
De Dokwerker
Today is the anniversary of any number of things, two of which I’ll focus on.
One is the Dutch strike of 1941. This was a mass action against anti-semitism in Nazi-occupied Holland. In response to the increasing segregation of jews, and the sending of more than a hundred to extermination camps, a strike was organised by the banned communist party. Though it was ultimately suppressed, it rallied a large number of workers and is annually celebrated in Holland. It is also commemorated by the pictured statue, in honour of the dockworkers who led it.
Yet despite the central role of communists in resisting Nazism, a brief increase in their popularity after the war was short-lived. This was largely related to the other event that happened on the 25th of February: Nikita Kruschev’s secret speech of 1956. This speech denounced many of the actions of Stalin during his rule, while praising Lenin – it was the first time that many aspects of Stalin’s tyranny had been publicly admitted.
The speech seems to be to bear a certain comparison with the American civil war (although obviously less bloody). It was the time when the initial and most unrestrained butchery that accompanied the setting up of the revolutionary government (I feel that life as a slave can be called a ‘butchered’ life) was denounced by the highest echelons of that state – but not denounced so far as to bring and end to it, merely to make it milder and more stable. The civil war didn’t end racism, nor did Lincoln, the great emancipator, want it to end racism. Similar, the one-party state and the repression of dissent against it was not ended by Kruschev. Indeed half the point of his speech was simply an excuse to attack his rivals in the party.
I say that speech is connected to the lack of benefit that the Dutch communists drew from their resistance to Nazism – not because the speech itself produced that effect, but because the political character of the USSR which it discusses was one of the great forces holding back the spread of communist ideas. Except among aspiring military juntas, of course.
Though it draws this post rather onto a different random topic, I thought I’d share a thought I had about some statements by Abraham Lincoln that I just looked up. He was quite adamant that
“I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races…
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