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Fresh from his Brexit victory over Brussels, Conservative MEP and thinker Daniel Hannan now has Communism in his sights organising an ACRE conference next month in Tirana, Albaniaon the legacy of state socialism for Europe.

EURACTIV.coms Matt Tempest met him for a discussion ranging across the 1968s Prague Spring, first loves, enforced secularism, Che Guevara and the Dunblane handgun ban.

Mr Hannan, youre organising a conference on the legacy of communism and its to coincide with the centenary of the Bolshevik revolution. But it seems to me that anybody who can remember a communist government in Europe must be at least 40 years old and no communist party is in government or even poised to take power anywhere across Europe. So it has to be asked: why now?

Its exactly the centenary year. So 100 years since the beginning of what has to be reckoned, mathematically, the most murderous ideology ever devised by human intelligence. But I think this is an argument that we have to have in every generation. Youre right, there is not a communist regime still standing in Europe and most communist parties have transformed themselves into something else. But the argument has to be held again in every generation.

I read a poll last month that a third of American millennials think that more people were murdered by George W. Bush than by Stalin. When you see those idiotic Che Guevara t-shirts when people unconsciously adopt Marxist language about the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, very few people realise that theyre indirectly quoting him. You realise that this is something that goes very deep and you need to show that this is not some respectable alternative among many. The ethic of coercion which was intrinsic to communist rule, leading, sooner or later, to the secret police and the gulags. You can have it in a mild version or you can have it in a brutal version, but in the end, it always ends in autocracy.

I lived in Berlin for six years and had several East German friends. None of them was nostalgic at all for the Stasi, or the Berlin wall, or for the fact that they couldnt leave the country. But there was a certain sense, youve heard of the term Ostalgie they were nostalgic for that sense of free education, full employment, effectively rent-free accommodation. Obviously, none of it was very nice but it removed that worry you have in a capitalist rat race society of How do I pay the bills every month? Is there anything in you, even from the right end of the spectrum, that can see those lures or attractions of communism?

I think something else is going on there. I think people are nostalgic for having been 17-years-old. Which is a very natural and human thing. Were all the centre of our own universes. When we think back to the bright primary colours of our teenage years; the intensity of your first adolescent crush on someone, then the Stasi and the shortages and the drabness fade into the background. Thats not really what youre thinking about. But youre right, it has created this bizarre nostalgia in every communist country from people who forget what it was really like. Theyll say things like we had time to talk.

Well, living one week like that again, without even the most basic necessities being available would be a pretty strong cure if you actually had to go back and do it. But again, this exactly illustrates why we need to keep explaining to people where it leads. This wasnt a system that just meant a bit more state control and a bit less individual liberty. It was a complete hollowing out of civil society; the destruction of everything between the individual and the state. And then, ultimately, the NKVD, the knock in the night, and the torture chambers.

Obviously, all communist governments and regimes were officially atheist and secular. Isnt there something now, when were living in a period of, supposedly, a clash of civilisations Islam versus the West or Islam versus Christianity wasnt there something progressive in this idea of secular states?

I think theres a very respectable argument for secularism on the American model, where the state is effectively holding the ring and allowing each religion to proselytise. Or even secularism on the French model, where you say all of this is a private business. But enforcing atheism, which is effectively what ends up happening because everything is enforced, is every bit as tyrannical as enforcing Taliban-style sharia law, or enforcing fundamentalist Christianity, or any other belief system. The reason that this still matters is its very difficult, even a generation on, to rebuild where civil society has been systematically hollowed out and destroyed.

In 1948, when the Communists took power in Hungary, Jnos Kdr, who went on to become the Hungarian leader, was given the job of destroying independent associations. He systematically went through and closed down every church, every charity, every chess club, every village band, every boy scouts troupe; everything that fills the space normally between the individual and the government. 5,000 organisations, he boasted, that hed liquidated. Thats what we mean by a totalitarian society. And it bizarrely leaves people both atomised and controlled because people are denied the wherewithal to relate one to the other in a voluntary way as individuals. Everything is channelled through the party and the state.

I think of you as the libertarian, free market, property rights end of the right-wing spectrum, but not really the evangelical Christian, who are more obsessed with issues around handguns, banning abortion. Am I right in thinking that those arent your pet issues?

Handguns are not a big issue in the UK. Actually, I do regret the handgun ban. I think it was disproportionate and I dont think it was anything to do with what had just happened the abomination that wed seen. Nobody serious tried to argue that it would have made a difference. But, you know, we are where we are. Its not a campaign of mine to try and reverse the ban. But I do believe in freedom. I believe, very much, in people perusing their own happiness by making their own decisions and finding virtue by not having it coerced. And the defining ethic of communism was not equality, it was coercion.

