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Poland was partitioned in the 18th century, contested by rival imperial powers through the 19th, invaded by the Nazis and Soviets in 1939 and occupied by the latter for nearly 50 years, during which Stalin and his Communist henchmen murdered the Poles greatest war heroes and maintained a stifling grip on political, social and economic life.

That is the tragic history of my homeland. (And I didnt even touch on the devastating Swedish invasion of the 1600s. Yes, the Swedes.) Yet the Poles also have a glorious history, and among our most glorious moments remains the Battle of Warsaw, whose centenary we mark this month. Exactly 100 year ago, the Poles, then newly independent, achieved a startling victory over the fierce and fanatical Bolsheviks and, in the process, saved the West from Communisms advancing forces.

It should be the task of the political writers, wrote the English diplomat Edgar Vincent DAbernon in 1930, to explain to European opinion that Poland saved Europe in 1920.

Perhaps Im wrong, but I suspect the average European or American adult wouldnt have the first idea what this sentence refers to. The great historian of Poland Norman Davies remembered that, as a history student at Oxford, he never heard a word about the Polish-Soviet War; it had no place on the intellectual radar screens of British historians.

Its generally forgotten that before Stalin encouraged the Bolsheviks to pursue a policy of socialism in a single country, they had had more international ambitions. We staked our chances on world revolution, said Lenin in 1920, and while he thought much of this revolution would arise from spontaneous working-class enthusiasm, he and his followers werent above using military muscle to bring it about.

By the later months of 1919, the Soviets had pushed westward into Eastern Europe, exploiting the retreat of the Germans in World War I to overpower local independence movements and proclaim Soviet republics in nations like Latvia and Belarus.

Meanwhile, the brooding, heavily bewhiskered Polish strongman Jozef Pisudski sought to establish an alliance of independent states in the region to withstand the fury of the new Soviet juggernaut. Allied with Ukrainian independence fighters, Pisudski sent Polish troops into Ukraine.

With the Red Army still occupied by its own (Russian) civil war, the Poles reached Kiev. Under the brilliant and brutal Russian military leader Mikhail Tukhachevsky, however, the more powerful Bolshevik troops drove the Poles back and into their homeland. The Bolsheviks were jubilant. The Marxist revolutionary Nikolai Bukharin fantasized about taking the war right up to London and Paris. Felix Dzerzhinsky, head of the feared Soviet security agency, believed the working masses of Warsaw were awaiting the arrival of the Red Army.

Whether the Red Army would have reached London is arguable. But it would at least have posed a serious threat to a World War I-battered Germany, France and England. Mercifully for Europe, a Polish counterattack threw the Bolsheviks into chaos. The Red Army had been weakened by poor decision-making from Stalin and others; the Russians had also underestimated the patriotism, determination and intelligence of the Poles, who, with the assistance of American friends, forced them back and then cut off their escape route.

The Soviets sued for peace and miserably abandoned their dreams of overpowering Europe. Lenin deeply lamented the loss. We remember the battle as the Miracle of Vistula, for the river that flows through Warsaw.

The Miracle on the Vistula is a reminder of the Wests enduring debt to an underdog nation too often betrayed by the great powers. But it also teaches a universal lesson: namely, that there is glory in standing up to overwhelming odds and in sacrificing oneself for a greater cause.

Jacek Saryusz-Wolski, a Polish member of the European Parliament since 2004, played a central role in Polands accession to NATO and the European Union as a state minister in the 1990s.

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100 years ago, Poland saved the West from Communism - New York Post

Statue of Franco in Santander.13-08-2020EFE

Touch, I suppose you could say. One awaits with interest what the Palma councillor for social justice, feminism and LGTBI, Sonia Vivas, has to say on the matter. One would have thought that she would have a view. As noted recently, it was Sonia Vivas who proposed that the Avenida Joan March in Palma be renamed after Pilar Snchez, who was murdered by the Falange in 1936.

The Spanish Association of Christian Lawyers was founded in 2008. Its aims include the legal defence of religious freedom, of life, of the family, and of all citizens whose rights and liberties have been harmed for reasons of their faith.

The association is against euthanasia, permissive abortion policies, and destructive indoctrination of gender ideology. In terms of religious freedom, it means Christianity; its website doesnt make explicit reference to other religions. The association, I think one can say, can be defined as being conservative and right-wing. And it has every right to be conservative and right-wing.

