Dean - I'm a liberal who was born in the 1970s, well after Stalin had passed from the scene. I came of age in the 80s, during the fall of Communism; I owe no allegiance to the spectre of a philosophy which was dying during my childhood.
I'm perfectly willing to admit that the socialist regimes of the twentieth century committed great evil. But I'm getting really tired of posts from aggreived conservatives complaining about how liberals won't recant and abandon socialism. No liberal of my generation ever adhered to it in the first place.
And just how many Che shirt have you seen in the last year? By your admition, no liberal of your generation (and mine, since I too was born in 1970) have learn history.
Yeah, come off it. I was born in 1966. I watched the Berlin Wall fall when I was what, 24? So freaking what?
The right constantly and unendingly has the specter of fascism thrown in its face. Yet when you compare the left to Leninism, Stalinism, or just say "communist," people laugh and smirk and act like you're an idiot.
Don't play with me. It's 2005 and I still see it every day. Call someone a Nazi and they think you're really angry and calling someone the worst possible epithet. Call someone a communist and you think they're joking, or are a stupid buffoon.
Come on, Robert. Can you name any conservative of your generation who ever adhered to fascism? Can you even tell me exactly what fascism is besides snappy uniforms and hating minorities?
Don't lie to me: if I called you a Nazi you'd get all huffy, but if I called you a Commie you'd snort and laugh in derision.
Yes; if you called me a Nazi, I'd snort and laugh in derision. :) Almost everyone who uses the word in political debate is exaggerating and minimizing the crimes of the Nazis by so doing; this has irritated me for years.
No, I can't name an American conservative of my generation who adhered or adheres to fascism.
As for defining fascism - it's difficult to define, as there are very few tenets which seem to hold true for all of the political entities which are usually described as fascist (nazi germany, fascist italy, and francoist spain having quite different political systems). The way *I* use the word is roughly as follows: a political and economic system which attempts to treat society as a single corporate whole, in which individual political and economic rights are submerged into the rights of "society", and in which political rhetoric and debate is informed by a paranoid view of the threat to society by outsiders. Other people seem to use it differently.
I'm not playing with you. I see far more angry conservatives and libertarians denouncing moderate leftism as socialism than I see angry liberals denouncing moderate conservatism as fascism. (Mostly, I see angry liberals denouncing conservatism as the first step towards a theocratic state; but that's a different form of condemnation altogether than calling conservatives fascists).
BigFire - I've seen about half a dozen che guevara t-shirts in the last year. I would venture, based upon conversations that I've had with people wearing such shirts, or with their friends, that they have no clue what guevara did other than a vague sense that he "fought the man" or that he "fought for the people". Such people are ignorant at least as much, if not more so, than they are communist apologists.
... And how do you explain all the Marxist college professors?
... And how do you explain ANSWER? And the fact that ANSWER and various ancillary groups have proved vital to the "liberal" anti-war movement?
If you haven't seen many folks calling conservative or pro-war people facists you haven't been looking very hard.
Beyond all that, you have changed the subject. Dean never said that the left has to repudiate socialism/communism because they used to follow said ideology; Dean said that the left never repudiated socialism/communism at all. No "this was a bad idea," no "socialist/communist ideas are morally bankrupt," nothing.
Ok, fine. You admit that "the socialist regimes of the twentieth century committed great evil." Are you willing to admit that said regimes were, in fact, evil? There's a difference you know.
BTW, you are way off on one remark. You claimed that "[the communist] philosophy ... was dying during my childhood." Since you were born "in the 1970s" (when, exactly?) that means you were born before Reagan took office. Now go back and try reading the contemporary commentaries, political speeches, and military forecasts. Communism was hardly "dying" at that time. In fact, the sudden changes in 1989 took the vast majority of the world by surprise.
Perhaps your memories are tainted by the fact that -by the time you became aware of the world outside the US- Reagan had already killed the monster... ;)
We can all watch those old WW2 movies with John Wayne in them, and maybe even forget ourselves to such an extent that we worry about who will win. But we already know the answer today.
It wasn't so obvious back in 1941, or even in 1943.
And when the cultural and political leaders of the left actually start condeming socialism and communism on a publicly regular basis... then you might have occasion for objection. Not until then.
Marxist college professors are hardly relevant to my point, given that very few people of my generation have yet achieved that rank.
But I find it an interesting question nonetheless, mostly because my experience on this score seems to have been quite different from everyone else's. I graduated with a degree from the University of California, Santa Cruz - theoretically a bastion of political corectness in a stunningly liberal town. My coursework was primarily in political science and history, with some classes in computer science and economics. The foreign policy specialists on faculty at that time were all realists; the other politics faculty members were, broadly speaking, neoliberals; the economics faculty I interacted with adhered largely to the Chicago school; the computer science faculty, at least the ones who would talk politics, were all libertarians. The only places I encountered socialist faculty were in sociology, (possibly) cultural anthropology, and a visiting history professor who came from Brazil.
