A surprising non-recognition

Non-recognition of governments is a rare occurrence, usually occurring where the formation of a government is viewed as illegitimate and there is an alternative legitimate government that possesses support but is not in control of that territory. Important examples of non-recognition of governments are:

1. The Soviet Government after the Bolshevik Revolution up to 1924
1. Some countries, like Japan and Yugoslavia, did not recognise the Bolshevik Government until the 1940s
2. East Germany outside the Soviet Bloc and West Germany inside it during the Cold War
3. The Peking Stalinist Government vis-à-vis the Taipei Government in China
4. The PDPA regime in Afghanistan (1978-1991) outside the Soviet Bloc
5. The Taliban in Afghanistan between 1994 and 2002

Even when strongly opposed, there are rarely even protest demands at times of intense class struggle for non-recognition of the most repressive governments. For instance, there were never working class demands in Western Europe to not recognise the Nazi regime in Germany or the Fascist regime in Italy. However, I have recently discovered that there was one case of non-recognition of a right-wing dictatorship in Europe, even if on a relatively small scale. Nine countries never recognised the Franco government as the legitimate government of Spain. Instead, these countries — Mexico, Guatemala, Venezuela, and the Stalinist regimes of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, and Albania — viewed the Spanish Republican government-in-exile as the legal government of all Spain throughout Franco’s rule. Undoubtedly, the great majority of workers in Western European nations also privately viewed the Spanish Republican government-in-exile as the rightful government of Spain.

The critical question is why was Spain different in this respect from other democratic collapses — and perhaps even the Stalinist dictatorships?

The answer is that, unlike the Hitler, Mussolini and Dollfuß-Schuschnigg regimes, the Nationalists in Spain came to power as a result of a lengthy civil war rather than a technically legal coup. This meant that there was a much clearer alternative government than in Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy, or even Dollfuß-Schuschnigg Austria where a short civil war did occur. For another comparison, the Stalinist nations of Europe also never had viable alternative governments for the West to recognise, while the Whites in Russia were so fragmented even during the Civil War that there was never one clear alternative rightful government. Additionally, outside North America and Australia working class protest during the early 1920s was so intense that hosting a Russian government-in-exile would have increased the risk of spreading socialist revolution. In North America and Australia — especially the United States — there was little sympathy for Russians and the Orthodox Church was regarded as an alien culture, so it would have been difficult for a Russian government-in-exile to establish there either.

 

Thus, despite ruling classes’ extreme hostility towards socialism and Bolshevism, non-recognition of the Bolshevik Government in no case lasted so long as a few nations’ non-recognition of Francoist Spain. All this demonstrates how:

1. revolutionaries and right-wing dictators alike desire overwhelmingly to avoid any possibility that the outside world could view their government as illegitimate or unjust
2. the best way to avoid this possibility is to take power in a manner that prevents any clear alternative government from emerging
3. that if an alternative government does exist, there is a significant possibility that it will be recognised by some nation as rightful
   

A circuitous trip and a famous joke from time past

In the late 1990s — the same time I first studied Socialist Alternative, Socialist Worker and Green Left Weekly and was startled at how they demonstrated political reality as completely different from what I learned in school — I briefly collected bus timetables in Melbourne. I was quietly appalled by the quality of service vis-à-vis what books like Environment, Capitalism and Socialism or even the more moderate Public Transport Users’ Association demonstrated as requisite for sustainable transport in Melbourne.

At the same time, my brother was critical of my interest in travelling on buses — an interest that has continued to this day. I often joke that

“if you want to understand global warming, ride on Melbourne’s bus services”

because it is clear to me that the woeful quality of bus and other public transport serves is a critical reason why Australia is rated the worst-performing nation in the world re greenhouse gas emissions. (At the same time, ecology increasing demonstrates Australia is required to be by far the best performed nation, as far ahead of the pack as Port Adelaide in the 1914 SAFL or Yorkshire in the 1901 County Championship).

