On Communism and Death
by Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo and translated by Alex Higson. / March 3, 2014 / No comments
Today, in Venezuela, political control is maintained with violence.
Protests in Caracas, Venezuela on February 15, 2014. Photo: andresAzp via Flickr.
“The Party is immortal” was one of the first communist slogans. It was a declaration of the Party’s right to annihilate its “class enemies” and to keep hold of power by means of a “dictatorship of the proletariat” that would eradicate the “enemies of the people.”
- Is it worth-while to focus on the last images and letters coming from the inside of the last living utopia on Earth? Is Cuba by now a contemporary country or just another old-fashioned delusion in the middle of Nowhere-America? A Cold-War Northtalgia maybe? Can we expect a young Rewwwolution.cu within that Ancien Régime still known as The Revolution? I would like to provoke more questions than answers.
- Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo was born in Havana City and still resides and resists there, working as a free-lance writer, photographer and blogger. He is the author of Boring Home (2009) and is the editor of the independent opinion and literary e-zine Voces.
For decades, communists were murdered in every country they turned up in. As a result, once they were in power for the first time in history, from the upper echelons of Stalinism to the satellite nations of the USSR, they began their revenge for all the crimes committed against them. And continue today.
I am not anti-communist. As a Cuban, I have spent 40 years living in a communist nation. Many of my friends and relatives are communists. I probably could have been a communist myself during my teenage years, perhaps through the apathy of belonging to the only legal political youth organization in Cuba, even though by then nobody believed in ideologies. We were professional impersonators, pretending to be somebody else to survive.
The fact is, not a single communist government has ever respected anyone who pretends to be “someone else.” Both within and beyond international borders, they have never demonstrated a single shred of diversity. Or compassion. This is logical, since in totalitarian materialism there is no other god but the State, incarnated in one Great Leader.
Now death is again laying waste to those who are youngest and most free. It’s happening in Venezuela, where the army is killing peaceful protesters in the streets. And the response from the world’s Communist parties was unexpected: They have applauded, and all the more-so in Latin America, the region where death is in charge.
In Chile, the Deputy and General Secretary of the Chilean Communist Party, Lautaro Carmona, has even boasted of his own complicity: Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuelan executioners have been sent a message of solidarity. The Venezuelan president is ruling under a law whereby he can be re-elected time and again.
With this obituary note, Augusto Pinochet’s Chilean crimes of the twentieth century are being avenged with impunity today. Today the chant “Long live death!” echoes the anti-communist slogan of genocidal Europe.
These are criminal coincidences, complicit comrade Lautaro.
