‘This isn’t the Bolshevik party I helped found!’ so Trotsky might have whined, shortly before the ice pick shut him up.
I mean, what did he expect? Nothing Stalin did hadn’t already been started by Trotsky’s comrade-in-revolution, Lenin. Nothing, indeed, that Trotsky himself hadn’t had a bloody hand in. Trotsky was the supreme commander of the Revolutionary Military Council, which made him directly responsible for the Red Terror, which included wholesale murder of entire villages, as well as the shocking bloodletting in suppressing the Kronstadt rebellion. He was also in charge of brutally destroying the Russian Orthodox Church, ordering all clergy be arrested and sentenced to forced labor or killed.
So, pardon me if I don’t give a toss that he was brutally assassinated by his own Bolsheviks.
Nor am I much inclined to lend a sympathetic ear to a founding Greens member who’s pretending to finally notice that the party he helped co-found is a gaggle of far-left, intolerant, authoritarians.
The Australian Greens’ new leader, Larissa Waters, is resisting calls to intervene in the widening row over the minority party’s embrace of transgender rights and halt a purge of members who don’t toe the line.
The expulsion of Greens co-founder Drew Hutton has brought to a dramatic head tensions around the alleged hounding of those who question the party’s pro-trans platform.
The Australian has confirmed another two cases in which longstanding members say they were drummed out for disagreeing with the policies.
Which is anything new, how? The Greens have long been notorious as a quasi-Stalinist party, steeped in rigidly imposed ideological conformity and obsessive secrecy.
These people are only just ‘noticing’ what the Greens have always been, because it’s finally happened to them.
“I was expelled for arguing that it was appropriate for the principal of a girls’ school to not enrol boys who identify as girls,” said Gail Hamilton, 55, a former state council delegate of the Queensland Greens who ran for office in Townsville on three occasions after joining in 2000.
“What parent wants to think their daughter is sharing a dormitory or a change room with a teenage boy? I also objected to our MPs calling women ‘uterus havers’ and ‘menstruators’ on the basis that it is dehumanising.
“The expulsion process felt like a kangaroo court, where I was not given the space to defend myself.”
Welcome to the Greens. It’s not as if you shouldn’t have long known any of this already.
Mr Hutton said upwards of 30 former Greens members had reached out to him about being expelled for challenging the party’s position on gender. Most were women.
“It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy” – George Orwell, 1984.
They’re finally getting a taste of their own medicine – and they don’t like it. Accountability is a hard pill to swallow when it comes for you, isn’t it?
Anna Kerr, a human rights lawyer, was suspended and expelled from the party for, among other alleged wrongdoings, holding the view that men cannot be women. Her public criticism of protests against the exclusion of transgender women from the women-only McIver’s Ladies Baths in Sydney was deemed to be transphobic by her critics in the party.
Her legal service, the Feminist Legal Clinic, was defunded by the Sydney City Council. “I think it’s great that Drew is speaking out,” she said on Monday. “We need more people to do that. But the fact is many people just choose to leave the Greens rather than be subject to the sort of abuse and harassment that happens if you cross certain interests … in the party.”
Where were your tears when, say, Jewish politicians were besieged by Greens members?
Where was your whining about the Greens being ‘taken over by a cult’, when the cult in question was Marxism or the Climate Cult?
After years of punching everyone else, they’ve finally realised that they’ve been punching themselves in the face and they don’t like it.
Well, cry me a river.
