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Take the Czech Republic, for instance.

After World War I, statues from the vanished Hapsburg empire were quickly taken down and replaced by Czechoslovakias new, democratic heroes, like Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, its first president. After World War II, Communists erased Masaryk from public tributes, but he was put back in place after that system collapsed. One statue of Masaryk in the small town of Holesov was taken away and re-erected five times, said Zdenek Lukes, a historian and architect in Prague.

Mr. Lukes opposes the removal of such statues, but he said that in some cases a little historical context must be added. I like the solution they used in the town of Litomysl, Mr. Lukes said. Instead of removing a statue of the Communist minister of culture, they placed a plaque there explaining who he was and what he did.

Slovakia, which broke away after the fall of communism, also reveres Masaryk, but has built its own stable of national heroes, with the biggest disputes over the countrys wartime leader, Jozef Tiso, who was hanged for collaborating with the Nazis. Though monuments to Tiso are still shunned in most of the country, the small village of Cakajovce has erected its own Pantheon of Slovak Historical Figures, with Tiso at the center.

The recent bloody history of Eastern Europe, where occupation by Nazis and then Soviets scrambled political allegiances, has made the region especially susceptible to these waves of political upheaval. But such disputes are not confined to the East.

The spectacular tomb of Spains former fascist ruler, Gen. Francisco Franco, at Valle de los Caidos is still a pilgrimage destination for conservative Spaniards, and has survived several efforts to remove it.

In Italy, the right-wing mayor of Brescia tried in 2013 to restore a monumental statue of a muscular youth from 1932, called Fascist Era but nicknamed Bigio by residents to its perch in the center of town.

The statue, placed in storage after the war, should be seen as a work of art, the mayor argued, bled of its fascist baggage. Many disagreed, vehemently. He lost the next election, and his successor chose to keep Bigio in storage, where he remains.

In Germany, Nazi images and symbols were scrubbed from public spaces immediately after the war, and the display of the swastika and other Nazi symbols is illegal. The site of the bunker where Hitler died has been obscured, to deny neo-fascists a rallying point. The Olympic Stadium, where Hitler presided over the 1936 Games, is still in use, though stripped of all Nazi regalia.

The fall of the Berlin Wall presented fresh challenges. Statues of Lenin were swiftly removed in the early 1990s, but some sites were converted, including a former prison for the Communist security police that was turned into an informational center teaching about the past.

The goal, Culture Minister Monika Grtters of Germany said, is to explain everything, without holding back, without an agenda, without seeking to be in the right.

The extent to which these political symbols from the past still inflame emotions can be seen from a passerbys reaction in Dresden this month to a drunken American tourist giving a Nazi salute a solid punch in the face.

Normally, when jarring political changes happen, the statues of the former leaders and heroes are among the first casualties. Iraqis pulled Saddam Hussein from his perch in Firdos Square in 2003, and there are countless shots of Lenin flat on his face after the collapse of the Soviet empire.

To Ivaylo Dichev, a professor of culture anthropology at Sofia University in Bulgaria, the recent scenes from the United States have a clear resonance. Eastern Europe went through a similar period in the 90s, when a lot of Communist-era monuments were removed, he said.

In many cases, countries chose to move Communist-era statues to tourist-oriented sites, like Gruto Parkas in Lithuania and Memento Park outside Budapest.

But that has not halted controversies over public monuments.

In 2007, the removal from the center of Estonias capital of a statue of a Soviet soldier, head bent to mourn the deaths of comrades killed fighting the Nazis, resulted in riots by ethnic Russians.

In Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orban has led the country in a nationalist direction, disputes over public monuments have become a regular feature.

A statue dedicated to Soviet heroes in a park near Parliament was painted red several times by activists. And a monument dedicated to all the victims of the Nazi occupation of Hungary, in the same park, was widely criticized as an attempt by Mr. Orbans government to obscure Hungarys wartime history by ignoring its collaboration with the Nazis in the murder of Hungarys Jews.

In Bulgaria, the authorities decided this year to remove a huge Soviet-era monument that had been left to molder in Sofia since Communisms collapse. But in July, pro-Russian protesters took to the streets, and the demolition was temporarily halted.

This was after activists, in 2011, defaced a huge monument to the Soviet Army in Sofias main park by painting its heroic figures to look like Superman, Santa Claus and Ronald McDonald. The monument has been a regular target of politically minded vandals ever since. In 2013, someone painted all the figures bright pink, spurring an official complaint from the Russian Embassy and an apology from the Bulgarian government.

