We can hate ideas, but we cannot hate people. At the same time, we can think about any idea, but some relationships with people are too toxic to be endured. To put it simply: at The Saint Constantine School, our students think hard about Marxism, but we would not let Lenin teach.
Marxism is a bad idea, but bad ideas are only dangerous in bad men. Lenin was a bad man.
If you doubt that communism never works, I offer North Korea and what is left of communism in China (all the bad parts of life in China) as contemporary examples. If you can read the Black Book of Communism and still be a communist, then you have more faith than the woman who sends her last twenty to the late night televangelist.
Recently, I was having a discussion with some anarchists and some communists. The anarchists and the communists were only united in their dislike of traditional Christianity. As the Ukraine during the Russian Revolution proves, the two groups of secularists are happy to kill each other once we are out of the way. These revolutionaries were discussing how many Trump voters would have to be killed as counter-revolutiionaries after the Revolution. To their credit, more than a few were very, very uncomfortable with this and joined in (thanks be to God!) with a denunciation of violence.
History says that if the revolution came, those more peaceful communists would be the first to die.
Let me not repeat arguments against the implementation of communism, since it has been a disaster wherever tried and no country once freed of the parasitical system has yet to vote it into power. In fact, there are precious few examples (Chile and .. . ) of nations ever deciding to bite themselves, get communism, and go mad.
Instead, I shall simply tell you my experience over 53 years of life with academic discussions about communist countries. Prior to 1989, my communist compatriots would spend gobs of time telling me I was listening to right-wing propaganda. Eastern Europe was happy, had great health care (free!), and world class education. Old women were the only ones that went to churh because the Revolution was meeting the spiritual needs of the people.
It was the old women who bothered me. By the time I was in graduate school, we were into our second or third generation of Russian old women. Where were they coming from?
So I kept reading about life under communism, asking the Soviet embassy for information, and talking to people who had lived during the Revolution.
I learned three things pretty quickly.
It is horrible to live under communism, but until the regime is overthrown, American intellectuals will not believe it.
Communists are (by nature) academic types and so know how to woo academic types. Nobody is more gullible than an American academic in a communist state. They are shown a university, paternalistic and dedicated to binders full of data, blown up to a national (or even empire!) size. This is a dream.
When the communist state falls, almost all the statistics will be false.
When I would attack life in East Germany (the communist part of Germany), my communist friends would defend the place. People had free health care, great education, and all the stuff I heard were lies from the government.
When communism fell, East Germany turned out to be barely second world. You can still see the difference in Berlin between the communist side and the Western side. The sidewalks alone tell you something is wrong in the part the communists used to run. Rule of thumb: a state that cannot build a good sidewalk should not be in charge of the rest of the economy.
Academics love consistency and rhetoric more than reality . . . far too often when it comes to communism.
From an American academics point of view, communism has the right enemies. Communists don’t like religion, tradition, or free markets. American academics (overwhelmingly) don’t like religion, tradition, or free markets.
Communists might go too far (starving millions of people), but their hearts are in the right place . . . or so goes the justification of 1980’s academia for the Soviet Union. You can hear the same things today about Cuba.
The bad things about communism are always the fault of the USA.
We tried to overthrow Lenin, so the nice theorist became hardened against us. Forget his applause for cruelty and French Revolution techniques in his early writings. Lenin went bad, because we made him bad.
Insert Castro for Lenin and you can summarize many state university professorial opinions.
There is always some “monster” who messes up the good thing.
For a generation, American academics liked to pretend that Lenin was good, but Stalin messed things up. After Stalin, things got better.
This is all nonsense as we discovered when Eastern Europe was freed and the Soviet Union fell.
The regime before the communists is presented as dreadful to maximize gains.
Russia before World War I had a booming economy, growing literacy rate, and increasing social mobility and democracy. The Revolution ignored these facts and presented the world the picture of the “serf” and the oppressed and starving Russian.
As the Soviets bankrupted their national wealth pursuing Empire, American academics wrote learned papers on how communism made everything better. When communism fell, these papers were forgotten.
Soon the Castro regime will fall and we will see the same cycle repeated: education will turn out to be horrid, medical care inadequate, and human rights a mess. The first free election will sweep communism into history in Cuba never to return.
The “masses” at the Castro funeral, there to avoid making the bad list, will not vote for a Castro-like regime when given real choice.
It has all happened again and again. Poland, I was told, was happy under communism, until communism vanished over night.
For those of you who know this is true, never expect to get credit for being right. When the Soviet Union fell, I asked a professor who had flacked me about my “anti-Soviet” status if I could have my apology now! Everyone was saying how bad the Soviet Union was at that point. The facts were overwhelming the assumptions.
He said: “We were never pro-Communist, just anti-anti-Communist.”
Sigh.
It was then I knew there was no winning with good hearted people who embrace communism. They like the theory so much that no amount of reality can overcome the hope that someplace communism will be by the people, for the people, and of the people.
If you want to meet a real communist, go to Texas state universities, not to Cuba. In Cuba, they know. At American schools, what they know comes from books untied to real conditions, because they are dependent on data from the regime they are critiquing.
Communism is evil, but good luck explaining that to most freshmen. Communism sounds good and so must be good and the millions murdered? They must be lies.
When they are not lies, then some other communist regime will have gotten it right. Only they never do. Patience is the foe of communism.
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