The Berlin Wall and the victory of the White Terror

Among the many anniversaries being celebrated this year, the fall of the Berlin Wall is perhaps the most important. We all remember the sense of hope and elation which accompanied that momentous event. The oppressed people of the DDR, so long immured in a dystopian world of media disinformation, violations of individual liberties and constant surveillance by the secret police were now at last marching on the road to liberty and democracy. The evil empire of the Soviet Union which had imprisoned its citizens in a police state was crumbling before our watering eyes as we watched those moving images on TV.

Communism had failed. The fall of the Soviet Union proved that communism in practice equals fascism. How could anyone disagree with that proposition now? This is indeed the story recounted by thousands of publications and documentaries today in the ‘free world’. It is, however, a vicious lie.

Western historiography of the Soviet Union is replete with deliberate omissions, ideological distortions and in many cases, downright lies. Any serious analysis of how good or bad Soviet communism was, must take account of the fact that the Bolshevik revolutionaries, who had the support of the vast majority of Russia’s poor, were ruthlessly attacked by the White Russian counter-revolutionaries in cahoots with 16 imperial powers, who invaded Russia after 1918.n fact, White Terror occured in many countries throughout the twentieth century. Communists and the poorest classes of society all suffered the terror inflicted by counter-revolutionaries in Finland, Bulgaria, Germany, Spain,Greece, China, Taiwan and Korea.Hundreds of thousands of people slaughtered in the name of liberty. The victory speeces of history arrogantly omit this uncomfortable fact.

Our libraries and bookshop shelves are keeling over with books on the ‘Red Terror’ and the purges of Stalin, yet there are only a handful of books at most which talk about the White Terror unleashed upon the Russian population by the agents of the imperial powers. These mass murderers are presented as agents of ‘democracy’ who fought to ‘save Russia’ from the evil of Leninism. But who has read about the careers of White Guard leaders such as Lavr Kornilov who declared ‘the greater the terror, the greater our victories’. Kornilov had very little mass support but that didn’t bother this terrorist; he had the support of the Western powers and was prepared to ‘ set fire to half the country and shed the blood of three-fourths of all Russians’.

And what about White Guard general Krasnov who ordered his troops to deliberately murder workers en mass ‘"It is forbidden to arrest workers. The orders are to hang or shoot them." Who has heard of general Kaledin who declared: "The orders are to hang all arrested workers in the street. The bodies are to be exhibited for three days". What about the counter revolutionary terrorist Admiral Kolchak who was an admirer of Japanese genocidal techniques? His advice was to “follow the example of the Japanese who had decimated the local population in the Amur Region of Russia

What about General Semenov who decimated entire villages killing thousands of Russian peasants. Genocide in the Soviet Union was a result of Marxist Leninism, the so-called historians tell us. But the Russian civil war imposed by the Western ‘democratic’ powers claimed the lives of over 15 million people!

There are many more lies widely disseminated concerning the Soviet Union. I will talk about those in another article. But to come back to Berlin, was not the wall the proof that the Soviet Union was totalitarian? The Berlin Wall was constructed for two principal reasons. Firstly, many East German workers were being recruited in the West, causing a brain drain on the socialist economy. Secondly and more importantly, the CIA and their puppet agencies in Europe had undertaken a campaign of terrorism and sabotage in the DDR. The US strategy was to make communism fail at any cost. They poisoned children’s milk with soap, derailed freight trains, damaged power stations, set fire to factories and destroyed factory machinery.

The sabotage, terror and infiltration perpetrated by the CIA and MI6 in East Germany became a nightmare for the fledgling socialist state. The CIA were experts in anti-communist terrorism. They had, after all, recruited thousands of NAZIs after the Second World War and the US ‘de-Nazification’ programme had resulted in the rehabilitation of prominent ex-Nazis in the Federal German Republic, who became the zealous guardians of ‘capitalist democracy’

When the Soviets launched complaints with the UN to take action against the CIA/MI6 terror and sabotage campaign, the Anglo-American dominated UN ignored their concerns. Nobody in the DDR wanted the Berlin Wall but what do you do when you are being attacked by a neo-fascist empire? The Soviets had been attacked by fascists before resulting in the slaughter of over 20 million people. They knew the kind of fanaticism which the CIA Nazis were capable of unleashing. Terrorism and war are the dark reality of profit-driven societies.

When I lived in East Berlin I spoke to many people about the old DDR. Most of the people I spoke to had fond memories of life in a socialist society, where there was guaranteed work, free health and education and hope for the future. “Capitalism offered us wealth and liberty but now we are unemployed and poor” they would tell me. Almost all the people I spoke to hated the wall and the excesses of the Stasi but most of them still believed that socialism was possible but that history had betrayed them.