Sort of a Brexit question, the only Brexit question, and its not a totally facetious analogy; but having defeated the EU with Brexit, and looking at communist regimes, can you see something of that in the EU? Not with the violence or the oppression or the authoritarianism, but as a supranational institution; pan-states and sucking sovereignty inwards.

Not in my worst nightmares have I ever thought that the European Union is going to take away our passports, throw us into gulags or torture us. I suppose that the parallel, and its a very minor and limited one, but its an interesting one in so far as it goes, would be this. By the end of the communist era, you really struggled to find anyone who believed in it. I remember travelling in what we still called Eastern Europe in the late 1980s and I remember thinking this cant carry on because nobody believes in it. None of the people running these countries still believed, if ever they did believe, in the principles of Marxism or Leninism.

But on the other hand, how was it going to end? Because so many people had a vested interest in the status quo. So many people had learned to rise through that power structure. And in that limited sense, I think you can draw a parallel, in that there are very few true believers left in Brussels. But there are an awful lot of people who have learned how to make a good living out of it. And I dont just mean Eurocrats. I mean the armies of consultants and contractors, the big landowners getting money from the CAP, the lobbyists, the professional associations; all sorts of parastatal actors who have learned how to make a handy living out of the EU, one way or another. And just like the nomenklatura in the 1980s, they will fight very hard to maintain their position, not on dogmatical grounds, but out of sheer self-interest.

Certainly, we saw that in the UK referendum a lot of the opposition came from organisations that were directly or indirectly funded by the EU. This wasnt, in other words, about sovereignty or federalism or democracy; it was about mortgages and school fees. And that is a very difficult thing to end. But Ill end on a cheerful note. I think the communist system had been basically delegitimised after the Prague Spring. Up until 1968, you could find idealistic Marxists in central and eastern Europe, who believed that they would eventually get to the stage where they could reintroduce democracy. That once the system had been shown to work, shown to be more economically productive than capitalism, then they could have free elections again. After 1968, nobody really believed that and there were just people clinging on to their position.

I think the French and Dutch referendums in 2004 were a similar moment in Brussels. I think after that, people stopped believing that European federalism would win mass support. But they were determined to cling on to their positions. What was it in the end that brought the communist system down? Again, I can remember in the 80s, very few people saw the end coming. People would say maybe over twenty or thirty years there will be a gradual move to a more reformed kind of Marxism. And a few isolated dreamers would say, no, maybe there will be an exogenous shock; a kind of Chernobyl type massive event that will bring it all down. What was the event that brought down the Marxist system in the end? It was the smallest thing. It was the decision of the Hungarian interior ministry to stop requiring exit visas from East Germans who wanted to travel to Austria. Within two weeks, the whole rotten system had unravelled. And that, I think, does give me hope. Permanence is the illusion of every age.

So why Tirana, Albania?

Tirana is, if you like, the most vivid physical place where you can see the legacy of a communist regime. It was the ultimate autocratic system and the ultimate paranoid system. Enver Hoxha spent an immense amount of money fortifying the country. It was rather like North Korea is today. And a hungry and immiserated population, to use a Marxist word, was paying the cost of what had become a leadership cult, because thats where it ends.

Read more from the original source:
Dan Hannan on Communism, Ostalgie, first loves and enforced atheism - EurActiv

ubmission by Team Mills, a seven-member team of artists, landscape architects and public art consultants led by Karen and Ben Mills of Hamilton. -

The Department of Canadian Heritage has revealed five competing designs for a relocated and drastically downsized Memorial to the Victims of Communism at the Garden of the Provinces and Territories on Wellington Street.

Only one of the five designs is literally representational depicting a toppling sculpture of Communist icon Vladimir Lenin. Three others feature collections of artfully arranged rods, while one relies on a veil, reminiscent of the wooden veil at Lansdownes Parks TD Place, to convey its meaning.

Five teams of artists, architects, landscape architects and other design professionals were short-listed last November and given until Thursdayto submit their proposals.

Heres a summary of the teams and their creations:

Team space2place. -

Team space2place, made up of Vancouver landscape architect Jeff Cutler and Philadelphia artist Ken Lum.

Its entry shows a sculpture of Lenin in the throes of being toppled, recreating in permanent form the befalling of Communist statuary at the zenith of decisive political and social change.

Lenin was chosen, the team says, because he is the foundational figure of the worlds first Communist state.

