Gulags and Concentration Camps.
Britain had its concentration camps during the Boer War, so did Hitler’s Germany as soon as he assumed power in 1933. The US has its detention camp for 39 political prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. And it should not be forgotten that Stalin had his political opponents incarcerated in gulags and so does Vladimir Putin. As of June 2020, there were 380 known political prisoners in Russia (Memorial Human Rights Centre).
Gulags were a system of forced labour. Many prisoners – particularly those imprisoned during the great Purge – died of starvation, disease, exhaustion or execution. The gulag system was begun by Lenin in 1919 and by 1921 there were 84 camps holding political prisoners. It is estimated that around 50 million perished in Soviet gulags between 1930 and 1950.
In 1956, after Stain’s death and following Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech to the 20th Party Congress, thousands of prisoners were freed from Stalin’s labour camps.
Around 1980, or soon after, a voluntary groups began to set up to research and make publicly available the hidden history of the horrors of the gulag system. It was called ‘Pamyat’ – the Russian word for memory.
Before Putin showed this was not his idea of a good cause, Pamyat used to run annual festivals with young people encouraged to hear the memories of the old and to view the old prison camps.
Pamyat also used to search the areas of old WW2 battles for the bones of dead soldiers – Russian and German – which were then buried decently. Something neither Stalin nor Putin cared about.
But Putin’s decision to ban Pamyat is a clear signal: Stalin was and is a national hero, a figure of state importance and if in doubt we only have to consider the consequence! Russian historians are forced to toe the line. A Kremlin history is taught in schools. It would be a brave academic who tried to tell the truth about Stalin if it went against the Kremlin’s nationalist narrative.
Stalinism lives on. Not only are there political idiots in the US and Europe known as “Tankies” (named after the use of tanks in the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968) who support Stalin and his genocidal actions but the “cult of personality” lives on in Russia.
Consider the main opposition party to Putin. The Russian Communist Party is led by Gennady Zyuganov, a supporter of Stalin who pretends the millions of deaths in the gulags during the 1930s did not occur. The Stalin memorial in Moscow’s Red Square is a shrine visited by many Russians. There he is revered like a latter-day saint. You can buy Stalin wall calendars, fridge magnets and other memorabilia (BBC News 18/4/19). Museums are opened up in his name and he is seen favourably in Russian state history as a “war hero”.
There are also one or two Stalinist government leaders left in the world. Step forward, the Belarus president and practicing Stalinist, Alexander Lukashenko. He is now using immigrants as pawns to force the EU to lift sanctions against him. Following rigged presidential election there have been orchestrated attacks on dissidents and subsequent arrests, imprisonments and beatings of protesters. And in this use of immigrants to further his political end, he is supported by President Putin, another fan of “Uncle Joe”.
A state-sanctioned human trafficking programme brought desperate refugees from war zones or areas of grinding poverty to the Belarusian capital of Minsk. Then state functionaries bussed them out to the border of “Fortress Europe”. In this case the borders of Lithuania, Latvia and Poland. “Apply sanctions to my regime”, he tells the EU “…..and I will puncture the walls of fortress Europe.”
Let the EU, the UK, Russia and Belarusian government squabble. It is their problem not ours. The problems of the capitalist class and its politicians are not our problems. It is not immigration that is the problem but the deliberate underproduction that is the barrier capitalism creates preventing human need being directly met. Immigration is a consequence of capitalism’s war and poverty.
Capitalism is an unnecessary system of rationing of what we need through the market mechanism which only recognises a paying customer. Capitalism generates war and conflict over natural resources and, it creates deliberate scarcity resulting in poverty and want. Potentially, there is more enough to go round. What stands in the way is the competition between nation states, artificial borders and the profit motive. Socialism will abolish all three leading to the global socialist principle: “from each according to their ability to each according to their needs.”
