Evil of Marxism still haunts our social discourse

Eric Abetz, so moved by a book he read, writes this stern warning about the Left

SLOWLY coming around, familiarising yourself with your frozen surroundings, and realising you are on a heap of frozen bodies left for dead in a makeshift morgue is just part of Stasys Jameikis’ gripping first-hand account of the many depravities that he suffered (like so many other Lithuanians, Jews, Poles and indeed a Russian war hero) at the hands of the brutal Communist Russian regime.

In Only Eleven Came Back our author’s narrative of his life’s experiences tells us of the 1504 fellow Lithuanians with whom he was forcefully removed from his beloved homeland in 1941. Torn from his bride of only eight months, a good job and family, to face the hell of Arctic Russia for only one reason — being Lithuanian. Stasys’ relocation was only to be “temporary”, it was explained as his sobbing wife fell to the floor clasping the legs of the “comrades” pleasing that she be taken as well. Thankfully, they didn’t accede to her distressed pleas.

The human toll was massive. The brutality and depravity unthinkable and yet Stasys and 10 others survived to return home after 13 unbearably long years as slave labourers in the icy Russian Arctic, all in the name of the Marxist Workers Revolution.

Death shadowed their every step. By 1948 only 24 were still living. As early as the first year in exile, “30 to 40 bodies were removed from the barracks each morning. No, not bodies, but skeletons. They would be carried out completely naked and stacked like firewood on carts… Then for good measure as they passed through the gates their skulls were smashed with axe handles”. This is but one of the many stark descriptions left for us by Stasys Jameikis.

Since 1990, those few determined survivors and their descendants again breathed the air of freedom and liberty in Lithuania after 50 long years of oppression, including three under Nazi Germany.

It is thanks to the few like Stasys Jameikis that kept the fires of hope, freedom and liberty alive when to have given up would have been so much easier.

It was their tenacity and the strength of some Western leaders that finally saw the collapse of the evil Communist Empire — an empire sadly supported by many academics while I was at university. Their excuses and fake explanations seeking to justify the evil of Marxism now lie fully exposed as a huge disservice to a generation of students.

Yet Marxism is still peddled at universities. We had to endure academics and other allegedly well educated people eulogising Fidel Castro’s reign of communist terror in Cuba, despite well documented evidence which was studiously avoided by these uni elites.

Totalitarianism subjugates the individual and his rights to the common good as determined by the totalitarian elite.

Stasys’ story not only needs to be on the record, it needs to be told to remind us all our freedoms should not be taken for granted.

Many have suffered and willingly died for our freedoms.

The Tasmanian connection is very real with the local Taskunas family who had their father/grandfather and great grandfather taken on that same fateful June 14, 1941, at 3am by the Communists, never to be heard of again.

After 18 years the Soviet authorities acknowledged he had barely survived a year, dying on the July 22, 1942. The family heard nothing further until Jameikis made mention of Stasys Taskunas, the father of Al who served in the engineering faculty at the University of Tasmania for years and the grandfather of Vince who served as the Premier’s deputy chief of staff.

But back to Stasys’ reflections on his life.

His experiences and observations are expressed graphically and forcefully remind us that “there are still many Stalinists on our planet and not just here in Lithuania. Ah! May they walk the same path through the hell we suffered, the path that their beloved and still revered masterminds forced us to walk”.

Despite the harshness, the deprivations and torture that Stasys suffered, he completes his account in a manner that would uplift anyone’s spirit and ask ‘would I have survived and, if so returned as balanced’ to observe: “Perhaps it was His will that at least one man out of that 1500 be allowed to witness a Christian rebirth in Lithuania”?

Poignantly, he concludes with this injunction: “He who does not defend his freedom is not worthy of it. AMEN”.