A very powerful piece in the Guardian/Observer (yes!) decribing the grisly fate of official useful idiot Malcolm Caldwell, whose banal self-delusion about communist crimes led to his banal murder in Pol Pot’s Cambodia.

But this is astounding – can it really be true?

The UN-supported court (ECCC) investigating communist crimes has appointed a hard-core Australian Leninist to lead … the victims unit:

Somehow the link between Marxist-Leninist ideology and communist terror has never been firmly established in the way, for instance, that we understand Nazi ideology to have led inexorably to Auschwitz.

As if to illustrate the point, earlier last year the ECCC announced that Helen Jarvis, its chief of public affairs, was to become head of the victims unit, responsible for dealing with the survivors, and relatives of the dead, of S-21.

Jarvis is an Australian academic with a longterm interest in the region, who was recently awarded Cambodian citizenship. She is also a member of the Leninist Party Faction in Australia.

In 2006 she signed a party letter that included this passage: “We too are Marxists and believe that ‘the ends justify the means’. But for the means to be justifiable, the ends must also be held to account. In time of revolution and civil war, the most extreme measures will sometimes become necessary and justified. Against the bourgeoisie and their state agencies we don’t respect their laws and their fake moral principles.”

Jarvis refused to speak to me about these matters. But Knut Rosandhaug, the UN’s deputy administrator for the tribunal, said that the administration “fully supports” her. In this sense, although she was never a Pol Potist herself, Jarvis shows that the spirit of Malcolm Caldwell has survived the last century. It lives on in the conviction that the ends justify the means, and in the manner that liberal institutions can house the most illiberal outlooks.

Strewth.

Looking for something decent to do this Spring?

Join a really worthwhile Projects Abroad initiative to excavate unmarked graves of victims of communism in Romania:

Due to drastic governmental budget cuts, the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes in Romania is in danger of no longer being able to do its work of finding the victims of the communist regime, and is in need of our volunteers’ help…

The institute now needs help on the first of their projects taking place at the end of March and start of April 2010: the excavation of a common grave on Muntele Mare, in the Apuseni Mountains in Romania. This is where a resistance camp consisting of 5 anti-communist fighters (one of them a pregnant woman) was stormed by the communist secret service forces in the 60’s. The defenders were murdered and buried together.

It reminds me of this useful advice to Slavoj Zizek:

Luckily for Europe, many countries which laboured under Stalinism are now free; their representatives can speak out against this sort of thing in a way most politicians in Old Europe can not imagine doing.

It is no surprise that S Zizek as a leading supporter of an oh-so-fashionable Stalinist defence team comes from former non-aligned’ communist Yugoslavia: a country which wriggled out from the worst excesses of Stalinism, later collapsing not because there were serious intellectual forces opposing communism as such but rather because of populist mobilisation based on ethnic exclusivism and partly driven by sheer gangsterism.

Zizek is a Marxist philosopher who dwells on the level of ideas. If he wants to study aspects of the allegedly Enlightenment tradition of Stalinism in a way both more dialectical and materialistic simultaneously (and rather closer to home than the European Parliament), he need only walk down the road in Slovenia.

And start digging.