Just as it also has every right to question ideologies and indeed the naming of streets. If the left can promote changes to street names from those associated with Francoism, e.g. Francos banker, Joan March, then the right can call for changes to street names of those associated with Republicanism at the time prior to and during the Civil War.

Administrative procedures have been initiated by the association in certain cities of Spain. It wants street names and monuments dedicated to communists to be removed. Among these names are Dolores Ibrruri. She joined the Spanish Communist Party in 1920 when she was 25. She became famous for her slogan - They shall not pass - during the battle for Madrid in late 1936. She went into exile, only returning to Spain in 1977.

Another name is that of Francisco Largo Caballero, who succeeded Pablo Iglesias as the leader of both PSOE and the UGT union in 1925. He was to become prime minister of Spain after the Civil War started.

He fled to France, was arrested by the Nazis, held in a concentration camp and died in Paris in 1946. Abogados Cristianos cite a resolution approved by the European Parliament last year. This was on the importance of historical memory. (In Spain, the PSOE government of Jos Luis Rodrguez Zapatero from 2004 to 2011 introduced the law of historical memory, an aspect of which was the removal of Francoist symbols, e.g. street names.) The resolution urged European Union countries to condemn the crimes of Nazism and Stalinism and it advised that the existence of public spaces which extol totalitarian regimes facilitates the distortion of historical facts.

The association is therefore arguing that symbols in public spaces, e.g. street names or monuments, which stem from Stalinist totalitarianism, should be removed, as these names were authors of religious persecution and of the rape and murder of people for the practice of their faith during the period of the Spanish Second Republic and the Civil War. Priests, nuns and other citizens were murdered for religious reasons. Why, therefore, should individuals such as Dolores Ibrruri and Francisco Largo Caballero be honoured?

This is contrary to what has been established by EU resolutions and Spains law of historical memory, which does recognise that not all sins and evils were perpetrated by Franco Nationalists alone.

I defend the associations right to challenge these symbols and accept the argument that there were atrocities on both sides, something which can seem at times to be overlooked. Arguably, and in a spirit of genuine reconciliation, symbols from both sides should be removed. But the prevailing view doesnt allow this, and I dont believe that this is a view solely confined to the left or a republican left; not by any means. The historical memory is weighed against Franco, and rightly so.

But in saying this, one highlights what can be an at times depressing reliving of the past. It is a constant theme, and one that invades current-day politics as well as society. One almost wishes that theyd let it go, but then I am not they. The Spanish past is not my historical memory; or perhaps it is, but at a distance. Having said this, and while defending the associations right to challenge these communist/republican symbols, I cant say I have any sympathy. The association regularly denounces what it disagrees with; there have been various actions against LGTBI symbols, for instance. As such, there is the sense of the politics, those of the far right, and as stated in a comment about the communist symbols (made on Ultima Horas website), the association crosses the boundary of equity and good faith in filing complaints against those who hold theses contrary to their programmatic principles.

There is still that touch though.

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Removing communism: the past lives on - Majorca Daily Bulletin

By Vejas Liulevicius, Ph.D., University of Tennessee The Comintern was created to bring Communists of all countries together, in order to spread the influence of the Bolsheviks and promote Revolution across Europe. Comintern congresses were public celebrations as shown in Festival of the II Congress of Comintern on the Uritsky Square. (Image: Boris Kustodiyev/Public domain)The Advance of the Red Army

When the First World War ended with the Armistice on November 11, 1918, the Red Army invaded the newly independent Baltic states, Poland, and Ukraine, stretching to link up with an expected revolt in Germany.

These efforts continued and merged with the ongoing Russian Civil War, that confused a series of clashes between Lenins Bolsheviks and different sets of opponents. These opponents included Russian monarchists, socialist revolutionaries, anarchists, peasant partisans, and foreigners: some 200,000 soldiers from Britain, France, Japan, and the United States, and the Czech Legion.

Yet, by November 1920, the Bolsheviks had beaten their enemies. Created and perfected by Leon Trotsky, the Red Army proved the vital instrument for victory. The Bolsheviks knew they could rely on the Red Guards and Latvian Riflemen regiments, but these would not be enough. The order to form the mass army was given in January of 1918.

The Red Army grew to five million by the end of the Civil War. With its help, the state pursued a ruthless extractive economic policy named War Communism, which left a very deep stamp on their government. They centralized governmental control even more, nationalizing factories, and requisitioned food from farmers to feed the cities and the armies.

Learn more aboutthe Revolution of 1905.

