NY Times: Gauzy retrospectives about the idealism, sense of purpose, optimism, intellectuality, and downright sexiness of life under Communism.

Excerpts from more thoughts on a century of communism by Robert Tracinski at The Federalist.

…Countries taken over by Communists, from China and Russia to Cuba and Venezuela, were either plunged from relative prosperity into starvation or walled off for decades from the growing prosperity of capitalist countries—often right next door, enjoying all the same benefits of geography and culture. Think of the contrast between East and West Berlin, between Cuba and Chile, between mainland China and Hong Kong, between North and South Korea.

Communist countries have imposed oppressive regimes telling everyone what to read, think, and say. Scientists could be sent to the gulag for teaching unapproved ideas about genetics. Dissidents have been sent to prison camps, tortured, harassed, locked in psychiatric wards, and simply murdered outright. Artists and intellectuals have fled by the hundreds, when they could, seeking asylum in non-Communist countries in search of the freedom to do their work.

…Above all else, the history of Communism is a history of mass-scale horrors: the terror-famine in Ukraine, Stalin’s show trials and gulags, the mass starvation of China’s Great Leap Forward, followed by the anarchic terror of the Cultural Revolution, the Killing Fields of Cambodia—those are just the low points in a list that can go on and on. It is estimated that in the past 100 years, Communist regimes killed as many as 100 million people.

So why won’t the nightmare dream of Communism die? A recent poll shows that a majority of millennials prefer socialism or Communism to capitalism, and we know exactly where they’re getting their woozy, idealized version of these systems. The New York Times, for example, has been celebrating 100 years of Communism—”celebrating” seems the only word for it—with a series of gauzy retrospectives about the idealism, sense of purpose, optimism, intellectuality, and downright sexiness of life under Communism.

…A key to the problem can be seen even in critiques of this Communist hagiography by conservatives, who remind everyone that Communism “doesn’t work.” That seems a funny kind of understatement, like saying that dousing yourself with gasoline and setting yourself on fire “doesn’t work.” It implies some kind of idealistic goal for which the adherents of Communism choose unrealistic means. But the bloody, grinding history of Communism—and most especially the fact that it went on and on and continues even today, many decades after no one can have any illusions—suggests that oppression and murder is the goal.

The first moral idea is that self-interest is bad and that it is not only good but the very definition of morality itself to sacrifice your own interests to others. That’s why profit and money-making are supposed to be bad. That’s why anything you have that somebody else doesn’t think they have is supposed to be some kind of unconscionable “privilege.” That’s why capitalism has to be expunged, because it’s a whole system built on self-interest.

The second idea, which is the political consequence of the first, is that private interests are bad and need to be subordinated to the collective “public good.” That’s why everything private is bad, from private companies to private schools, and everything “public” is automatically good. That’s why celebrated authors hatch schemes to abolish private education, something only totalitarian regimes have ever done, in order to make sure everybody is “eating out of the same pot.”

The problem with Communism is not that it twisted these ideals or implemented them badly. The crime of Communism is that it took them seriously and implemented them fully, all the way to their logical conclusion. That is what people don’t want to face up to in the history of Communism.

…That leads us to another big lesson of Communism: without individualism, there is no basis for individual rights or any other guarantee of human dignity. The big mistake people make about Communism is to think that it’s just about collectivizing property. It’s actually about collectivizing people. Communist countries impose oppressive systems of censorship and interfere deeply with the personal lives of their subjects precisely because they take seriously this idea of the subordination of the individual to the collective good. They apply it to everything, including the very thoughts in your head, which they also treat as public property.

…If Communism represents the full implementation of a commonly accepted view of morality, we can understand the compulsion to make excuses for it, to claim it’s never really been tried, to forget its disasters and atrocities, to allow only a gauzy airbrushed version of its history, and to desperately wish that if we just tried it one more time and really did it right, we would finally reach the promised paradise.

We’ve done that for a full century, and even longer. After all, Communism was tried on a small scale, in voluntary utopian communities, for more than a century before it failed upward and took over entire countries. It’s time to start grasping the moral lessons before we’re forced to live once more through the nightmare of chasing the Communist dream.

Read more here.