Lest We Forget : vimarsana.com

Lest We Forget
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We cannot let March pass away without a reference to an event of great significance in the history of the working class movement. 2021’s March has some important dates in socialist history. In Germany it is the 150
th anniversary of the birth of Rosa Luxemburg and a hundred years since the abortive March Action by the Communist Party. While in Russia it is the 100
th anniversary of the doomed anti-Bolshevik Kronstadt Commune. In France March 2021 is has been 150 year since the formation of the ill-fated Paris Commune.
To socialists throughout the world, the Commune of Paris in 1871 recalls to their minds the first organised attempt on the part of a section of the working class to administer the affairs of society in the workers’ interest. Even many politically conservatives with  no sympathy with the Commune reluctantly testified to the orderly and peaceful manner in which the Communards carried out the duties of citizenship. One can only look in vain through the revolutionary articles of the day for any blood-thirsty policies and proposals. The needs of the Parisians were attended to the best they could under the circumstances of a siege. The Communards held the city of Paris for a little more than nine weeks. They rapidly and efficiently organized its municipal activity. They suppressed vice and crime; they kept industry and commerce moving. Betrayed on every hand by the agents of the Thiers’ regime, they maintained a rare leniency in their treatment of their enemies although provoked by every manner of brutality and treachery on the part of the government. They did not execute a single prisoneruntil the very final desperate days , after they had suffered the massacre of  hundreds of prisoners and of unresisting citizens suspected of sympathy with the Communards, and only then did they retaliate, executing 63 prisoners out of some 300 in their hands.