Team Mills. -

Team Mills, a seven-member team of artists, landscape architects and public art consultants led by Karen and Ben Mills of Hamilton.

Its proposed work is an array of bronze stellae in the form of a gently undulating, permeable curtain.

From a distance, the slender triangulated monoliths form a collective identity, the teams literature says.

However, up close, they reveal individually finished surfaces or skins, echoing the distinct stories and experiences of different groups of refugees.

As the sun sets, the work will be bathed in a soft light projected from a central plinth, gradually taking on a warm, iridescent glow until it becomes an immense floating field of light.

Team Moskaliuk. -

Team Moskaliuk, led by Markham, Ont. architect Wiktor Moskaliuk, with landscape architect Claire Bedat and artist Larysa Kurylas, both of Washington.

Radiating from the memorials core, 200 bronze blades remind visitors of the triumph of the human spirit over the dehumanizing and oppressive nature of communist regimes, the team says. Each blade is etched with the surnames of five victims honoured by Canadian families and represent 500,000 victims, giving form to the estimated 100 million deaths attributed to communism worldwide.

An oval in the central plinth, shaped like a shield, symbolizes Canadas protection of democracy, human rights and the rule of law.

Team Raff. -

Team Raff, headed by Toronto artist and architect Paul Raff, along with landscape architects Brett Hoornaert and Luke Kairys and designer and arborist Michael Ormston-Holloway.

The focus is on a sweeping sculptural array, 21 metres long and nearly four metres high, divided into two sections. Along its length, a fine vertical veil of 365 stainless steel fins supports 4,412 bronze rods. Each rod describes a unique angle of the sun one for each hour of every day in a year.

The memorials powerful form, the teams literature says, reflects the horrific magnitude of wrongdoing while also invoking gratitude and optimism for the present.

Team Reich+Petch Architects -

Team Reich+Petch Architects, which includes Toronto architect Tony Reich, artist Catherine Widgery from Cambridge, Mass., and Matthew Sweig, a Toronto landscape architect.

The team says its design presents two realms: the darker communist realm on the lower level, and the lighter realm of safe haven that is Canada in a shimmering metal cube on the upper level.

The lower level of the cube is a Room of Remembrance, with walls perforated with quotes that speak of communisms oppression and Canadas open spirit. A freedom bell rings out every 15 minutes, triggering a cloud of voices, relating personal experiences with communism in many languages.

This is the second design competition for the $3-million memorial, made necessary after the incoming Liberal government scrapped the former Conservative governments controversial plan to erect a massive memorial on a 5,000-square-metre site on Wellington Street near the Supreme Court of Canada.

Instead, it will be built on a 500-square-metre site at the Garden of the Provinces and Territories, just east of LeBreton Flats.

The designs will be evaluated by a five-member jury that includes Ludwik Klimkowski, chair of the memorials sponsoring group, Tribute to Liberty. Before reaching its decision, the jury will consider feedback from the public from a survey launched Thursday on Canadian Heritages website.

Klimkowski told the Citizen the jury expects to reconvene on March 24 to review the public input and will recommend one of the designs to Heritage Minister Mlanie Joly by the end of this month.

Tribute of Liberty is expected to contribute $1.5 million half the cost of the memorial to the project.

Though it has struggled in the past to raise funds, Klimkowski said the non-profit group should have the money with something to spare.

A number of pledges were contingent on actual construction commencement, he said. If you take those into consideration, I think we have exceeded our goal.

Canadian Heritage said the winning design will be announced this summer, with major monument elements unveiled in December 2018 and completion of site work and landscaping by March 2019.

More than eight million Canadians can trace their origins to countries that have suffered under totalitarian communist regimes, the department says.

Continue reading here:
Five competing designs revealed for Victims of Communism memorial - Ottawa Citizen

Ottawa could be home to the leaning tower of Vladimir Lenin.

The falling figure of the Russian communist revolutionary is the central feature of one of five finalists to become themonument to the victims of communism, whose site was moved in 2015 from land near the Supreme Court to the Garden of the Provinces and Territoriesa, on Wellington near Bay Street.

Jeff Cutler, with the team Space2Place, which is proposing the Lenin-centric design, said having the statue's toppling effect ties into history.

Supplied

The Team Raff proposal would have more than 4,000 brass pipes protruding from two sculptured walls. Each pipe would denote a important moment in the history of Communism.

What it really represents is that moment of transition from the fall of a communist regime into something new, he said.

He said his group chose Lenin because of his central role in the movement.

All of the modern-day communism can really trace their roots back to him."