But not all disputes over public statuary in Europe are fallout from the Nazi and Soviet years. Continuing political turmoil has produced fresh ones.

The breakup of Yugoslavia in the wars of the 1990s caused many of the countries that emerged including Croatia and Macedonia to remove monuments to the former countrys Communist-era leader, Josip Broz Tito.

In Skopje, Macedonias capital, where Titos image was once ubiquitous, he now presides mainly outside a single elementary school named for him. Instead, fresh disputes over public statuary have flared up.

Eager to establish itself as a sovereign nation, Macedonias rulers went on a building spree in Skopje, erecting dozens of statues of contemporary political figures, as well as a giant one known as Warrior, but looking suspiciously like Alexander the Great seen as a rebuke to the neighboring Greek province of Macedonia, which complained that Alexander was theirs to honor.

Now, the nationalist leader who went on the building spree, Nikola Gruevski, has been removed from office and his left-wing successors are trying to decide what to do with all the statues of lawmakers and ministers from a former government.

In this case, we can see how certain symbology can be eruptive and damaging for a democracy when used in political causes, said Aleksandar Petrov, an architect and author in Skopje.

Of course, such problems have bedeviled Europe since the dawn of civilization as new conquerors erased traces of their predecessors, leaving behind a patchwork of stone survivors from ancient Rome to the Holy Roman Empire whose subjects may not have been exemplars of human rights and modern morality.

Nobody would even think of removing statues of Napoleon or Roman emperors, said Mr. Lukes, the Czech historian.

After a certain point, time erases political enmity and the images lose much of their symbolic power. Perhaps, he said, a way forward in America would be to emulate Litomysls example and add context to the monument.

I believe a plaque explaining who he was and what he did would suit General Lee very well, Mr. Lukes said.

Reporting was contributed by Joanna Berendt from Warsaw; Hana de Goeij from Prague; Aleksandar Dimishkovski from Skopje, Macedonia; and Melissa Eddy from Annaberg-Buchholz, Germany.

A version of this article appears in print on August 18, 2017, on Page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: Political Rage Over Statues? Old News in the Old World.

The rest is here:
Political Rage Over Statues? Old News in the Old World - New York Times

One cold grey February morning, back in 2001, we turned the key and opened the creaking gate on to a world that could not have been further from the built-up street just strides away. As far as the eye could see, scattered sheds teetered on the edge of a tidal wave of dense bramble. Halfway down the hill, just as the path disappeared into this surge, were plots 20 to 24: our new allotments. Whatever else, this was going to be groundbreaking stuff.

Driven by the vision that more food can and should be grown in London, we set up OrganicLea on a derelict allotment in Chingford, east London. The Lea Valley, which for centuries used the river to transport food down the Thames, from Saxon settlers growing celery in the sixth century to Italians growing cucumbers in glasshouses in the 1950s, was a good place to start.

Over the next year or two we cleared the brambles, made a compost heap, built raised beds, and planted a forest garden with apple trees, worcesterberries and blackcurrant bushes. We created a number of features, including a pond, a willow dome and a compost toilet, built into a honeysuckle bush. All our vegetable planting was done using organic and permaculture principles, working with nature, not against it, to grow food in a sustainable way. We then started to run rudimentary gardening courses from the potting shed, and sell our seasonal produce.

For the past nine years we have managed the 12-acre site as a community market garden. We grow more than eight tonnes of fruit and veg a year, feeding 330 households through our veg box scheme, as well as sending produce to market stalls and eateries across London. We work with the local council to deliver accredited horticulture courses and helped it develop a food policy, which aims to ensure that locally grown, healthy and sustainable food is affordable and accessible to all.

We also run a volunteering programme that welcomes participants from all walks of life to take part, from seed sowing to veg box packing. And we support young people and residents groups to develop their own food growing spaces all over east London.

We do all this as a workers co-operative, employing 15 members. Where normal allotments are rented by individuals, were a community food project, and as a workers co-operative we manage the operation ourselves, without any need for bosses or shareholders.

The community food movement is flowering in the UK and we are proud founder members of Londons community food growers network and the land workers alliance, organisations that are drawing people back to the land and using the land as a way to contribute to local politics.

