Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians: by Dave Jaffe. Chapter 27, Part Four of 'This Man Is A Communist'

    This Man Is A Communist'. Part Four.


      Abe Heller had a left-wing explanation of the collapse of the Soviet Union. "Gorbachev," Heller insists , "was an agent of the CIA. He deliberately destroyed the Soviet Union. Now there's no one around to confront the U.S. of A. It can do what it wants." Whatever the truth about Mikhail Gorbachev, Heller remained a communist, while hundreds of other former communists streamed out of the Canadian Communist party.
   Today in 2017, Heller is his late eighties. He continues to attend political meetings, see progressive political films, reads books by progressive authors and hands out leaflets urging people to attend protests. He has left the communist party but essentially he remains a committed socialist.  Of course, Heller seems to have forgotten what happened at first when communists took power in a number of countries. Mao Tse Tung's government launched a Great Leap Forward in the late 1950's that left 27 million Chinese to starve to death. Another 1 and a half million Chinese died in Mao's Cultural Revolution of the late 1960's. Josef Stalin was responsible for the deaths of somewhere between 8 and 20 million people between the 1920's and his death in 1953.
      Then there were other communist rulers who killed many other people. Still, Heller believes that communism was overall a good thing for the world. "I wasn't born a communist," he said. "But without communists there wouldn't have been any unions, old age pensions or medicare. We communists helped create those things. I'm not ashamed for having been a communist. No sir."