I never know whether to laugh or cry when I hear about communist youth movements. Having a festival that is full of them should be as discredited as a gathering of fascist youth.
What sort of determined amnesia is required to ignore the crimes of communism wherever and whenever it has been tried?
The Black Book of Communism totals 100 million deaths due to communism in the previous century. So how can any young person see hope in this thoroughly failed doctrine?
This is the real scandal of the 17th World Festival of Youth and Students held in Pretoria. It was more than a waste of R69 million that could have helped poor people in South Africa. It reinforced dangerous misconceptions and moral blind spots that hark back to when the World Federation of Democratic Youth was a Soviet front manipulated by the KGB.
Half of Europe was under Soviet imperialist domination but the WFDY endorsed this even when the Hungarians rebelled in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. Other Soviet imperialist adventures around the world were praised, including support of North Korea.
Peace movements were cynically exploited to serve communist goals and the effective support of tyranny. The travesty of these youth festivals should have come to an end with the fall of the Soviet Empire, but the WFDY was revived by Fidel Castro's Cuba.
No surprise, then, that Castro is still hailed despite his oppressive rule and Cuba's abject economic decline. Predictably, the Festival gave the lion's share of blame to American "imperialism".
Yet prosperous and democratic South Korea survives because of US military protection, but delegates denounced this and called for reunification to build a "socialist country". Not a word of criticism about North Korea's extreme despotism and nuclear bombs.
Robert Mugabe is no doubt pleased by the Festival's call for the immediate lifting of economic sanctions described as a catalyst for imperialism's "regime change agenda in Zimbabwe". The selection of causes, some very worthy, is as warped as anything during the Cold War years.
Morocco is rightly blasted for its occupation of Western Sahara, but the people of Tibet get no support for being under China's iron heel. Swaziland's people are supported but the "funding of civil society and opposition parties in Africa by the West to bring about regime change agendas" is condemned.
The International Criminal Court is attacked for its "apparent onslaught of African leaders". It's all the fault of imperialism, you see, defined much as it was in the Soviet era.
There were many strange alliances of convenience and/or necessity during the Cold War. While the ANC can be forgiven for accepting Soviet support during its exile years, in the end the right side won.
Even though ANC leaders were appalled by the fall of the Berlin Wall it was an essential catalyst for the negotiated settlement in South Africa. The ANC Government's foreign policy is fortunately largely pragmatic, marred occasionally by undeserved solidarity with an anti-western dictator.
But what does it portend when the ANC Youth League aligns itself with North Korea and despotic leaders like Mugabe and Hugo Chavez? It calls into question whether they really understand and are committed to our democratic Constitution.
They really need to shake off the imperialism of bad ideas.
Jack Bloom is a Democratic Alliance member of the Gauteng legislature. This article first appeared in The Citizen.
Click here to sign up to receive our free daily headline email newsletter