Concentration Camps, Immigration and “Fortress Europe”
Immigration is never out of the news. Throughout the world immigrants, those who are refugees from persecution, poverty and war – find themselves in displacement camps, forced to move from country to country, face the dangers of sea crossings and the cruel state violence of barbed wire, border guards, attack dogs, tear gas and water cannon.
Immigration is highly political. One of the main political rows is the border between “fortress Europe” and the Belarus government. The EU has constructed a fortress of walls, barbed wire and exclusion zones around its borders. The EU has become a no-go zone for millions of the working class fleeing war zones, torture, poverty and homelessness. (see photo above. Poland – Belarus border. 2023)
The authoritarian Polish government is refusing to allow the migrants into its country and is being backed by the EU, and the governments of Britain and the US. The Polish government’s racism is primarily directed at Middle Eastern migrants where they are depicted as a threat to “national security and Poland’s Christian culture”. Poland’s politicians routinely describe Muslims as “an existential threat”. The administration pumps out a daily diet of racist propaganda: “which brands refugees from the Middle East as parasites”:
(Ian Dunt, ‘Ukraine is Europe’s next big test’ Independent 16/11/21).
In November 2021 Polish forces used tear gas and water cannon against migrants trying to cross into the country from Belarus. Poland declared a state of emergency along its border with Belarus where media, aid agencies and NGOs are banned from the area. The migrants, including children, had been living in makeshift camps in freezing conditions just inside Belarus. In recent days, thousands have converged on a crossing at Kuznica, South of Grodno in north-west Belarus.
Another puncture point is Lithuania. At the border with Lithuania distressing film was shown of an attack dog mauling at an immigrant. The Lithuanian government had already decided to erect a 300 mile steel wall topped with razor wire on the Belarus border to prevent migrants crossing. (BBC 10/10/21).
Look at the way these few thousand migrants are being treated at the border with Belarus and Lithuania. They are not alone. It is the reality of the EU’s policy ‘fortress Europe’ turning the living conditions of the abject poor of the world into a gigantic concentration camp. “Fortress Europe” is a system of border patrols and detention centres to prevent immigration into Europe.
The use of anti-immigration security forces is also happening on the borders of Croatia, Greece, and elsewhere. The EU pays Turkey to keep refugees out. Libya has EU funds for coastguards to prevent refugees trying to get to Europe. Niger is given aid to detain refugees. The immigrants are contained in barbaric conditions where some find themselves traded as slaves, tortured and murdered.
The violent images of the state terrorism of immigrants had been anticipated in Alfonso Cuaron’s 2006 film ‘Children of Men’: a case of life imitating art. In the film, all of Britain’s troubles have been blamed on asylum seekers, who are locked in cages, and then bussed to barbaric shanty towns. “Poor refugees,” says Theo’s hippy friend Jasper (Michael Caine). “After escaping the worst atrocities, and making it all the way to England, our government hunts them down like cockroaches.”
In the UK we have the Home Secretary Priti Patel wanting to stop and return the rubber dinghies on which so many risk their lives in trying to reach the English coast. The Government’s Nationality and Borders Bill, now passing through Parliament, is the biggest assault on refugees, seeking asylum in the UK, ever. She wants small boats pushed back into French waters even if it means refugees drown. And Channel arrivals could be flown out of the UK to countries like Albania within seven days, a cruel policy adopted from Australia where immigrants are sent to processing centres in the Pacific island of Naura.
Priti Patel’s latest desperate wheeze to outsource the UK’s immigration policy mirrors the “out of sight out of mind” detention centres such as the controversial Yarl’s Wood facility, one of ten in the UK holding people about to be deported, situated in Bedfordshire. One caseworker who has worked in this immigration detention centre said:
“The vast majority of detainees have experienced or are at risk of rape and torture. Many have been trafficked to the UK and coerced into criminality. Why would you put a group of highly traumatised people together in a facility that is not appropriate for them to be in?”
(‘Detention breaks families and causes trauma’, Independent 18/11/21)
Why, indeed? As graffiti sprayed on the perimeter wall of Yarl’s Wood rightly states: “No Borders”.
