Abimael Gusman - Anti-communist inquisitors or how to bury a myth?

Every year, on the same day, they gather to celebrate, but above all to recall their great contribution, without compensation, to the rescue of democracy in Peru, as they claim. They are retired policemen of various ranks, members of GEIN, the special intelligence unit set up within the National Anti-Terrorist Directorate, the notorious DINCOTE. They started in the early 1990s under the presidency of the social democrat Garcia and continued during the years of the fascist Fuhimori. Operation Victoria. Eighty-six carefully selected police officers, led by Captain Benedicto Jimenez, went on the hunt for the leadership of the illegal Communist Party of Peru after being recruited, trained and equipped with advanced technology hardware by the US Embassy in Lima and the CIA.

China Arrests Student Leader for Celebrating Mao Zedong’s Birthday

The Chinese state security arrested a student leader of Peking University for attempting to celebrate the 125th birth anniversary of Chinese communist leader and the founder of the People’s Republic of China, Mao Zedong, inside the university campus on 26 December. Qiu Zhanxuan, head of Peking University’s Marxist Society was forced into a black car by a group of seven to eight men who identified as ‘public security department’ officials.

Under Chinese President Xi Jinping, the Chinese Communist Party has started building a cult of individual and despite paying occasional lip service to the late founder of the People’s Republic of China and the leader of the Chinese Revolution, Mao Zedong, the party has recently officially distanced itself from celebrating any legacy of the leader fearing a public sentiment rising in favour of socialism and thereby fuelling a massive unrest against the unbridled capitalist exploitation, inequality and oppression the majority of the people are subjected to.

Truth and Lies about Stalin

Interview of  professor of Medieval English literature at Montclair State University, Grover Furr, on the occasion of the 140th birth anniversary of Joseph Stalin

 Sixty-five years after his death, the name of Joseph Stalin remains at the epicenter of anti-communism. The bourgeois historiography, as well as bourgeois political forces, continue the vilification of Stalin, calling him a “dictator”, a “bloodthirsty tyrant” who supposedly “killed tens of millions of people”. According to your view, why anti-communists still focus their attacks on Stalin and what are the major sources of their claims?

G.FURR: Defenders of capitalism need to depict communism as something horrible! So, in addition to hiding the horrors of capitalism- imperialism, they require a “boogeyman” to focus on as the epitome of the “evil” of communism. Stalin was the leader of the USSR and the world communist movement during the period of its greatest triumphs, and therefore of its greatest threat to capitalism. So Stalin would be a natural target in any case. 

But there are at least two other factors. The first is Leon Trotsky, who lied about Stalin in virtually everything he wrote from 1928 until his murder in 1940. Trotsky’s post-1929 writings were the first major source of lies and slander against Stalin and the USSR. The second is Nikita Khrushchev. His “Secret Speech” of February 25, 1956 to the XX Party Congress was a devastating blow to the world communist movement. And it was an invaluable gift to the anticommunists of the world! 

After the XXII Party Congress in October, 1961, when Khrushchev and his people attacked Stalin even more viciously, with even more lies, Khrushchev and the CPSU sponsored hundreds of books and articles attacking and lying about Stalin. Khrushchev also sponsored hundreds of books and articles attacking and lying about Lavrentii Beria, whose murder Khrushchev organized on June 26, 1953. Beria is not as significant a figure in Soviet history as is Stalin. But Khrushchev and his men slandered Beria at least as viciously, if not more viciously, as they did Stalin. And those who had been closest to Stalin – Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich – supported Khrushchev in this unprincipled attack upon and murder of Beria.