Allotment gardens have always been more than mere domestic food growing units. From their very beginning in the Victorian period, when land was given to the labouring poor for growing food, theyve provided a space for recreation and an alternative to industrial capitalism.

Allotments offer a way for individuals and the community to come together. They are special places. In 1908, the Small Holdings and Allotments Act placed a duty on local authorities to provide allotments according to demand, and by the end of the first world war land was made available to everyone, primarily as a way of assisting returning service men. By 1925, local authorities were banned from selling or converting allotments without ministerial consent.

This means that, legally speaking, selling from allotment gardens is a murky issue. It is legally permissible for allotment gardens to market the surplus, up to 49% of what allotmenteers produce, and councils are also entitled to put unwanted allotments to commercial use on a year-by-year basis. We believe there is a strong case for promoting limited trading activity: it would enable people to spend more time on their plots, because they can generate some income from it, and would stimulate the local food economy.

By 2009, seven years after signing our first allotment contract, we had built such a reputation that when the council closed down its central plant nursery operation, it entrusted us with the facility. Our site is now located where they originally managed all the local parks and street tree operations.

We are one of many responses to a broken food system, that exploits producers and harms consumers. It contributes significantly to climate change, air and water pollution and is essentially run for the short term profits of food corporations rather than the long term benefit of communities and the environment.

Our purpose is to demonstrate what can happen if groups of committed people with ideas are given space to nurture and grow.

Ru Litherland works at OrganicLea

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Carrots and communism: the allotments plotting a food revolution - The Guardian

Arnold Ahlert Aug. 17, 2017

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the two revolutions that swept through Russia, ending the reign of the czarists and enabling the rise of radical Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Lenin. Since then communist ideology has precipitated the deaths of more than 100 million people and counting.

The riot in Charlottesville last Saturday is a stark reminder of the American Lefts dubious double standard with regard to virulent ideologies. While leftists are correctly contemptuous of the Nazism that forms the foundation of white supremacist hate groups, they retain a soft spot in their hearts for Communism.

And yet both ideologies are flip sides of the same totalitarian coin.

For most leftists, and many other Americans, Hitlers Third Reich remains the ultimate expression of racist, murderous hate. Yet among the 20th centurys worst mass murderers, Adolf Hitler comes in third by a wide margin. By most historical estimates, Hitler murdered six million Jews and an additional five million others, bringing his total to 11 million.

Josef Stalins total is conventionally put at 20 million killed, with some historians contending it may be twice that number.

Both men pale in comparison to Mao Zedung. Chairman Mao bears responsibility for 40 to 77 million killed, with the discrepancy owing to an ongoing historical argument over whether the mass starvation of millions in Chinas great famine (1958-1961) was intentional or not. Most historians lean toward the higher number.

Mao and Stalin were Communisms superstars, but there were other mass murderers like Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, who ruled Cambodia from 1975-1979 and killed up to two million people. Their ascendance was part of the Communist takeover of the Southeast Asian Peninsula following Americas withdrawal from Vietnam, whose own fall to Communism was aided and abetted by a Democrat-controlled Congress that cut funding to South Vietnams government from $700 million in 1974 to only $300 million the following year. This enabled Hanois Communist takeover and additional mass murders.

So why is Hitler, as opposed to Mao or Stalin, the embodiment of evil? Because the American Left has never completely rejected its belief in the philosophy of Communism and its radical egalitarian, collectivist worldview. Leftists only wish to paint the American Right as racist, and thus use Nazis as a bludgeon.

Moreover, a certain level of nostalgia remains the order of the day. In a series of articles called Red Century, The New York Times explored an ideology it alternately acknowledged as horrific yet morally complex.

Morally bankrupt is more like it, despite Times columnist and Democratic Socialists of America vice chairman Bhaskar Sunkaras pathetic attempt to separate the message from the messengers. We may reject the version of Lenin and the Bolsheviks as crazed demons and choose to see them as well-intentioned people trying to build a better world out of a crisis, but we must work out how to avoid their failures, he insists.

Such contemptible nonsense courtesy of the Times is nothing new. Reporter Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for singing Stalins praises during a Ukrainian famine that killed 10 million in 1932. Yet as Sunkara indicates, Durantys apologist take you cant make an omelet without breaking a few eggs remains ideologically operational.