The UK is not alone in wanting to set up offshore processing hubs. Denmark is in talks with Rwanda to host a processing centre (Times 18/11/21).
All because the Tories fear the popular racism of UKIP and what they see as a sizable anti-immigration electorate, they have to pander to a sustained and successful drip-drip poisonous propaganda campaign from the tabloid media.
The observation of the capitalist media in The Commonweal, edited by William Morris, that: “To make something out of nothing, and much more out of less, Is the function and prerogative of the writers for the press (July 16 1892) has not changed. In the 1890s the media were blaming the Jews fleeing persecution in Russia for “poverty, and taking jobs” and being “physically and morally enfeebled”
(Emigration, Immigration and Migration in Nineteenth-Century Britain. A Lloyd CUP 2007)
In fact, the media’s politics of hate has got worse. Fear, anger and deliberate disinformation make up the daily diet of articles penned by the likes of Richard Littlejohn. Littlejohn’s anti-refugee novel, ‘To Hell in a Handcart’ (2001) was, described by The Independent’s David Aaronovitch as “a 400-page recruiting pamphlet for the British Nationalist Party” (13/6/01)
No one asks why there are tens of thousands of immigrants living in cold and disease ridden circumstances on the borders of ‘Fortress Europe’. The answer is simple: wars and instability caused by Russia, US and its allies –the on-going civil war in Syria with millions dead, the war in Yemen which has killed 100,000 people and displaced 4 million others, the consequences of the war in Iraq and the floods and drought conditions caused by global warming which has affected crops and living conditions.
Never in human history has there been so much movement of people trying to escape endemic poverty and war. Currently, international migrants represent about 3.6% of the world’s population. (International Migration 2020 un.org)
All this movement of the poor and the desperate is totally unnecessary. Abolish the capitalist cause of war, poverty and homelessness so that production and distribution can be moved across the world without frontiers, border guards and razor wire, hunger, disease and poverty. Society has the potential to feed, clothe and house all humankind adequately and well. It is only the profit system that is standing in the way. For the working class it is a strategy of divide and rule. Workers are told by politicians and the media that immigrants are the enemy; that migrants just want an easy life on social security, that they are a threat to “Our British values and way of life”. The working class and capitalist class have no common interests. Class unity is the antidote to class division.
Capitalist politicians are adept at dividing the working class against itself but workers should see immigrants and refugees as members of our class. Workers should also take a historical perspective of becoming a class; a memory of class struggle and how they have been used by the capitalist class and their politicians against their own interests. Workers have been persuaded to blame other workers, usually workers elsewhere in the world. We should be a united world working class taking democratic political action to replace capitalism with socialism.
Currently our class is fragmented within artificial borders; thousands of our class are surrounded by razor wire, guards and attack dogs, eking out an existence within refugee camps. And on top of this, we are an exploited class abused through the wages system; all this to provide the capitalists with their unearned income in the form of rent, interest and profit which enables them to live the life of privilege and luxury they think they deserve.
We produce all the social wealth but do not have our needs met. We are fragmented by artificial borders unable to solve pressing social problems of poverty and disease. It does not have to be like this. There is an alternative – there is world socialism where production takes place to directly meet human need, no one would be forced to leave where they live. The abolition of nation states and borders would make immigration meaningless. If there were natural disasters those affected would not have to wait for charity because resources elsewhere would be immediately and directly sent.
Socialism is a practical solution for the problems caused by capitalism. As the banner of the 1892 Commonweal stated “Have you not heard how it has gone with many a Cause before now: First, few men heed it, Next, most men condemn it: Lastly, all men ACCEPT It – and the Cause is Won”. The socialist cause can be won with the political and democratic determination of a socialist majority. Acting in unity instead of division we can establish a wageless, classless, borderless, harmonious world system necessary to abolish poverty and national boundaries by establishing the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution by all of society.
