OPINION
As New Zealand’s panjandrums of “combatting extremism” like to babble, “If there’s just one Nazi flag at your rally, it’s a Nazi rally”. Worse, we’re finger-wagged, “If nine people sit down at a table with one Nazi without protest, there are ten Nazis at the table”.
So, if one Communist joins your rally without protest, does that mean that there are now thousands of Communists at your rally? What does it mean if there’s a Communist flying a flag at your rally?
It means, apparently, that there’s nothing to see here. It’s just one lone nutjob who has nothing to do with anything. At least, according to the left elite.
After all, these were the people who lost their minds when a gaggle of neo-Nazi LARPers were personally escorted by Victoria Police to gatecrash a Let Women Speak rally in Melbourne. The same people who shrieked and clutched their pearls when a notorious homeless nutter started hanging around Wellington’s Freedom Village.
They’re shrieking again because attention-seeking Putin apologist Simon “Aussie Cossack” Boikov is trying to glom onto the No campaign in the “Indigenous Voice” referendum.
But when literal Communists are welcome to wave gigantic hammer-and-sickle flags at “Yes” marches?
Crickets.
The same activists who attacked Moira Deeming over neo-Nazis hijacking a Let Women Speak rally are both silent and out of sight.
“If a murderous ideology supports your cause, it’s probably not a good one!”
Indeed, if support from a hateful ideology that murdered six million people is enough to damn your cause, then support from a hateful ideology that murdered 100 million people ought to be enough to banish your cause beyond the pale for good.
I’m not hearing that rationale, even though the shoe clearly fits if moral responsibility is to be applied equally.
It seems that Socialist salutes are, in fact, okay, just as long as it’s the “right” brand of wrong.
Remember folks, when the far-left does it, it’s not a social sin, it’s a “necessary” butchering.
The Hammer, Sickle, and power fist represents the Left’s “right” brand of butchery. A swastika and Nazi salute doesn’t.
I don’t condone either.
I’m simply illustrating the dissonance.
The tiresome Woketopian double standard when it comes to domestic terrorism.
Indeed, even as the chattering classes were screaming and fainting over a handful of soyboys in black t-shirts doing Heil Hitler salutes in front of Victoria’s parliament, they completely, studiously ignored the fact that dozens of violent communists — Victoria’s far-left Socialist Alliance — were on the other side of the police cordon.
But the presence of Communism in the Yes23 campaign goes far beyond some lone jackals waving hammer-and-sickle flags.
Yes23 campaign leader and Uluru Statement signatory, Thomas Mayo, wears his communist sympathies on his sleeve, bellowing to his “comrades” about his “Communist elders” at May Day rallies. Supposed “intellectual” leader of the Yes movement, Marcia Langton is a hardcore communist from way back, who started her career as a member of the National Committee of the Communist League, and then the Marxist Socialist Worker’s Party. She has never publicly walked back her communist ideology.
The promotion of Communism at the Yes march should be as aggressively condemned as the so-called Neo-Nazis (should have been) after they hijacked the Let Women Speak rally.
Anything less is a slap in the face to the victims of Communism.
Caldron Pool
Yes, but it’s different when they do it.