JUST A FEW OF COMMUNISM’S MANY VICTIMS: The sad stories of those killed trying to cross the Berlin Wall. Communism was — and is, still — sold as something moral. But it’s a system of slavery, benefiting a few at the top at the expense of the many beneath. It was enforced by death and cruelty, because without death and cruelty it couldn’t work even for a little while. The people who say nice things about communism today either know this and are lying, or are profoundly stupid. Either way, you need neither listen to them, nor afford them even the smallest degree of respect.
Glenn Reynolds
I wonder if Obama would agree with you? 😉
People are stupid. Many of them.
Too bad so many were slaughtered like sheep. I’m afraid we haven’t seen the end to the carnage that is communism.
People are stupid.
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It was a popular enthusiasm for a time in Chile, in Spain, in France, in Italy, in Hungary (in some measure), and, most tragically, Czechoslovakia after the war. In the United States, one American adult in 1,500 held a party card in 1947, but three of twenty members of the MIT mathematics faculty did. R.W.B. Lewis offered a number of years ago reviewing a book on Communism in Hollywood that he could not say much from personal knowledge about the situation there, but that in the publishing business, ca. 1945, the red haze had enough influence to prevent the publication of certain sorts of literature and injure the careers of people who produced and fostered it. The intelligentsia and their dependents and hangers-on were the constituency for it most times and places.
Art Deco wrote, “It was a popular enthusiasm for a time in Chile, in Spain, in France, in Italy, in Hungary (in some measure), and, most tragically, Czechoslovakia after the war.”
In France, after WWII, the Communists were widely admired as the patriotic party « le parti des 75’000 fusillés, morts por que vive la France» – The party of the 75,000 shot,dead that France might live – for their rôle in the Resistance, especially given the dismal record of the parties of the Right. After the Liberation, their leaders were either in prison, in a few cases shot, or had fled abroad.
That honeymoon ended abruptly in 1956; a PCF that disavowed its Arab comrades in Algeria, and expelled militants arrested for supporting the FLN, was no longer the Party of the Resistance.
MPS, the French Communist Party had a confused if not collaborationist stance prior to the invasion of Soviet Russia in June 1941, the first to take up arms against the occupation were those of the Croix de Feu, and Gen. de Gaulle was a devout Catholic.
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We get it. History is written by the intelligentsia, who’ve been drawn to Marxism, to sundry sorts of approved particularisms, to feminism, &c and write their own as heroes and there present-day enemies as scoundrels. The rest of us are not under the obligation to swallow their sales pitches hook, line, and sinker.
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The Communist Party has lost the electoral constituency it had at the end of the war stepwise, one effected during the period running from 1956 to 1958, one from 1978 to 1986, and one from 1997 to 2002. The first of these was the least consequential, inasmuch as about 20% of their base defected rather than half, which was the case in the latter periods.
A latent lust for power, the grand absence of self-knowledge and the inability of a rock-hard heart to love, induces an individual to embrace the communist ideology. The vacuum of personhood, of knowing “I Am WHO I AM” and doing unto others as one would be done unto; the dispersion of the rational, eternal soul into shadows causes the zombification of men into communists. Communism, it may be said, is the personification of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Death, as long as it is somebody else’s, War, as long as I am waging and winning, Pestilence to blame on God and Famine to take from others their sustenance; a punishment from God for sin.