It also remains literally operational in Venezuela, whose implosion reveals the rank ignorance of leftist useful idiots like Jesse Jackson, Sean Penn, Michael Moore, Danny Glover, Oliver Stone and others who hailed the 21st century Socialism that is devolving into totalitarian tyranny.

The same totalitarian tyranny entrenched in North Korea.

To communist sympathizers and adherents, none of it matters. Nor does it matter that Communisms founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, were avowed racists and anti-Semites. Both expressed contempt for Mexicans, politicians with nger-like features, a quality Engels referred to as a degree nearer to the rest of the animal kingdom than the rest of us, and the huckstering Marx referred to as the worldly religion of the Jew.

The progressive blind spot to communism reflects historical ignorance on the part of Americans and Europeans, columnist Michael Rubin asserts.

In America, it is cultivated ignorance. Thus 40% of Millennials believe its acceptable to suppress offensive speech about minorities, while minorities and their equally clueless allies countenance elimination of history itself, emulating the Islamic State, as well as the Nazis who destroyed any piece of art Hitler found offensive.

And on Americas college campuses, where leftists routinely shut down speech they define as hate employing violence if necessary to do so they are emulating Communist Chinas Red Guard movement that precipitated attacks on those whose traditional views were insufficiently revolutionary.

The Lefts cultivation of communist ideas has occurred for decades. In 1993, Library of Congress experts traveled to Moscow to copy previously secret records of Communist Party USA activities that had been sent to the Soviet Union for safekeeping. They reveal irrefutable evidence of cooperation between the Soviets and American leftists from the 20s through the '40s. Coded Soviet intercepts known as the Venona Papers confirmed that infiltration, vindicating much of what Sen. Joseph McCarthy asserted during the '50s, despite his continuing status as the Lefts most enduring icon of evil.

In the '60s, the college students who recoiled in the presence of a swastika did so while wearing Che Guevara T-shirts and singing the praises of Communist Party U.S.A. radicals like Angela Davis. It was also a time when future failed Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was learning and teaching the revolutionary tactics of communist sympathizer Saul Alinsky tactics Barack Obama perfected in winning the presidency.

In the '70s and '80s, Democrats pursued their admiration of the Soviet Union with vigor, making peace trips to the USSR, often as members of communist-created front groups. And when Ronald Reagan called the Soviets the evil empire they actually were, Democrats painted him as a warmonger who would lead the nation to nuclear holocaust. Moreover, the party that currently excoriates Donald Trump for his Russian connections apparently had no problem when Ted Kennedy offered to help the Soviets thwart Reagans re-election.

Most recently, the Obama administration had at least two communist sympathizers working for it: former White House Communication Director Anita Dunn, who professed admiration for Mao Zedung, and former CIA Director John Brennan, who voted for Communist Party candidate Gus Hall in 1980. As for Obama himself, a video from 1995 shows him stating he was taught about race relations by Communist Party member Frank Marshall Davis.

Until the left, and all the institutions influenced by the left, acknowledge how evil communism has been, we will continue to live in a morally confused world, argues Dennis Prager.

Of course, as Prager knows full well, the American Left embraces Communism. Moreover, moral confusion is a necessary component of leftist power. When right and wrong are relative, by any means necessary becomes a reasonable substitute. Exhibit A is a despicable Washington Post op-ed by Johns Hopkins University associate professor N.D.B. Connolly, who insists leftist generic solutions to racism, etc. arent working.

What to do instead? Start throwing rocks, he advises.

Thus, 100 years and 100 million deaths later, the American Lefts infatuation with Communism remains undimmed. And as decent Americans recoil in disgust, the historical purges remain ongoing, begging the inevitable question:

When do the book burnings begin?

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The American Left's Infatuation With Communism - Patriot Post

Catholic World News

August 17, 2017

The secretary-general of the Russian Catholic bishops conference has asked Christians in the West to help keep alive the memory of Russian Christians who died under Communist persecution.

The sufferings in Soviet prisons and labor camps remain an issue for the whole of society in Russia, said Msgr. Igor Kovalevsky. Churches have been built to those who died for the faith, who deserve to be compared to the martyrs of Christianitys first centuries.

Msgr. Kovalevsky reported that during the Great Purge of the Stalin era, 442 Catholic priests and more than 100,000 Orthodox priests were killed. Of more than 1,000 Catholic churches and chapels, all but two were destroyed or converted for secular use.

