The Specter of Communism
The specter of communism that was haunting Europe for century and a half has largely been exorcised, but not before it claimed untold millions in its bloodthirsty path. There are still a few countries in the world where it is strangling the lifeline out people, but unless something really drastic happens, these places are going through the last of it. Communism was an experiment in social engineering of staggering proportions and it resulted in a death toll that vastly surpasses all other tyrannical tragedies in the history of the world combined. Unfortunately, there are still many who cling to the illusion of intrinsic goodness of this abominable ideology, most of whom have cushy jobs in Western academia. The line that is all too casually tossed around is that what we had was not the "real communism", that there is a difference between Communism (which is bad) and Marxism (which is pure and unsoiled). This last line of argument really gets to me. To see what is wrong with it, imagine that someone told you similar things about the other great tyrannical ideology of the 20th century, Nazism. Imagine that someone said that what Hitler did was not the "true" Nazism, that there is a difference between Nazism and, say, Fascism, or any other such inanity. You probably would not want to be associated with such a person, and rightfully so. Apologist for mass-murdering ideologies should not have a place in polite society. If you knew someone who lost family members in the Holocaust, you would be especially indignant and outraged at their behalf. I do have family members who had suffered all sorts of vicious persecution under the communism. Some of them have even paid with their lives. Needless to say, I take moral equivocation on behalf of Communism very seriously.
A big reason that Communism does not get the same level of coverage as Nazism is that former has never been defeated on a military field. It just simply imploded from within, under very strong pressures from the outside. After World War II the supreme commander of Allied troops in Europe general Dwight Eisenhower took ordinary Germans to the remnants of the concentration camps and showed them firsthand what had been done in their name. Those Germans took the lesson to heart, and to this day any mention of Nazism is severely restricted, and even in some instances criminalized in Germany. No such thing ever happened with Gulags. We are all that much poorer for not taking all the lessons to heart from that catastrophic mistake. We can only hope that in this case, we will not need to repeat the material.