Communism murdered north of 100 million people in the 20th century, and numbers continue to climb in the 21st. Such regimes also reduce their countries to economic basket cases. What is there to like?
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Yet criticism of this political system generates very little assent. Some will push back with moral neutrality claims, such “as our side [specifically Western democracy] is just as bad.” Others will arrogantly assert that real communism has never been implemented, and that modern communists in the West (like the Democratic Socialists of America?) will get it right despite so many others having gotten it wrong.
Some will even argue that criticism amounts to nothing more than propaganda, which implies that the People’s Republic of China, Cuba, Venezuela, Cambodia’s former Pol Pot regime, Zimbabwe, the former Soviet Union, etc. really weren’t so bad despite the Great Purge, the Gulags, the killing fields, thousands or millions of murders in each communist regime, politically motivated arrests, strict censorship, mass starvation, and slave labor, plus state seizure of private property, including farmland, which transformed breadbaskets (thanks to competent private-sector farmers) into basket cases (state appropriated farms run by favored regime bureaucrats who knew nothing about farming). We can add Mao’s Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward to this sorry mix. Hence, it is unclear why anyone might think the West, though imperfect, is equally heinous.
Others will be noncommittal when communism is criticized, either because they disagree but are too polite to say so, or they agree but are afraid to broadcast their agreement. We have a problem when people are afraid to give consent to a no-brainer claim that communism is evil. Why the fear? How free are we when people are afraid to take a political stand?
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Perhaps the roots of this oikophobia — this feral hatred of the West, or the fear of repercussions for pushing back — rest with academics, who, for whatever reason, have either apologized for communism or given it a pass. Perhaps they and their indoctrinated graduates who have gone into teaching or the media or the helping professions or government or business to think they are bucking a status quo they have been taught to hate — specifically Western democracy, Western civilization, Judaism, and Christianity.
As such, they deem it unsophisticated to criticize our civilization’s antithesis. Ah, yes, the good old “enemy of my enemy is my friend” fallacy. This may also account for their fawning embrace of Islam and contempt not only for Israel, but seemingly for Jewish people who don’t even live in Israel and have nothing to do with Middle East politics. Maybe people fear appearing unsophisticated, uncool, or stupid, in addition to fearing the ensuing retribution heaped upon them if they deviate from their group.
These folks are reminiscent of the “cool kids” in the high school. Blind conformity to their group’s fads — no doubt stemming at least in part from insecurity — is the be-all and end-all for them. Psychosocially, such folks never advanced beyond this adolescent phase, even though many are now seventy-something Baby-Boomers (the old sixties radicals). This level of immaturity is a character weakness, but sadly all too prevalent throughout the postmodern West.
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Image: david__jones via Flickr, CC BY 2.0.