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Catholic Church in Russia recalls victims of Communism - Catholic Culture

A kerosene lamp flickers beside a Macbook in a jungle camp as aging Philippine communist leader Jaime Padilla plots the next step in one of Asias oldest insurgencies with a new generation of fighters.

Fueled by one of the worlds starkest rich-poor divides, a Maoist rebellion that began months before the first human landed on the moon plods on even though the country now boasts one of the worlds fastest-growing economies.

Theres a big pool of young people who will pursue the peoples war even if it takes us a hundred or more years, 70-year-old Padilla, one of the Philippines most-wanted men, said at a rare news conference for a small group of reporters.

Padilla, who joined the New Peoples Army a few years after the insurgency began in the late 1960s, insisted the rebels were not concerned by President Rodrigo Dutertes threats to end peace talks.

A self-proclaimed socialist, Duterte swiftly launched negotiations with the Maoists after winning presidential elections last year and there were high hopes he could end the rebellion, which the military estimates has claimed 30,000 lives.

But last month Duterte angrily declared there would be no more talks because the NPA continued to extort money from businesses and ambush security forces.

Padilla, a slight, bespectacled ex-farmer who goes by the alias Ka (Comrade) Diego, heads the Melito Glor Command, one of the most important units of the NPA, the communists 3,800-member armed wing, military commanders told Agence France-Presse.

The unit operates across the south of the main island of Luzon, the countrys industrial heartland that lies next to the capital of Manila, typically attacking isolated security outposts and taking guns from slain police and soldiers.

It also collects revolutionary taxes from businesses, ranging from big power plants and even small pig farms, as well as local politicians, Padilla said.

Hammer and sickle

The guerrillas sleep in hammocks near streams and rural hamlets, help farmers harvest crops, and melt into nearby forests to evade any approaching large military forces.

They choose only to fight smaller units, according to Padilla.

His press conference was held on a hilltop ringed with wild banana plants, about two hours hike from a poor, coconut-growing hamlet.

The 50 or so gunmen escorting him wore olive military-style uniforms inspired by Chinese revolutionary leader Mao Zedong, the movements ideological godfather.

Most also had on thick red makeup, many decorated with the hammer-and-sickle communist logo rendered in yellow, to conceal their identities.

While their numbers are relatively small, there continue to be frequent reports of communists killing security forces across the Philippines.

Last month the rebels killed six policemen and a civilian in an ambush on the central island of Negros, according to the police, and wounded five of Dutertes military bodyguards in another encounter in the southern Philippines.

Padilla said the rebels wanted the talks, held in Europe, to continue. But they stood ready to fight.

Weve been fighting for 50 years. What does it matter if it takes another 50 years, said Padilla, who gave a slide presentation by lamplight with the help of a young female guerrilla.

Padilla defended the continuing NPA attacks, calling them a form of self-defense against military operations in areas where their shadow government was in place.

Extortion He also insisted it was legitimate to demand the equivalent of two percent of any business project in revolutionary taxes, but admitted companies that refused to pay were punished harshly, with their equipment usually burnt.

The payments are vital to the communists survival.

They net the rebels up to PHP2 billion each year, Philippine military spokesman Brigadier-General Restituto Padilla, no relation to the rebel leader, told AFP, branding the practice plain extortion.

This paralyzes the local economies, keeps people poor and makes it easier to recruit them. Its a vicious cycle, the general said.

Another key reason that the Philippines continues to host a communist rebellion when Marxism has dissolved almost everywhere else around the world is an economic system that has created huge wealth but left tens of millions in deep poverty.

The Philippines has one of the fastest growing economies in Asia and has grown by more than six percent for much of the past decade.

But 22 million, or one in five Filipinos, continue to earn a dollar or less each day, according to government data.

Padilla, the NPA leader, said millions more young Filipino adults fared little better working in low-paying contractual jobs after completing their schooling.

This made the NPA a viable option even for fresh graduates of the countrys top universities, he added.

One of them, a 25-year-old from a middle-class family who called herself Ka Kathryn, told AFP she joined the NPA five years ago after her father, an engineer, was fired for organizing a union at an energy company.

We are facing an enemy who has committed atrocities against the people, said Kathryn, who had studied to become a television presenter but now carries an M-16 rifle.

We should stand up to them and not cower in fear.

Link:
Communism in the Philippines: A new generation of rebels - Coconuts