by JR Nyquist, jrnyquistblog.com, ©2021
(Jun. 2, 2021) — INTRODUCTION
Renato Cristin is a professor of hermeneutic philosophy at the University of Trieste, Italy. He is the promoter of a worldwide campaign to conduct a “Nuremberg” trial against communism. This was an idea of Professor Cristin’s friend, the late Russian dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, who believed that a trial of communism was necessary if only to confront the world with communism’s many unpunished crimes. Cristin has a unique way of explaining the collapse of communism. It is a collapse, he says, in which the Iron Curtain was replaced with emerging communist movements in every Western country. Now every country is split within itself. In this process, the communists no longer use their old labels as before. He offers us a striking example of anti-communists being marginalized at the end of the Cold War (instead of Marxists being marginalized). Professor Cristin describes the system of the Chinese Communist Party as a mix of communism and capitalism. He does not mention the revolutionary/strategic significance of Lenin’s NEP or Deng Xiaoping’s Four Modernizations. Even so, he recognizes the communist ideology at the heart of the Chinese ruling system. Here is the reason for the ruling party’s many crimes. Cristin’s emphasis on the immoral nature of communism deserves special appreciation. Please read his words with careful attention.
NYQUIST: Will your trial of communism be a trial of concepts only?
CRISTIN: I would start from a fact. In the second half of the twentieth century the free world, led by the United States, managed to defeat the Soviet-style communist regimes; but the ideology that had produced those regimes did not disappear with them. In addition to being today a state ideology in China and other countries such as Cuba, Vietnam, Venezuela or more recently Argentina, it has subtly penetrated into the folds of Western societies, where it has established itself in the twenty-first century. It has strengthened itself precisely by virtue of dissimulation and a special alliance. Communism’s criminogenic essence is hidden behind proclamations of peace and liberation. Its alliance with the media-cultural establishment has generated the paradigm of political correctness.
I remember that in an interview you did with Bukovsky in December 2018, he told you that communism was something difficult to understand in the West, because the Western elites, that is, “the forces of ‘peace and progress,’ are socialist. They were never serious about fighting Soviet power.” And beyond that, “most of the conservatives believed it was not so bad in the West.” In short, as you yourself explained in that interview, the West struggles to fully understand the essence of the communist ideology and, due to this reason, does not clearly realize the danger this ideology represents and poses.
From here, therefore, we must start: from the recognition that we have a problem of understanding the totalitarian reality and the criminogenic essence of communism, which is an obstacle we must confront. This obstacle is represented by what I call the New Iron Curtain. The old Iron Curtain cut Europe and the world itself in two (on the one hand the free world, and the communist world on the other), and served to lock up populations subjected to Soviet totalitarianism. The new one, instead, is internal to the West and cuts it into two concepts of society and life, and serves to isolate all those who do not submit to politically correct cultural totalitarianism. In both, the Marxist ideology with all its derivations operates as a factor of division. The old curtain was like a long war front that, after all, made things clear: on the one side the communist regimes, on the other the free democracies. The new curtain, conversely, is an internal front, which brings this enemy of the West right into our institutional, cultural and even our mental world, disrupting us, weakening us, favoring the spread of what I consider the characteristic sign of our time: chaos.
Mind you, I believe that the West has done very well to fight and overthrow the Soviet enemy, but now the West must make a further effort to finish the work on the ideology of the Gulag and its current mutations, in order to limit its spread. In fact, we know how to defeat a totalitarian system. We have a long historical experience and an effective theory that is sufficiently elastic to be valid for very different totalitarian regimes, but we do not yet know how to defeat an elusive and ambiguous totalitarianism that presents itself as the opposite of totalitarianism and which has insinuated itself in society and public opinion throughout the Western world.
But if grasping the essence of a phenomenon, an event or an ideological ensemble allows us to understand its developments and forms, however varied they may be, then by grasping the essence of the communist ideology we will be able to understand its metamorphosis, up to the most recent and ambiguous transfomrations we see today. And since the paradigm of the politically correct is one of the current forms of ideological totalitarianism, it must be faced with all that conceptual and categorical equipment with which the free world, led by the United States, has overthrown numerous totalitarian regimes.
It is necessary to grasp the essence of communism using both the strength of reason and the strength of institutions, avoiding falling into irrational simplifications which almost always produce damage rather than provide solutions; but the New Iron Curtain, the internal one, forces us to precisely readjust our strategy. We must insist on using historical, political and moral concepts rather than juridical concepts in this trial. Therefore, it seems to me difficult in the short term to realize a trial in the strict legal sense, which nevertheless remains as a long-term objective or, possibly, to be carried out on a case-by-case basis and depending on the circumstances. The first objective is both to eliminate from the collective historical conscience the toxins that the communist ideology has scattered everywhere, and to regenerate the moral conscience of the Western world, of that free world that too often, out of laziness or bad faith, hides the truth of communism, hiding the essence of an ideology that is still active and lethal.
To answer your question concretely, today no trial of communism can take place without its crimes being known by a large part of the public, and without some governments and institutions legally condemning communism as has been done with National Socialism in Germany after World War II. From an operational point of view, the “Nuremberg for Communism” project must be developed on three levels: (1) in terms of cultural research which outlines the ideological dimensions of communism, highlighting its current ramifications in the form of governments, parties, movements, groups and associations; (2) a juridical investigation, which makes it possible to identify cases of specific crimes or crimes of genocide; (3) finally, work on the political and institutional field, to be conducted together with both national parliaments that want to pronounce a political and moral condemnation of communism, and the European parliament (in the latter case it would be necessary to complete the parliamentary resolution, approved in September 2019, which historically equates communism with National Socialism).
NYQUIST: So, there is no chance you will be charging communist activists in the West with the crime of treason – of adhering to the enemies of humanity? – of undermining freedom at home and supporting criminals abroad?
CRISTIN: In this case the legal charge is possible only if those activists have committed criminally punishable crimes, as was the case, for example, of the red terrorists in Europe, who were almost all tried by their respective national courts (the Rote Armee Fraktion in Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy, GRAPO in Spain, the Fighting Communist Cells in Belgium, the Action Directe in France), or, albeit to a lesser extent, the conviction of terrorist groups in Latin America (including Sendero Luminoso in Peru, the Colombians of FARC, the Sandinista Front in Nicaragua, the Montoneros and the ERP in Argentina, and the Tupamaros in Uruguay) or in the United States (small circumscribed groups and mostly well controlled by the FBI). Accusation and condemnation are also possible for those thugs who today, both in Europe and in the United States, practice violence in street demonstrations, such as the Antifa and the BLM in USA, or the Black Blocks and the Social Centers in Europe, who are prosecuted to the extent that they commit crimes.
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