defeat. The second front thus was launched primarily to ensure that the Soviet Union does not take the entire credit and, more importantly, to stake a share in the post-war `spoils’.  History, thus, is once again sought to be distorted to serve the immediate political objective of imperialism in the present context. As stated earlier, we shall expose this distortion subsequently.

Another important reason for launching an aggressive anti-communist propaganda drive is the urgent need for US imperialism to establish its credentials in the fight against terrorism. These credentials are becoming more suspect by the day as information and knowledge of the overt and covert support that US imperialism provided to these very terrorist groups in the past are being exposed. We had earlier noted that the battle cry of the cold war – “war against communism” – is being replaced by the current battle cry – “the war against terrorism”. The post 9/11 situation has seen this translate into a very severe restriction of the democratic rights of the people in various countries in the name of fighting terrorism. Draconian laws have been put on the statute books on this pretext. Needless to add these are aimed more at attacking the progressive and radical protests against imperialism and its rule. Anti-communism becomes the objective as these laws are applied in many parts of the world.

A whole new set of fabricated campaign against the so-called “communist” terrorism, the activities of some fringe groups of the Left are magnified out of proportion to justify such an attack. This has become necessary for the ruling classes both in the advanced countries and in the third world in order to control and quell the rising protests against their neo-liberal economic policies of globalisation. The global anti-globalisation protest movements that are growing invariably have the communist-Left as its leading, if not, as the most influential component. To stem the tide of these growing protests it is necessary for imperialism and its ruling class appendages world wide to mount an anti-communist propaganda offensive. Hence, we see as elections in the USA and the UK draw closer the fever pitch to which such a campaign is mounted. Like the earlier so-called campaign against “fascism and communism,” the current campaign is against the so-called, “terrorism and communism.”

In another subsequent article we shall deal with the criminal history of imperialism which intervened in many countries where religious fundamentalism rules, if not, dominates today. The progressive anti-imperialist forces in these countries were the primary targets of US imperialism since they constituted, besides everything else, the most powerful and consistent anti-imperialist force. The US support to the Shah of Iran and his persecution of the Left paved the way for the Islamic revolution to triumph. Likewise, the US imperialist interventions in Iraq, Sudan, Egypt and elsewhere which once had a powerful anti-imperialist communist movement led to the rise of the fundamentalist forces in these countries. Afghanistan, however, remains the most classic example of how US imperialism, in the name of fighting the then Soviet influence in Afghanistan, founded nurtured, aided and militarised the fundamentalists by creating the Taliban. The Taliban was thus the Frankenstein of US imperialism. The progressive regimes in Afghanistan were undermined and decimated paving the way for religious bigotry and fundamentalism to rule the roost. Thus it is US imperialism’s anti-communist obsession that laid the grounds for the rise of fundamentalism and terrorism.

Further, in its drive to establish its global hegemony, US imperialism embarked on a policy of State terrorism. The wars that it unleashed against sovereign countries under one pretext or the other contributed, albeit in a distorted form to the rise of individual terrorism as the counter weapon. The September 11, 2001 in New York was preceeded by another September 11 1973 in Santiago. Chile. The democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende was killed and the regime toppled through a CIA inspired coup leading to the massacre of millions of people and decades long rule of the terrorist dictatorship under Pinochet. This is only one such example. All across Latin and Central America, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Grenada, Panama, Guatemala and elsewhere it was US military intervention that propped up dictators through the blatant use of State terrorism. US imperialism’s state terrorism therefore is in the first place the most powerful factor that led to the spurt in the growth of individual terrorist actions.

The most glaring example of such a policy in contemporary history is the persecution and denial of the fundamental right of a homeland to the Palestinians. If the US backed Israel were to withdraw from all the occupied Palestinian territories and allowed the UN sanctioned Palestinian state to be formed then there is no ground left for the growth of any “terrorist” activities by the Palestinian groups. This is the simple truth. But by refusing to do so, in defiance of international public opinion, USA and Israel continue to foment terrorist activities in the region.