To spread the message of global revolution, the Bolsheviks sponsored an entire institution tasked with that goal, the Comintern, which was short for Communist International, also known as the Third International. The founding congress started on March 2, 1919 in Moscow and the Comintern would be based there in the Kremlin.

This organization was in some ways a company to export revolution, by spreading propaganda and offering help to other communist parties springing up around the world. The fiction was that it was an independent, private organization. Its official language was German, the language of Marx, which was only replaced with Russian in 1924.

At first the Comintern was small, mostly a gathering of Russians with a sprinkling of nonRussian communists. But by the second congress the next year, delegates from 37 countries attended. At that meeting in Moscow in 1920, Lenin dictated the TwentyOne Points: the conditions for a party to be admitted to membership in the Comintern. Grigory Zinoviev was made the chairman of the Comintern and working with him were Karl Radek and Victor Serge.

This is a transcript from the video series The Rise of Communism: From Marx to Lenin. Watch it now, on The Great Courses Plus.

Radek was the classic internationalist: he spoke Polish, Russian, German, French (all in his idiosyncratic way) and was a dazzling and witty journalist and conversationalist. He was described as half professor, half bandit.

At the start of 1919, he had been sent to Berlin by the Bolsheviks to help organize the German Communist Party with his old comrade Rosa Luxemburg. And he was there during the Spartacus uprising in January 1919 and after the revolt was crushed, he was arrested in February. Only at the end of 1919 was he released to return to Moscow, and then went to work in the Comintern.

Victor Serge was a striking and insightful character. Born in Belgium to Russian exile parents, Serge came to Soviet Russia in 1919. In his book Memoirs of a Revolutionary, he relates how he lived through a dilemma, as he worked for the Communist regime. He spoke of doing double duty: to guard against external enemies of the revolution, but to remain within the party to combat abuses within.

He condemned the Cheka, and its arbitrary arrests. He condemned the emerging privileged nomenklatura of the party elite with privileges of its own, but he did not break with Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

He would argue in debates against dictatorial rule and against the suppression of free speech, but then he would submit to party discipline. He spoke of the atmosphere of terror as intolerable inhumanity, but then he tolerated it by remaining within the regime.

The role of being the heroic inner conscience within the regime is fraught with problems. But Serge concluded, Bolshevism was in my eyes tremendously and visibly right. It marked a new point of departure in history.

Learn more aboutthe relation of human social systems to evil behavior.

Many ardent radicals flocked to the Comintern. Other foreign communists became prominent in this movement, including an American, John Reed. His journalistic account of the Bolshevik seizure of power in Red October, Ten Days That Shook the World, became the basis for the Eisenstein film that mythologized the coup.

Reed, a war reporter, was thrilled by what he saw in Russia and crossed over from reporting to partisan support. He was among the founders of American communists, and he returned to Russia for the second Comintern congress. There he fell ill and died in October 1920 and was buried in a tomb set into the wall of the Kremlin, as an honored foreign communist.

The Chinese Communist Party, led by Sun Yat Sen, was organized in 1921. Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh was a founding member of the French Communist Party and came to Moscow to work in the Comintern. Sen Katayama helped found Japans Communist party in 1922. Later, Katayama moved to Moscow, and died there in 1933.

The Comintern sought not only active agents, but also sympathizers, to aid the communist cause. The Comintern sent agents with money and advice and expected to have its orders followed. The stage was all set for a world revolution, or so the Bolsheviks thought.

The Red Army grew to five million by the end of the Civil War. With its help, the state pursued a ruthless economic policy named War Communism. They centralized governmental control, and requisitioned food from farmers to feed the cities and the armies.

To spread the message of global revolution, the Bolsheviks sponsored an entire institution tasked with that goal: the Comintern, or the Third International.

Victor Serge was troubled by the evil and the corruption he saw in the Bolshevik movement, and protested against it while remaining within the party itself.

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The Comintern: The Committee to Export Revolution - The Great Courses Daily News

Thousands of women took the streets in more than 16 cities in Turkey, on August 5, demonstrating under the slogan "We are not giving up our rights, implement the Istanbul Convention".

In Istanbul's Kadky district, women carried placards with the name of 350 murdered women and the slogan "She would be alive if the Istanbul Convention was implemented".In Izmir, protesters faced with police's violent response and 16 women werre detained.

The "Istanbul Convention", also known as the Convention of the Council of Europe "on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence", was signed in Istanbul in May 2011 and entered into force in August 2014. However, officials of Erdogan's ruling AKP party have implied that Turkey could withdraw from the international agreement, calling the signing of the "Istanbul Convention" a "mistake".

