George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I remember in the early 1970s, when I was a schoolboy first coming to political awareness, it was the custom of my family on Sundays at noon to watch on the television a short program by BA Santamaria called Point of View. Mr Santamaria would warn against the threat of communism. He would talk about the tyranny of communism. I can still remember the lurid diagrams—the hammer and sickle across so many nations of the world and the downward-thrusting arrows in South-East Asia—and it was obvious to me, even to my schoolboyish eyes, that Mr Santamaria was very much against the prejudices of his time. Indeed, he subsequently entitled his memoirs Against the Tide.

For those were the days when Mao Zedong was regarded as a great historical figure, when there was more sympathy for the Vietcong than for the Australian and American forces deployed in Vietnam, when Fidel Castro and Che Guevara were cult heroes, and Mao jackets and fatigues, red-star adorned workers’ caps and T-shirts displaying the latest item in communist kitsch were the last word in radical chic. It was a time when brilliant parliamentarians—men of outstanding intellect such as WC Wentworth, the member for Mackellar, and Senator Ivor Greenwood—were mocked and ridiculed as right-wing extremists when they sounded the alarm to an apparently unseeing world on the gravity of communist tyranny in so many nations.

With the passage of the years, the world’s eyes slowly began to open. By the middle of the 1970s, Soviet scientists like Andrei Sakharov and writers like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn were received in the West, and the West heeded their warnings about what the Soviet system stood for. Solzhenitsyn in particular exposed the Gulag. We in Australia witnessed at relatively close quarters the genocide of Pol Pot in the late 1970s, and then later in the 1980s we saw the Tiananmen Square massacre and the fall of the Berlin Wall. By the early 1990s, the collapse of communism had led to the opening of the Kremlin archives, and the full magnitude and horror of the system which had prevailed in the eastern European nations and in the Soviet Union were exposed for all to see. Solzhenitsyn’s dire warnings were demonstrated to be nothing more than a stark picture of an awful reality. The world began to reassess.

However, to this day there is for some—particularly among the bourgeois left in the West—a selective capacity for outrage. There are still some who practise discrimination in their condemnation of political tyranny and selectivity in their pity for its victims. It is in that context that I want to draw to the attention of the Senate a most important resolution of the European Parliament that was carried some four weeks ago, on 25 January. It was resolution No. 1481 and it was moved by Mr Goran Lindblad, a Swedish parliamentarian of the European People’s Party. The resolution, which acknowledged and condemned the extent of communist atrocities in the 20th century, came on the heels of a report to the European assembly of its political affairs committee.

This is the first comprehensive audit of the number of deaths directly attributable to communism in the 20th century. Although there have been numerous estimates by writers, academics and think tanks, the Council of Europe’s document is the first comprehensive study by a major government body. For that reason alone, it is an occasion of historic significance. According to the Council of Europe, a conservative estimate of deaths worldwide which are directly attributable to communist governments and revolutionary movements since the time of the Russian Revolution in 1917 is 94.5 million souls. That figure does not include people who died in wars fought by communist regimes against other nations. It does include deaths from genocide, purges, deportation, famines, civil wars, wartime reprisals, deaths in gulags and other concentration camps, and all other forms of domestic state-sponsored killing.

The countries in which the greatest number of deaths are estimated to have occurred are China, 65 million; the Soviet Union, 20 million; Cambodia, two million; North Korea, two million; Africa, 1.7 million; Afghanistan, 1.5 million; Vietnam, one million; and Eastern Europe, one million. According to the Council of Europe, the death toll attributable to communism in the last century was almost one million people per year. On average, more than 2,500 people a day for every day of every year of the 20th century were exterminated in the service of ideology.

To put those figures into context, the most reliable estimate of the number of people, military and civilian, killed in the First World War is between 10 and 15 million and, in the Second World War, between 50 million and 60 million. In other words, the number of people killed by communism in the 20th century—even on the most conservative estimate—exceeds by some 20 million the number of people killed in both world wars. Unlike war, the death toll from communism was the result of the deliberate policy of communist apparatchiks, driven by ideology to liquidate their own countrymen.

It has been rightly said by historians that the 20th century was the most bloody century the world has ever seen. It was the most bloody century because of the development of war and killing on an industrial scale. It was the most bloody century because of the rise of tyrannical regimes across the world. But of all the causes of human suffering, death and bloodshed in the 20th century, the deliberate, advertent imposition on domestic populations by communist governments and communist movements of a policy of extermination of those who did not fit into their particular ideology—almost 100 million people—was the greatest.

I think it is important that this Senate acknowledge the resolution of the Council of Europe. Some six years into the 21st century, it is not too early for us to assess the 20th century with the beginnings of some sort of historical perspective. It is not too early for us to begin to grasp the awful magnitude of the experiment that was communism. Even though our minds can barely comprehend the almost astronomical numbers of human souls involved, including men, women and children, we can at least in relative terms appreciate that in the century of industrial scale warfare, communism—an ideology, the fruit of the brains of men and women—was responsible for more slaughter than both of the great wars.

We should be pleased that the Council of Europe, which presides over the jurisdiction in which much of the slaughter took place, has at last published an audit of that tyranny. We, on all sides of politics—professed practitioners of liberal democracy—should note it with solemnity and humility, and we should resolve that that should never be allowed to happen in this century, and the moral blindness which saw the West avert its eyes in the 20th century should never be suffered to happen again.