It is precisely to mask this reality that the campaign against the communist movement is being remounted. Imperialism’s predatory pursuit of profit accompanied by inhuman atrocities against the peoples of many sovereign countries across the globe is a crime that can be carried out continuously only by discrediting its staunchest opponents. US imperialism therefore requires today to club the fight against terrorism with that against communism for its survival and advance.

This international anti-communist propaganda aggressiveness converges with the objective reality domestically at home with the results of the general elections 2004 leading to the formation of the UPA government that is critically supported by the Left.  Imperialist pen-pushers and the drumbeaters of the domestic variants of neo-liberal globalisation economic policies are aghast at the fact that this government cannot survive without the support of the Left. This is a reality that they wish would disappear. Periodic elections in a parliamentary democracy for these liberalisation pundits are an aberration that interrupts the process of the loot of the economy and the impoverisation of its people. Now that this “aberration” is over, they seem to argue that India should get along with its business as usual. In the process, they seek not merely to ignore but to negate the mandate of the people. An important element of this mandate, as noted earlier by us was a decisive vote against the severe hardships imposed by these economic policies on people’s livelihood during the last five-six years. The mandate therefore has brought back to the forefront an important element of the Left’s agenda that the focus of economic reforms must be people’s livelihood and not merely crony corporate profits. The anti-communist attacks particularly against the Left’s economic policy positions is thus mounted to negate the people’s verdict and permit the continuation of the very same economic policies which were rejected by the people in a large measure. The defeat of the Chandrababu Naidus and SM Krishnas clearly shows the trend of popular opinion. The attempts to explain these defeats through specious arguments continue to hold no credibility whatsoever amongst the people.

Such efforts however continue. More importantly, to negate the people’s mandate, it requires, if not the negation, then the obfuscation of the Left’s agenda. This despite the fact that the Left has won in these elections the maximum number of seats it has ever done since independence. Since the negation of the Left may not be frontally possible, given their significantly increased strength, they take recourse to resurrect age old anti-communist prejudices and to weave new theories of the convergence between the Left and the Right -- the Communists and the RSS or the Communists and the fascists. A case in point, amongst the spate of anti-communist articles appearing in mainstream media, are two instances: Rajeev Desai’s piece in the Times of India of August 05, 2004 and Amulya Ganguli’s piece in the Hindustan Times of August 06, 2004.

Buttressing a similar vein, Surjit Bhalla in an article in Business Standard (Augu st 7/8, 2004) seeks what he calls, “a possible explanation for the Left’s intellectual dishonesty in research?” A la Amulya Ganguly, it is argued here that the Left deliberately opposes statistics of poverty reduction in India since the reduction of poverty means the waning influence of the Left! According to them the Left is relevant only when poverty exists and hence poverty has to be nurtured. This is not merely insidious and diabolic, it is downright dishonesty – intellectual dishonesty of the worst variety. A study of the World Bank (the Vatican of liberalisation pundits) for the last decade of the 20^th century shows West Bengal reaching the first amongst Indian states in poverty reduction! The second rank is that of Kerala! The Bhallas’ and the Gangulys’, however, deliberately ignore this reality.

In his tirade against the Left, Bhalla, coins the acronym id to denote intellectual dishonesty. By doing so he has committed a classical Freudian slip! Id, in Freud’s psychoanalysis constitutes the lowest form of desire, often unattainable, untempered by rational reasoning! Such is the congenital anti-communism of these drummer boys of imperialist liberalisation. Or,  Mr. Bhalla’s id!

Such is their desperation that the Hindustan Times article uses a photograph morphing the images of Lenin with Golwalker. For congenital anti-communists however, this is nothing new. Reams of fabricated lies seeking to compare Hitler with Stalin, in fact to portray Stalin as a tyrant worse than Hitler have emerged from this anti-communist propaganda machine in the past. Evolving an Indian variant of this theme requires neither great creativity nor originality. In this series subsequently we shall deal with this perfidious campaign of equating communists with the fascists, more elaborately.

For the moment however, let it suffice to state that the convergence of international and domestic developments are leading to a renewed anti-communist propaganda offensiveness that needs to be met squarely and exposed thoroughly. No amount of recourse to the age-old propaganda mill whose dictum has been -- to glorify the fascists, compare them with the communists -- to decry the communists, compare them with the fascists – will however not change the reality. More on this later.