A total of 474 women were killed in 2019, as a result of femicides and gender-based violence, which is the highest rate in a decade. According to the campaign group "We will stop femicides", at least 36 women were murdered by men this July.

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Turkey's communists at the forefront of the struggle for women's rights, against femicides - In Defense of Communism

The police killing of George Floyd on May 25 provoked demonstrations worldwide. The United Nations Human Rights Council on June 17 debated a draft resolution introduced by the African Group of nations that condemned structural racism endemic to the criminal justice system in the United States. The African nations were responding to a letter from the families of murder victims George Floyd, Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor, and Michael Brown; 600 human rights organizations had endorsed it.

Other U.S. appeals for relief from racist violence had arrived at the United Nations. The National Negro Congress and the NAACP delivered petitions in 1946 and 1947, respectively. Three years after the United Nations ratified its Genocide Convention, the New York-based Civil Rights Congress in 1951 submitted a petition to the United Nations. The title was: We Charge Genocide: The Crime of the Government against the Negro People.

To explore international ramifications of anti-racist struggle in the United States, we examine the substance and circumstances of We Charge Genocide and the recent appeal to the Human Rights Council.

Split up into groups

Prior to the Councils meeting, many of its independent experts, special rapporteurs, and members of its working groups divided into groups to release open letters denouncing U. S. racism. The UNs Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination produced one of its own.

The Council designated the June 17 session as an Urgent Debate, for only the fifth time since 2006. Opening the meeting, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet declared, Patience has run out Black lives matter. Philonise Floyd, brother of George Floyd, asked the Council through video to investigate anti-Black police violence in the United States. You watched my brother die, he is heard. You in the United Nations are your brothers and sisters keepers in America.

U.S. allies had their say, and after closed-door negotiations, the final resolutionapproved by consensus on June 19didnt mention the United States; it spoke instead of all nations, all regions, and around the world. The draft resolutions proposal to investigate anti-Black police violence in the United States disappeared and was replaced with plans for a report on systemic racism by police everywhere and for a yearlong study of police violence against peaceful protestors everywhere.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a statement denouncing the Councils consideration of the resolution as a new low. The United States was absent at the session, having departed the Council in 2018. The Councils platitudinous final resolution conveying generalities will likely contribute almost nothing to combating racism in the United States.

By contrast, the appeal represented by We Charge Genocide (WCG) took on enduring power from a narrative as comprehensive as it was riveting, from coherent ideological underpinnings, and from its sponsors collective experience in anti-racist struggle.

Lawyer William Patterson, head of the Civil Rights Congress, edited WCG. He had earlier led the International Labor Defense, the predecessor of the Congress. In that role he shepherded the campaign that, extending internationally, saved nine Black teenagers from execution in Alabama. These were the Scottsboro Nine.

Patterson in 1951 took copies of the just-published WCG to the UN General Assembly, then meeting in Paris. Meanwhile Paul Robeson, actor, singer, and Pan-Africanist, was delivering WCG to the United Nations Secretariat in New York. Back in New York, Patterson had to surrender his passport to U.S. officials. Robeson had already lost his.

A section of WCG labeled Evidence details lynchings, other killings, physical abuse, and police brutality occurring between 1945 and 1951. It takes up more than half of WCGs 238 pages. In his introduction, Patterson refers to a record of mass slayings on the basis of race. He calls upon the United Nations to act and to call the Government of the United States to account. WCG cites international law. The violent episodes recorded there are arranged to fit with specific articles of the Genocide Convention.

WCGs message and reception reflected turmoil stemming from U.S.-Soviet conflict, U.S. war with North Korea, a brand-new Peoples Republic of China, and vicious anti-Communism in the United States. William Patterson was a leader of the Communist Party USA. The Civil Rights Congress was affiliated with the Party.

The U.S. government saw to it that WCG never received a hearing at the United Nations. But elsewhere it circulated widely and exerted an impact, mostly through consciousness-raising. WCG was extensively covered in the [foreign] press, says one observer. African-American newspapers reported and commented on WCG after its release.

Coincides with battle of ideas

There would have been readers in socialist nations, in Black liberation circles, and among intellectuals and activists in the various national independence movements. Its arrival coincided with the worldwide battle of ideas of the postWorld War II years. (I discovered WCG in 1955 in the office of the Society for Minority Rights at my college.)

