Communism
The Communists have been vanquished! The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) confirmed yesterday that the Communist Party of Australia had been deregistered as a political party for the second time in 90 years.
The reds are gone. The Punch discovered this morning they’re not even under the bed. We called five Communist contacts on the CPA’s website and not a single comrade answered the phone. And the AEC told The Australian yesterday the party was deregistered because they didn’t respond to a notice querying whether they met the required membership threshold.
While your natural reaction might be: hoorah! The Glorious Bourgeois Capitalist Machine has won! The Resistance is dead!!! The reality is, it’s a bittersweet victory. The end of communism means the end of all kinds of cultural touchstones we hold dearly.
Continue reading "Comrade, communism has been vanquished!" »
It was a country that banned beards. Travellers arriving at the border sporting facial hair would be shaved on the spot.
A citizen attempting to leave the country on other than official business engaged in an act of treason punishable by jail or even death.
During the second half of the 20th Century Albania was one of the most isolated countries on earth.
Continue reading "Albania, a country which actually is “moving forward”" »
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marley says:
Nothing wrong with being optimistic, but there’s nothing wrong with being realistic either. While no doubt things are improving, the level of corruption in Albania a few years ago was pretty staggering (it’s a problem common to all the post-communist states), as was the power of organised crime there. Read more »
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Robert S McCormick says:
Exactly what is wrong with being optimistic? Maybe in generations to come, vile cruel & totally repugnant as the Hoxha & the entire communist era may have been Albanians will be thankful that theirs was such a closed society - that is not to suggest they would ever want to… Read more »
Communism was a really good idea – stay with me here – and so is democracy. Unfortunately, neither ended up the way their idealist inventors imagined.
If you lived through the ‘Reds under the bed’ era this might come as a shock, but at its core communism is really rather nice. It would be great to think that we could treat everyone as equal and be sharing, caring community.
The fatal flaw, though, is communism didn’t really take human nature and greed into account, so ‘What’s mine is yours’ evolved into ‘What’s mine (and yours) is the dictator’s’.
Continue reading "Democracy is dead. Long live democracy!" »
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acotrel says:
I’ll bet this story never appears in the Australian media?: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/jul/08/murdoch-newspapers-phone-hacking Read more »
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NESLIHAN KUROSAWA says:
Hi Danielle, I spent most of childhood and some of my childhood years living right next door to the old Soviet Union and Eastern Block “Iron Curtain” countries. Having read most of the Russian classics by Tolstoy and Dostoyevski, message of Communism to me was all about “total and utter… Read more »
I’ve written before about how, at the age of 25, I discovered that my father was a very senior member of the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6.
I was visiting him in Washington, where he was serving in what had once been Kim Philby’s job - as the SIS liaison with the CIA. One reason that he chose to tell me on that visit, I think, was that during my stay at his house in Washington, some of his colleagues from London would also be visiting.
He needed to know that I would not say or do anything untoward. I was, after all, a long-haired journalist working for the Sydney rock station Double-Jay. Not exactly prime security material.
Continue reading "How ASIO got it right during a time it got so much wrong" »
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PeterinBrisbane says:
People who criticise the efforts of the anti communist agencies would do well to consider that without doubt the most evil force the world has ever faced has been communism. Its’ aim was the destruction of every other society in the world by sabotaging their economies and subverting the weak… Read more »
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James Wheeldon says:
Mark Aarons is not reliable and his book is not to be trusted. He includes a bunch of discredited nonsense in his book, including the allegation that my father - the late Senator John Wheeldon - was a “secret member” of the Communist Party of Australia. Supposedly, Aarons knew my… Read more »
I remember the jokes. They were usually about one of two things: hardship or fear.
It’s been strange, this week, to reflect that most people will never know, as I did (albeit as a visitor) what it was really like in the old Soviet Bloc. But the jokes used to tell the story.
An American dog, a Polish dog and a Russian dog are talking. The American dog says “Where I live it’s good. You bark loudly enough, and they give you meat”. The Polish dog says” What’s meat?” The Russian dog says “What’s bark?”
Continue reading "Recalling communism through its black jokes" »
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Andy W says:
In the year 1848 Karl Marx and Freiderich Engels published ” Communist Manifesto ” . If Karl Marx and Freiderich Engels were honest men , their book would have been called ........ ” Red Bull ” . Read more »
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BJ says:
I have a joke from modern-day Ukraine, where I lived for three years. A reflection on the corrupt police. The graduate from the Police academy gets a job at the city precinct. He goes there on his first day, and the Chief gives him his uniform, his gun and his… Read more »
Near Sydney’s Circular Quay sits the Hitler Bar. The door sign has Hitler’s name in Germanic script on a swastika background. Similar nazi era iconography decorates the menus.
Alright, not surprisingly, there is no Hitler Bar. Instead what overlooks Sydney Harbour is the Lenin Bar, replete with the nostalgic/ironic hip communist hammer, sickle and Soviet star kitsch.
This is strange because in overall scope, communism presents as a greater man-made humanitarian catastrophe than nazism, or almost certainly any other ism.
Continue reading "Communism isn’t cool, and never has been" »
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It’s Friday at The Punch
Fact: today in 1956 thousands of Hungarians took to the streets demanding an end to Soviet rule. Communist forces had taken control of Hungary in 1946. The Soviet army led a brutal retaliation to the uprising that resulted in 2,500 deaths and a further 200,000 people being forced into exile. They maintained their influence in Hungary until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989.
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howtosingbetter says:
how to sing better Anyone can learn <a >how to sing better</a> if they have the drive and determination to improve. Many people think that people are born with a 5 octave reach, sounding like Mariah Carey. You might not be able to become the next massive superstar, but with… Read more »
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Simmo says:
Still no action on my proposed 3 day weekend from last Firday Lucy, what kind of investigative journalist are you????? Read more »
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