Yesterday, after a brief conversation with my mother, I was allowed to spend my first day riding buses since the COVID pandemic. Before COVID, I would often spend days riding buses around Melbourne, and enjoyed it even though there often is not much to see from inside a bus.

I had had a plan to go on a bus route that I recall laughing about with my brother a great deal during the late 1990s — the bus from Moonee Ponds to Niddrie via Strathmore. My brother called that route, then numbered 501,

“a classically circuitous route”

at the same time as he complained a great deal about how circuitous almost all bus routes were vis-à-vis trains or trams. When I took this “classically circuitous route”, I was taken by what I thought was a joke saying (as I strongly recall it):

WHY IS THIS BUS
THE 501?
BECAUSE THAT IS THE PROBABILITY THAT IT WILL
BE EARLY OR LATE:
5/1

When I first read that, I presumed that meant the odds of it being early or late were 5 to 1 — which means it was on time five times out of six. My brother, however, said that it is much more likely that the old writing I had seen — if I recall correctly near Strathmore shops — was not a joke but an angry response to a user’s experience. That is, it was either early or late five times out of six, and on time only one time out of six. Actual experience does not tell me which is right, although I have ridden on buses many times, and they are often late though rarely outright cancelled as trains sometimes are.

At the same time, of course, the 501 could not plausibly have actually received its route number from being early or late five times out of six!

Yesterday, my first plan was to ride on the “classically circuitous” route, now part of the 469 alongside a modified Niddrie to East Keilor section from the old route 475. When I did this, I scanned reasonably carefully but could not see the old 501 writing noted above — it may well have been removed long before the route was modified — but I did find the long circuitous trip and the beef burger at Milleara Mall quite interesting. The terrain around Strathmore Heights is quite steep, even scenic, as is the lake area to the south of the Calder Freeway. 

Are the “Big Five” dictators a correct assumption?

 For many years, I have assumed that the worst dictators in (at least) modern history have been:

• Joseph Stalin (lived 1878-1953)
• Adolf Hitler (lived 1889-1945)
• Mao Zedong (lived 1893-1976)
• Pol Pot (lived 1925-1998)
• Saddam Hussein (lived 1937-2006)

The reason for this is that Stalin, Hitler, Mao and Pol Pot were the largest killers from famines and/or genocides, whilst Hussein was both an extreme warmonger and also genocidally exterminated many Kurdish populations with poison gas in northern Iraq.

Most people around me have found this an absurd list, but after re-watching the Evolution of Evil series on YouTube tonight, I googled for a list of worst dictators and found ‘The Top 10 Worst Dictators in History’ by Larry Slawson — who received his Masters Degree at UNC Charlotte and specializes in Russian and Ukrainian history.

Slawsons’s list was:

1. Mao Zedong
2. Genghis Khan
3. Joseph Stalin
4. Adolf Hitler
5. Leopold II
6. Pol Pot
7. Saddam Hussein
8. Idi Amin
9. Vlad the Impaler
10. Ivan the Terrible

It surprised me a lot to see the familiar “big five” dictators (in bold) were in the top seven, separated from each other only by two older rulers. This does suggest to me that — perhaps not as usually as I would wish because of inability to be sceptical without clear refutation about extreme views — my judgment is reasonably accurate. The list could also be a reflection of potential bias, given that the death tolls attributed to Stalin and Mao by writers like Paul Kengor do not seem to be accepted by academic scholars away from the conservative “Christian madrassas” (as my brother calls them) like Kengor’s Grove City College or Benjamin Wiker’s former Franciscan University of Steubenville. Still, I was oddly surprised by what I read on such a brief glance.

The harsh reality of Nazi and Communist sympathy — trivialised too often

In recent years, in an attempt to dissect the old Politically Incorrect Guide series, my brother and mother have frequently noted that the founder of Regnery Publishing, Henry Regnery, was a Nazi sympathiser. This despite the fact that Regnery’s books are never supportive of the Nazis and frequently critical.