Supplied

The Team Moskaliuk proposal would incorporate 200 bronze blades with the names of Victims of Communism etched on them.

Four other designs are also competing to be selected for the project, including an elevated platform, a grouping of triangular monoliths and a design with 200 bronze blades.

Paul Raffs design features more than 4,000 bronze pipes attached to a large sculpture that would mark moments in the history of Communism.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union can be marked on a day of the calendar, so it is memorialized forever," he said.

Raff said part of the challenge of this project is that it has to encompass so many parts of history.

Supplied

The Team Mills proposal

When you have 4,000 unique moments you are also trying to express the vastness of this tremendously unfortunate reality of human history. The government has put all of the proposed designs online for people to view. Online votes will be provided to a design jury, which includes representatives from Tribute to Liberty a private group sponsoring the project.

Natalie Huneault, a spokesperson for the Heritage Department, said Minister Mlanie Joly will make the final call this summer. Construction starts next year.

She is going to make the final selection, which will be announced in the summer of 2017.

Supplied

The Team Reich Petch Architects proposal envisions two levels with an area of darkness and light.

View post:
Five finalists revealed for victims of communism monument - MetroNews Canada

From tall bronze columns, granite pillars, bronze rods pointing to the sun, to a freedom bell and a toppling statue of Vladimir Lenin, its all part of five designs for a scaled-down memorial to the victims of communism have been unveiled by the Canadian Heritage.

The design competition was launched last fall with teams invited to provide their credentials and examples of past work, according to Canadian Heritages website.

Then in November, five teams were shortlisted.

Videos and photos of each design are available online. The public can also weigh in on the different designs by taking a survey, available at pch.sondages-surveys.ca/s/63447834/?l=en.

Ludwik Klimkowski, who sits on the design jury and is chair of Tribute to Liberty, the group formed in 2008 to establish the memorial, said in a statement, Over 8 million Canadians trace their roots to countries that suffered under communism. We are confident that the design selected for the memorial will recognize the role that Canada has played in offering refuge to those who left behind suffering and repressions to live in a free and democratic country. We hope that this next step helps to energize our supporters to participate and vote online.

The memorials location was moved to west of the terraces of the Garden of the Provinces and Territories, after the National Capital Commission voted last April to relocate the project to the south side of Wellington Street near Bay Street. The move came after the NCC was asked in 2013 to authorize a site southwest of the Supreme Court by what was then called Public Works and Government Services Canada that was very controversial in the city. But with the change in federal government, Canadian Heritage scrapped that site.

The memorial is scheduled for completion in 2018.

Melissa Murray is a reporter with the Ottawa West News. She can be reached at mmurray@metroland.com .

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Public encouraged to weigh in on victims of communism memorial ... - http://www.ottawacommunitynews.com/

Research shows that the political ideology of communism restricts innovation, todays panacea for economic growth and long-term prosperity.

In broad strokes, the communist tenets of state ownership of business and property with strict government supervision lead to a risk-averse culture working in an environment that discourages ambition and creativity. This could not be further from the building blocks that innovation needs to thrive.

The 2017 International Intellectual Property Index, recently published by the Global Intellectual Property Center (GIPC) of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, ranks the current bastion of communism, China No. 27 and formerly communist Russia No. 23behind the smaller economies of Malaysia, Mexico, and Turkey, for example.

The report associates stronger intellectual property (IP) protection regimes with more innovative economies and conversely, weak IP protection as hindering long-term strategic innovation and development.

A robust national IP environment correlates strongly with a wide range of macroeconomic indicators that fall under the umbrella of innovation and creativity, according to the GIPC report.

The leading countries in IP strength are free market, capitalist economies such as the United States and United Kingdom. First-world democratic countries of Europe and Asia also rank highly.

Ma Guangyuan,Independent Chinese economist

The report states that Russias protectionist moveslocal production, procurement, and manufacturingwork to restrict IP rights. Russia also suffers from persistently high levels of software piracy.

For China, the report singles out historically high levels of IP infringement.

China and Russia are the usual suspects of cyberespionage. Theft of IP, the infrastructure for innovation, is one way these nations heavily influenced by communism try to stay competitive globally.

Melbourne, Australia-based agency 2thinknow has been ranking the worlds most innovative cities for the past 10 years. In its latest rankings published Feb. 23, the most innovative city in a communist country, Beijing, ranks No. 30, and Moscow ranks No. 43.

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), not a single Chinese university ranks among the worlds top 30 in terms of most-cited scientific publications.

Universities are breeding grounds for young, innovative minds. Within their walls, ideas are born and debated, companies are formed, and research is conducted. They are key components of a healthy innovation ecosystem.

