The true communist history of International Women’s Day

As a descendant of the island of Eire who has, on occasion, made a nuisance of himself on the Feast of St. Patrick, I don’t begrudge anyone celebrating their status as a hyphenated American. But International Women’s Day isn’t like our other hyphenation celebrations. For one thing, it’s a communistical plot.

Does that sound like a joke or the emanations of right-wing paranoia? It is not. Started in 1909 by the American Socialist Party as National Woman’s [sic] Day, the International Women’s Day was exported to Europe via the German communist Clara Zetkin. Its association with communism was permanently cemented when the Russian Revolution of 1917 began with a women’s demonstration in Petrograd on March 8. But its status as a truly international day for women was decreed by a resolution at the second International Communist Women’s Congress in Moscow in 1921, under the auspices of the Third International — the Comintern. They called it the International Communist Women’s Day.

“The liberation of the workers can only be the work of the working class itself, it can never accomplish this gigantic and terrible work of history, however, if it is torn in two halves by the sex distinction,” Zetkin wrote the next year. “The International Communist Women’s Day must not remain only a women’s demonstration in any country or town. It must everywhere be the expression of the will and the work of the entire Communist Party.”

A good Marxist, Zetkin was clear about the goals of women within her organization. “Dare we forget that we are Communists? Communism binds! Our place is in the struggle with the capitalistic monster, in the work and fight for the far-off sunshine-filled edifice of Communism. … With this conviction, the International Women’s Day is to win the broad masses for the fight in the cause of Communism. Men and women without distinction! The memory of the glorious deed of the Petrograd working women on March 8th, shall wave over our Women’s Day like a blazing banner which points out the way and kindles our courage.”

Zetkin died in exile in Moscow in 1933, late enough to see Stalin, grand feminist that he was, dissolve the women’s section of the Comintern in 1929. All women’s issues had been solved in the Soviet Union, and its continued existence was a “bourgeois feminist diversion,” in one writer’s description.

To this day, International Women’s Day is an official holiday only in the former Soviet states, Communist China, Cuba, North Korea, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and a handful of mostly pro-Soviet African states like Angola. In China, it’s a holiday only for women.

It probably would have remained an obscure Soviet holiday alongside Miner’s Day and Cosmonautics Day were it not for second-wave feminists and the United Nations.

According to one version of the story, “it was revived in the United States by a women’s group at the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle, which included daughters of American Communists who remembered having heard of the holiday.”

The cause of this zombified reimported day of feminism was then taken up by the U.N., which began observing it in 1975. A resolution in the General Assembly introduced by Romania named that year the International Women’s Year, with a World Conference on Women held in Mexico City.

Because it is seemingly impossible for the U.N. to convene without blaming the world’s problems on the Jews, that conference was the first time a U.N. body described Zionism as a form of racism. “Women and men together should eliminate colonialism, neo-colonialism, imperialism, foreign domination and occupation, zionism, apartheid, racial discrimination, the acquisition of land by force and the recognition of such acquisition, since such practices inflict incalculable suffering on women, men and children,” the conference’s report said.

The subsequent “Zionism is Racism” General Assembly resolution of 1975 directly cited the conference’s report. But the U.N. eventually found in its heart that it might be acceptable to believe that Jews can have a state, and the resolution was revoked in 1991 — to date, the only General Assembly resolution ever to be repealed.

It’s this U.N. version of the holiday that is celebrated today. And like all such U.N. observances, it is both completely stripped of its historical context and described in pandering neologisms so illiterate that one yearns for mere PR jargon gobbledygook. For 2023, the @UN_Women account tweeted, “This International Women’s Day, 8 March 2023, join UN Women and the United Nations in celebrating under the theme DigitALL: Innovation and technology for gender equality.”

UN Women’s “DigitALL” presence is embarrassing all around for its poor writing and, worse, its seeming ignorance of history and condescending understanding of female accomplishment. To give an example just from the day I write: “Women belong? in all places? where decisions ? are being made? Today we remember Ruth Bader Ginsburg, U.S. Supreme Court Justice. #RBG was a champion for justice & she cleared the way for gender equality so other women can have a seat at the table. Her legacy lives on.”

(Of course, RBG did not clear the way for a woman to sit at the Supreme Court table. Sandra Day O’Connor, appointed by Ronald Reagan, was the first woman to sit on that bench, though UN Women has never tweeted about her.)

To understand what is ultimately false about International Women’s Day, one must examine how its celebration is useful and to whom. Take this instructive tweet from the Cleveland Browns: “On #InternationalWomensDay, we’re honoring the incredible leaders that power our organization.” This sort of saccharine message has come to be a rite in which corporate overlords and powerful policymakers seek to communicate their deep respect for women. But what it marks, along with ignorance, is shallowness. The Browns are really powered by their quarterback, Deshaun Watson, who missed the entirety of the 2021 season and served an 11-game suspension in 2022 because of sexual assault allegations made by 26 of his masseuses. While Watson denies any wrongdoing, he has settled more than 20 of the cases. The Browns rewarded Watson with a $230 million contract, one of the largest in the NFL’s history.

Cases like this are why even many liberals find International Women’s Day to be a preposterous exercise in PR onanism. It stands alongside the FBI’s annual Martin Luther King Day message and the Lockheed Martin Gay Pride Parade float as woke hypocrisy taken to the point of lunacy. (Before his assassination, the FBI wrote anonymous blackmail letters to King urging him to kill himself, and while I suppose there’s nothing wrong with an arms manufacturer celebrating their #Pride, it’s a bit gauche.)

What started as a gay pride day, June 28, the anniversary of the Stonewall riots, is now an entire LGBT Pride Month. These “affinity” celebrations take up a growing share of our national calendar. Going by the undeletable holidays in Apple Calendar, fully half of the year is now taken up by celebrations of ethnosexual heritage and history. Many of these civil rites can only be celebrated by ignoring the real history of civil rights. If you really care about how oppression can be overcome, history is worth remembering.

Andrew Bernard is the Washington correspondent for The Algemeiner.

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