However, the reality about Nazi sympathisers, as shown by Clement Leibovitz during the 1990s in his book In Our Time: The Chamberlain-Hitler Collusion, which I have been reading recently, is much darker than merely heroes of the extreme right being Nazi sympathisers. Leibovitz demonstrated, in fact, that a clear majority of the ruling classes even in those nations that remained democratic were Nazi sympathisers. Moreover, even those portions of the ruling classes of the democratic survivors who were not Nazi sympathisers had negligible sympathy for liberal democracy. They saw democracy as only a temporary compromise with workers’ demand for a revolution to eliminate ruling classes entirely before — as had been done throughout Central and Eastern Europe except Czechoslovakia — defeating the workers completely and restoring a status quo ante where workers lacked the political and legal rights (like the right to vote, the right to unionise, the right to strike, and freedom of speech) gained since the 1860s.

Leibovitz shows that the overwhelming goal of the British and French ruling classes — and presumably the ruling classes of other remaining democracies in Europe, not to mention the US, Canada and Australia — was to overthrow the Bolshevik regime by whatever means necessary. He demonstrates that they never accepted the existence of the Soviet Union, even after Stalin relinquished the goal of international revolution. It was this desire to overthrow the Soviet government, which had been consistently dominant within the Western ruling classes, that drove their strong sympathy for Nazism and their appeasement policy.

At the same time, Leibovitz — much more than even Trotskyist groups like Socialist Alternative, the International Socialist Organisation and the Democratic Socialist Party — conclusively demonstrates that the working classes of Western Europe overwhelmingly sympathised with the Soviet government. Of course, the majority of Europe’s working classes had supported the spread of the Bolshevik Revolution back at the tail end of the 1910s. Once revelations of real wages cut by a third or more, and loss of hard-won rights to form unions and to strike in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy appeared, the working classes of surviving European democracies became desperate to have Hitler and Mussolini overthrown, or minimally prevented from expanding by force. That idea drew overwhelming opposition amongst their ruling classes, who knew it would result in the spread of Bolshevism — something they could not tolerate.

Leibovitz also conclusively shows just how much Thomas Woods (in the Politically Incorrect Guide to American History) and Paul Kengor (in the Politically Incorrect Guide to Communism) trivialise sympathy for Lenin and Communism in general. Kengor’s claim of 25 percent of Millennials having a favourable view of Lenin is insignificant when it is observed that probably over 90 percent of industrial workers in Europe in the late 1910s and early 1920s had a favourable view of the Russian Revolution’s leader. Woods’ focus on Communist sympathisers in American government and Hollywood is similarly ridiculous. Even in the 1930s most workers in Britain and France sympathised with Russia as much or more than with their own government, while when Lenin was alive Western Europe’s industrial working class observed how a workers’ revolution could transform society. They not merely wanted to emulate what Russia’s workers had done, but believed they were capable of emulating them locally.

Leibovitz also shows that the only thing that limited the ruling classes’ ability to let Hitler and Mussolini expand east and destroy the USSR was popular — which can only mean lower class — opposition to those dictators, and/or support for the Soviet Union. Even if working class excitement had died down by the 1930s, the USSR remained the enemy of every paramount enemy of the workers — Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. Thus, even if they disagreed with Stalin’s policies and/or practices, the working classes in the surviving democracies still wanted the USSR to survive.

All this points to a harsh reality: extremely few people in interwar Europe sympathised with liberal democracy. Generally, the ruling and middle classes desired right-wing authoritarian regimes, whilst the working classes desired revolutionary socialism: a society without bosses or profits where all decisions were made directly under workers’ control, far more democratic than familiar systems of liberal democracy. Even when the ruling classes did very reluctantly accept fighting the Nazis — and as Leibovitz shows most therein privately thought they were fighting the “wrong” enemy — they did not come to accept liberal democracy as a “good”. The workers, for their part, overlooked the brutality of Stalin’s regime and the reality of his counterrevolution because Stalin’s Russia at least publicly opposed what they hated the most: right-wing authoritarianism and the Catholic Church.