Harvard Business School professor William Kirby wrote about the strict limitations within Chinese universities on what faculty could discuss with students.

Faculty could not talk about any past failures of the communist party. They could not talk about the advantages of separation between the judicial and executive arms of the government, Kirby stated in an article in the Harvard Business Review (HBR) in 2015.

It is hard to overstate the impact of these strictures on campus discourse and the learning environment, Kirby wrote.

Protestors shout slogans during a rally against a pro-Beijing official who was appointed as chairman of Hong Kong Universitys (HKU) governing council, in Hong Kong on Jan. 3, 2016. Fears are growing over political interference in the citys education system. (Anthony Wallace/AFP/Getty Images)

Communism is known for its corruption and cronyism. A Science editorial noted that the bulk of the Chinese governments R&D budget is allocated due to political connection rather than merit based on the judgment of independent review panels.

McKinseys 2014 report The China Effect on Global Innovation noted that the impact of innovation on Chinas economic growth declined to the lowest level since about 1980.

China has a massive consumer market and a government willing to invest huge sums of moneynearly US$200 billion on R&D in 2014and its universities graduate more than 1.2 million engineers each year.

Garry Kasparov,former world chess champion

Clearly, China has so much potential, but it is the United States that has taken the lead in technological dominance.

The country [China] has yet to make an internal-combustion engine that could be exported and lags behind developed countries in sciences ranging from biotechnology to materials, according to McKinsey.

While almost all western technology giants have R&D labs in China, the bulk of what they do is local adaptation rather than developing next generation technologies and products, wrote Anil Gupta and Haiyan Wang in a 2016 article in the HBR. Gupta and Wang are co-authors of the book Getting China and India Right.

Excessive government involvement often leads to waste and excessoverbuilding and overcapacity. Chinas real estate bubble and steel mills are two such examples.

Lately, the Chinese government has been trying to spur an onslaught of startups by providing them with generous subsidies. But it doesnt have the savvy to pick winners and losers. Instead, a more efficient use of capital comes from knowledgeable and discerning venture capitalists. Most startups are meant to fail after all.

Why China Cant Innovate, a 2014 article in the HBR co-authored by Kirby, noted that the Chinese Communist Party requires one of its representatives to be associated with every company of more than 50 employees. Larger firms must have a Party cell, whose leader reports directly to the Party at the municipal or provincial level.

These requirements compromise the proprietary nature of a firms strategic direction, operations, and competitive advantage, thus constraining normal competitive behavior, not to mention the incentives that drive founders to grow their own businesses, according to the article.

The system of parallel governance constrains the flow of ideas. Chinas innovation largely comes through creative adaptation, which can mean a lot of things including foreign acquisitions, partnerships, but also cybertheft.

Communism is against private ownership of property. This puts a damper on innovation.

The key to whether China can become a country of innovation is tied to the respect of property rights and the rule of law, wrote Ma Guangyuan, an independent economist in China.

In his blog, Ma cites renowned U.S. investor William Bernsteins writings, which discuss property rights as being the most important of four factors needed for rapid economic growth. Guangyang wrote, Entrepreneurs live in constant fear of punishment, due to the questionable business practices in China, an environment that leads them to lose trust in a viable long-term economic future.

Capital flight out of China is one symptom of the problem; another is the preference of wealthy Chinese to send their children overseas for higher education. The loss of entrepreneurs like Li Ka-shing and Cao Dewang is a sign that greener pastures lie abroad.

Former world chess champion Garry Kasparov, a Russian, wrote: Communism as a political ideology is as bankrupt as ever.

In his blog, he went on to say: It is no coincidence that the values of the American century are also the values of innovation and exploration. Individual freedom, risk-taking, investment, opportunity, ambition, and sacrifice. Religious and secular dictatorships cannot compete with these values and so they attack the systems founded upon them.

The authors of the HBR article Why China Cant Innovate recognize the nearly limitless capability of the Chinese individual, however, the political environment in China acts like a choke collar on innovation.

The problem, we think, is not the innovative or intellectual capacity of the Chinese people, which is boundless, but the political world in which their schools, universities, and businesses need to operate, which is very much bounded, they wrote.

Follow Rahul on Twitter @RV_ETBiz

Communism is estimated to have killed at least 100 million people, yet its crimes have not been compiled and its ideology still persists. Epoch Times seeks to expose the history and beliefs of this movement, which has been a source of tyranny and destruction since it emerged.

See the entire series of articles here.

Originally posted here:
How Communism Stifles Innovation - The Epoch Times