WCG depicts racist violence in the 20th century as resting on the plunder of bodies and land intrinsic to both slavery and the plantation economy. It suggested the perils of colonialism and of imperialism. Ultimately, WCG made intellectual tools available to activists resisting apartheid in South Africa, U.S. war in Vietnam, dirty wars in Latin America, U.S. intervention in the Middle East, and more.

For scholar David Helps, International solidarity was central to the worldview of the [Civil Rights Congress]. And movements for peace and for decolonization clearly shaped the tone and language of WCG. According to WCG, White supremacy at home makes for colored massacres abroad. WCG called for an international tribunal to judge U.S. crimes against humanity.

Teaching that racial violence occurs in both the U. S. South and North, WCG observes that as the Negro people spread to the north, east, and west seeking to escape the southern hell, the violence, impelled in the first instance by economic motives, followed them, its cause also economic. Indeed, Once the classic method of lynching was the rope. Now it is the policemans bullet.

WCG connects racial violence with capitalism. The authors show that exploitation and abuse of Black workerssharecroppers in the South and industrial employees in the Northenable their white oppressors to profit and to skimp on spending for social services, schooling, and health care. WCG points to bankers and public officials enriching themselves through chicanery and procedural manipulations. It lists corporate monopolies operating in the regions where killings take place

Further, the implementation of genocide is sufficiently expressedin depressed wages, in robbing millions of the vote and millions more of the land and in countless other political and economic facts, as to reveal definitively the existence of a conspiracy backed by reactionary interests. More: The lyncher and the atom bomber are linked.The tie binding both is economic profit and political control.

WCG anticipates unity between Blacks and those whites who also are oppressed. It argues that abysmal living conditions and even psychological damage represent a kind of violence. WCG presents data on health status, mortality, housing, and education demonstrating the oppression of Black people. This kind of violence impinging upon the daily lives of Blacks, the reader realizes, can endanger white people too. Patterson says as much in his introduction: We [Blacks] warn mankind that our fate is theirs.

WCG moves beyond simplistic solutions. From slavery times on, denunciations of anti-Black violence have centered on moral outrageas heard in the streets now and at the Human Rights Council. And anti-racist white people have denigrated the misinformation of other white people, as if that fix might be enough. William Patterson and colleagues, however, draw attention to the economic, political, and policing realities that sustain racial oppression and need to be changed.

WCG did contribute directly, serving as a resource for African-Americans advocating for reparations. Influenced by WCG, the National Black United Front adopted We Charge Genocide as the title of its own petition to the United Nations in 1996. And a Chicago organization defending Black youth against police violence also adopted the name for the petition it too presented at the United Nations in 2014.

WCG probably gave a boost to the U.S. civil rights movement. Foreign critics reading WCG could find documentation there for their own ideas about racist brutality in the United States. The work of the American propagandist is not at present a happy one, bemoaned analyst Walter Lippmann in 1957. A book reviewer noted that this Cold War criticismproved to be so effective in embarrassing the United Statesthat it deserved major credit for helping to facilitate the struggle for racial equality at home and the eventual passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The U.S. governments amicus brief in the watershed Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954 declared that, racial discriminationhas an adverse effect upon our relations with other countries. Racial discrimination [has] furnished grist for the Communist propaganda mills.

Ultimately, WCG and the recent appeal to the United Nations are dissimilar enough as to make detailed comparison irrelevant. They differ in surrounding circumstances, breadth of vision, and in the organized preparation of the one and the improvised character of the other.

The families appeal clearly resulted from outrage at terrible violence. WCG shared that but also relied on analysis of institutionalized inequalities and of economic and social handicap. It derived from a culture of resistance that prioritized organization, reliance on allies, and learning from models of struggle.

The world of We Charge Genocide is gone. The case presented by U.S. families to the United Nations might not have been so easily dismissed, if the Soviet Bloc still existed. Or perhaps the U.S. Secretary of State wouldnt have so glibly discounted world opinion. But all is not lost. Anticipating the police killing of George Floyd, WCG observes that the killing of Negroes has become the police policy in the United States and that police policy is the most practical expression of government policy.

This statement leads to a question: what are a governments purposes as it decides what its police should do? WCG doesnt comment, although Patterson could have done so, having studied in the Soviet Union in 1928-29. Citing Marx, Lenin (State and Revolution) opines that the state is an organ of class domination, an organ of oppression of one class by another.

Published in Peoples World, July 30, 2020.Image: Ashitaka San, Creative Commons (BY-NC 2.0).

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We Charge Genocide: Appeal to the UN still true today - Communist Party USA