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<\/a><\/p>\n\u201cCongratulations to President Xi and the Chinese people on the 70th Anniversary of the People\u2019s Republic of China!\u201d\u00a0 So tweeted President Donald Trump<\/a> on October 1, the anniversary of the takeover of China by the Communist Party.<\/p>\n As someone who came of age during the Cold War, I was astonished to hear such positive sentiments about communism from an American president, especially one with the reputation as a fire-breathing conservative.\u00a0 But it isn\u2019t just President Trump.\u00a0 \u00a0An overt socialist is a leading candidate for the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party, nearly two-thirds of whose members (64%) have a favorable view of socialism.<\/a>\u00a0 Marxism and its variations are very prominent and influential in the academic world.<\/p>\n It\u2019s hard to find anti-communist sentiments these days.\u00a0 You can still find them among dissidents in neo-communist Venezuela and refugees of Castro\u2019s Cuba.\u00a0 And there are still some old-style Cold Warriors.\u00a0 (Ironically, the very day President Trump was congratulating \u201cthe Chinese People\u201d for 70 years of communism, Senate Republicans were issuing statements condemning<\/a> what the Chinese Communist Party has done over those seven decades.)<\/p>\n During the Cold War, Americans considered communism to be an \u201cexistential threat,\u201d the overused term meaning a threat to America\u2019s very existence.\u00a0 The issues were not just matters of different economic systems.\u00a0 Communism, with its authoritarian governments and totalitarian insistence on controlling every facet of life, was a direct threat to freedom, democracy, religion, and everything Americans hold dear.\u00a0 And because communists sought to spread their system throughout the world, including by military conquests, and because the major communist powers possessed nuclear weapons, Americans felt that their very lives could be at risk.\u00a0 Republicans and Democrats, for all of their differences, agreed on the necessity of opposing communism.<\/p>\n Yes, Cold War anti-communism sometimes went too far, with inquisitions that violated America\u2019s own ideals of civil liberty and paranoid fears of communist infiltration and a communist behind every bush.\u00a0 Still, documents recovered after the fall of the Soviet Union showed that some of those fears were justified, that communists were<\/em> behind a lot of bushes.<\/p>\n At any rate, after Russian communism imploded and the Cold War ended, Americans were enormously relieved, to the point of wanting to put all of that communist, anti-communist stuff behind us.<\/p>\n But the Cold War was mainly focused on the Russian-dominated Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.\u00a0 That evil empire did, indeed, fall.\u00a0 Today the major Communist power is the People\u2019s Republic of China, which has grown more powerful than ever.\u00a0 Chinese Communism does not seem nearly the threat that the Soviet Union was.\u00a0 (Never mind that the actual shooting wars in the period of the Cold War\u2013Korea, Vietnam\u2013were military conflicts that involved China and its client states.)<\/p>\n Today, though, China is easier to like.\u00a0 China revised communist economic theory to allow for private property and market forces, resulting in a tremendous growth of wealth and prosperity.\u00a0 But China retained the authoritarian government and totalitarian controls of classic communism, the opposition to freedom, democracy, and religion that made communism so antithetical to American ideals.<\/p>\n Michael Brendan Dougherty discusses <\/a>how two of the old bulwarks against communism, American business and the Catholic church, have to a great extent become defenders of the Chinese communist regime.\u00a0 He describes a TV interview in which Wall Street tycoon and former mayor of New York City Michael Bloomberg praises China\u2019s anti-pollution efforts and denies that China is a dictatorship.\u00a0 Dougherty comments:<\/p>\n What concerns me is that the attitude [Bloomberg] expressed to Hoover has come to predominate among the American business elite. Tim Cook is happy to announce retaliatory measures against U.S. states that are on the wrong side of the culture war. But you won\u2019t hear a peep about the anti-suicide nets that Apple\u2019s Chinese contractor Foxxconn installed to deal with the public-relations problem of iPhone-assembly workers throwing themselves to their deaths. Nor about concentration camps for Muslims in Jinjiang province, or the ructions in Hong Kong. In an article on the trade war, James McGregor, the chairman of the greater China region for the consultancy APCO Worldwide, was quoted admitting the awful truth: \u201cFor many American tech companies, Xi Jinping is more important than Donald Trump, because China is often their largest and fastest-growing market.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Dougherty then cites the pro-China cheerleading from the Roman Catholic Church:<\/p>\n The Church might even be even worse in this respect. \u201cRight now, those who are best implementing the social doctrine of the Church are the Chinese,\u201d Bishop Marcelo S\u00e1nchez Sorondo, the chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, said last year as the Vatican was buttering up the Chinese ahead of a historic deal meant to solve long-standing conflicts between the Church and the Chinese Communist Party. Like Bloomberg, Sorondo burbled credulously about a fictive regime that does not exist, praising China\u2019s \u201cpositive national conscience.\u201d \u201cYou do not have shantytowns, you do not have drugs, young people do not take drugs,\u201d in China, he said. Even better, \u201cthe economy does not dominate politics, as happens in the United States, something Americans themselves would say.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n He then cites the concordat between the Vatican and China that allows the avowedly-atheist government to approve the selection of Catholic bishops.\u00a0 \u201cThe day after it was signed, Xi humiliated the Vatican by having the bishops of the CPCA [Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association] sign a statement affirming their \u2018independence\u2019 from Rome, and their determination to pursue the \u2018sinicization\u2019 of their religion. Prelates who remained underground, like Bishop Peter Shao Zhumin, were rounded up and detained.\u201d<\/p>\n The legacy of the 70 years of Chinese communism continues, as John McCormack notes<\/a>:<\/p>\n Mao\u2019s Great Leap Forward killed\u00a0perhaps 45 million people<\/a>. The Communist regime still denies its people freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and has imposed a policy of\u00a0forced abortion<\/a>. At the present moment, China has detained something like\u00a01.5 million Uighurs<\/a>\u00a0and other Muslim minorities in re-education camps. Its crackdown on Hong Kong escalated this week, when a protester was\u00a0shot in the chest<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n