By Robert Tracinski
Thursday, August 03, 2017
Has anyone else observed a striking pattern in the New York Times recently? They’ve hosted
a series of fond, nostalgic recollections about the good old days of
twentieth-century Communism—the optimism,
the idealism,
the moral
authority. Not to mention the gulags, the squalor, and the soul-crushing
conformity.
Actually, they don’t usually mention those things. These
articles are part of a series called “Red Century,” which is supposedly
dedicated to “exploring the history and legacy of Communism, 100 years after
the Russian Revolution.” But that history and legacy turn out to be very
selectively explored. The editors of the Times
could easily spend a year filling their newspaper with a hair-raising litany of
Communism’s crimes across the globe, stuff that would keep their readers up at
night for weeks. There’s certainly no shortage of material: the terror, the
gulags, the Holodomor, the Cultural Revolution, and so on. Yet in this series,
the crimes of Communism are mostly just hinted at.
A few articles deal forthrightly with the horrors of the
Soviet regime. Others present being a member of the secret police as a morally
complex issue—”it was way to build the future and be a part of something larger
than themselves”—something I doubt the Times
would be foolish enough to publish if it were about a former member of the
Gestapo or the Klan.
Disturbingly, most entries are in this vein of talking
about the idealism and human warmth and just plain caring of the people who
denied the gulags and the mass starvation in Ukraine. Sure, they may have
abetted the torture and murder of millions, but their “devotion to creating a
more just world was infectious,” “the party was possessed of a moral authority
that lent shape and substance…to an urgent sense of social injustice,” and all
of it was infused by “an inherent optimism for the future, implied by socialism
and progressivism.”
The overall thrust of the series is summed up in a call
to try Communism again, but maybe this time try not to have any gulags. No,
really.
This time, people get to vote.
Well, debate and deliberate and then vote—and have faith that people can
organize together to chart new destinations for humanity….
We may reject the version of Lenin
and the Bolsheviks as crazed demons and choose to see them as well-intentioned
people trying to build a better world out of a crisis, but we must work out how
to avoid their failures.
Meanwhile, we can actually tune in live and see what
happens when someone tries to act on this idea of reviving the Communist ideal.
A few years ago, leftist pundits were praising
Venezuela as a socialist
miracle. Then the socialist regime hit the Thatcher Line: it ran out of
other people’s money (in this case, oil company money) and the illusion came
crashing down. The result: desperate poverty, shortages, squalor, children
dying in hospitals from lack of medicine and equipment, refugees fleeing in
makeshift boats.
In other words: your basic rundown for a radical
socialist regime. It’s not the first time this has happened. It’s not even the
tenth time.
And the socialist “revolutionaries” respond the way they
always have: they try to save the revolution by exterminating political
freedom. In the past few weeks, while folks at The New York Times were airily speculating about reviving
Communism, but in a good way, Venezuela’s socialist revolutionaries staged a
flagrantly rigged vote to overturn representative government, and now they have
brought back the “midnight knock on the door,” with the arbitrary arrest and
imprisonment of opposition leaders.
At home, the Left is calling for “resistance” against the
“authoritarianism” of Donald Trump—while their most prominent mouthpieces are
actively whitewashing a movement that stands for totalitarianism, and the
actual young idealists in places like Venezuela are getting gunned down in the
streets by the regime. Some of this has even been reported in The New York Times. Maybe somebody ought
to inform the opinion editors.
What is it about a thoroughly discredited doctrine like
Communism that just won’t die? My overall sense from the “Red Century” series
is that enough years have passed since the fall of the Iron Curtain that
Western intellectuals now feel they can get away with downplaying Communism’s
crimes and failures and return to rapturous descriptions of its abstract ideals,
without the need any longer to take a serious look at what those ideals really
meant in practice.
The theory of Communism—the elevation of the collective
over the individual and of government dictates above free, private
decision-making—is the fundamental cause of all of its evils. But it’s also a
moral theory with old roots, on that has established itself in many people’s
minds as synonymous with morality itself. Of
course everyone should put the collective “public good” over private
interests—what could possibly go wrong? Well, we found out what could go wrong,
over and over again. We have plenty of reasons to think that individual rights
and private interests are actually essential to a free and prosperous
society—not to mention that they might help keep us out of the gulag.
But if you can’t bring yourself to question whether the
theory of socialism is synonymous with the very idea of morality and progress,
you won’t be able to relinquish the socialist dream, even after it has been
exposed as a nightmare.
This deep vein of denial has troubling consequences. One
sign—still on a very small scale—is the reconstitution of “Young Communist
Clubs,” something I haven’t seen much of since I was in college in 1989, the
year reality pulled the rug out from under all of the earnest young socialists.
This can only be happening again because today’s young people have been allowed
to grow up ignorant of the nature of Communism, both in the past and in the
present. And this is aided and abetted by publications at the top of the
culture, like The New York Times, as
they draw a gauzy curtain of nostalgia across the history of twentieth-century
Communism.
One of those “Red Century” encomiums to Communist
idealism sums up its case by recalling “Rosa Luxemburg’s revolutionary
ultimatum: ‘socialism or barbarism.'” But the lesson of history—heck, the
lesson of our own time—is that socialism is
barbarism.
Don’t let The New
York Times send this truth down the memory hole.
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