Dear Editor,
It’s too bad that the May 14 opinion column of one of my favourite French Canadian journalists (Richard Martineau @quebecormedia.com) is not translated and made available to young people everywhere, particularly to those throughout the western world, who continue to take to the streets, and to the media, peddling, pushing the so-called values of the tandem socialism-communism.
Martineau’s May 14 (Vive le communisme! (Long Live Communism!), relates events that took place in France (Paris and Cannes) fifty years ago in May 1968; events that illustrate Jorge Santayana’s well-known observation: “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Fifty years ago, fascinated by the anti-American/anti-capitalist propaganda of that period by communism and the so-called “Workers’ Revolution” in Communist China, French students in Paris took to the streets where they were joined by several their teachers, as well as most of the leaders and members of the public-sector unions.
Their “Revolution” drove President Charles de Gaulle to resign the following year, in April 1969. General de Gaulle, the hero-saviour of France during the Second World War, leader of the French Resistance to Nazi Germany; father of the French “Force de frappe,” and the current French Fifth Republic, died one year later, in 1970.
In May 1968 in Paris, there were demonstrations, disorder, and long-winded speeches praising Marx, Lenin, Mao Zedong, and Ho Chi Minh; and blaming the U.S.A. for the ills of the world. Some 900 kilometres south of the capital, the Cannes Film Festival was in full swing: half-clad female stars, producers, directors, movie critics, journalists and others were living it up; but not for very long.
Film directors, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and Claude Lelouch among other leftist sympathizers decided to join the students and the workers in their revolution, and they forced the Festival to close its doors. Roman Polanski (35 years old then), and Milos Forman (36) were also present at that Festival and were reportedly having a good time.
Richard Martineau, who is well informed on the history of the cinema, wonders what Polanski and Forman were thinking as they watched their idealistic French Leftists colleagues, the French/Swiss bourgeois Jean-Luc Goddard in particular, praising communism, partaking in this “revolution.”
Polanski and Forman had experienced the virtues of socialism/communism in the USSR—behind the iron curtain: the former in Poland and the latter in Czechoslovakia. At Cannes, on the other side of the curtain, they were now rejoicing: glad to be out of the hellhole – the nightmare of communism. They were, most likely, scratching their head as they listened to Godard, Truffaut, Lelouch, and others praise their hellhole as Paradise.
Richard Martineau is dead on target. Today, half a century after those events in France, and a month or so after the passing of the great Milos Forman, there are too many young folks throughout the West who are still singing the so-called virtues of communism.
Propagandists have switched the order of the two draft horses: Socialism is the lead horse nowadays; Communism follows right behind. But the order of these two heavy, deadly beasts does not matter for they work in tandem: one can’t pull without the other.
People everywhere, particularly young, gifted, individuals (who are often idealistic and sensitive) should study history and remember events so that they may better resist the sweet songs of Sirens and avoid going down the same old deadly, dead-end roads.
Gérard M. Hunt