I've gathered from talking to people about other universities that my experience is exceptional; that the faculty at my university, in the areas I studied, were unusual. But those stories contradict my experience, and I have a hard time taking them seriously without statistical data to back them up.
As for ANSWER - I can't explain them. I know that my friends who protested against the war had no clue who was organizing the protests; it was an anti-war protest, and it was axiomatic to my friends that, if they believed the war was bad, they had a duty to go to the protests. I'm not aware that any of them enquired further into the organization running them; they just assumed that the people running the show were there out of motivations similar to theirs. Which is a quite common human failing.
You are correct that Dean never said the left has to repudiate communism because it used to follow that ideology. I think it was quite clearly implied by the words he used, and I think that it would be a valid argument to say that much of the interwar and post-war left were, in the best of cases, fellow travellers on the road to socialism; but Dean did not say that in this post.
Of course I'm willing to admit that Lenin and Stalin were evil, and that their regimes were as well. (I'm not going to say that with respect to Mao, because I know next to nothing about Chinese history and am therefore reluctant to say anything on the subject) Stalin, in particular, was responsible for more deaths than Hitler was, and the Gulag Archipelago was one of the great evils of the modern era. The system that allowed him to come to power and stay in power was fundamentally broken, and the governments which adopted that system represented a string of economic, political, environmental, and social catastrophes.
There's no controversy here that i'm aware of. I've rarely held a conversation about politics with anyone who would not admit this. (I know one person who doesn't, who basically thinks the stories of the gulag are conservative propoganda; I don't understand what he is thinking).
I was born in 1973. While it is the case that people in western Europe and the United States did not understand that commuism was dying, it is also quite clear that significant portions of the the people of the Soviet Union, and of its eastern European satellites, knew it to be dying. There's a terrible joke that they used to tell, in the Soviet Union:
Stalin, Khruschev, and Brezhnev were travelling on a train that had stopped. "I will see to it!" said Stalin, leaving the compartment. On his return, he declared "we are ready to go, I have shot the engineer." Nothing happened. Khruschev got up and went to the front of the train. When he came back, he smiled, and said "I have rehabilitated the engineer." Still, the train did not move. Suddenly Brezhnev stood up and pulled down the blinds plunging the compartment into total darkness. "There! Now the train is moving."
The point to the joke is that the people living under communism understood it to be a farce, its promises to be meaningless, its economy stagnant, its politics morally bankrupt, even in the 70s. The system was dying. That we could not see it, that we were not aware of it because the leaders of the Soviet Union put on a great face and bluffed their way through, did not make it any less on its deathbed.
It is possible that my memories are tainted by the fact that I first became politically aware in 1986-1987, and that by then communism was on its last legs. But, if so, that simply makes my point stronger: communism has never in my mind, or in the mind of my contemporaries, been seen as a workable system, let alone an admirable one. Why are we being asked to confront it? It was a miserable failure; its leaders so profoundly misunderstood human nature that it could not have been anything but a miserable failure. Everyone knows this. Why are we still talking about it? :)
Well, we're still talking about it because we've got an endless supply of people of the left still lauding Castro...heck, I understand that Angela Davis is a tenured professor somewhere (in case you're unaware, Davis is a genuine, dyed-in-the-wool communist who had terrorist affiliations in the 1960's); in short, communists are still considered persona grata on the left side of the aisle. It should be borne in mind that to the average conservative, there really isn't any fundamental difference between a communist, Nazi or fascist - they might use different slogans, but their aims and means are essentially the same; and all of them piled up corpses at an amazing rate in the late, unlamented 20th century. We just don't understand why a person on the left would consider Nazism horrific and not feel exactly the same about communism - and we are left to assume that to the left, communism is ok; ergo, 100 million murders were ok, because it was communism doing it.
There is a heavy communist/socialist influence in the American liberal/left - in fact, to a large degree the communists have hijacked the term liberal to the point where in the minds of a large swath of the American people there is no difference between a liberal and a communist - and this is why the far left must be rejected...and not just by saying "I disagree"; they have to be hounded out of political/social/economic/intellectual life just as any fascist or Nazi would be. Everyone has a right to believe as they wish, of course - but some ideals are just not consonant with American ideals and have to be driven out of proper society. Worn out communists like Davis shouldn't be given tenure - they shouldn't even be given the time of day.
Whenever any compares conservatives to Nazis, I remind them that National Socialism was in fact socialist. Both Nazism and Communism are left wing movements, not right wing movements.
On the far right are anarchists. Just to the left of them are libertarians. Next Paleocons. Then other various kinds of conservatives. All believe in a smaller state, and there are strong populist movements all over the right, including anti-corporatist agenda. Dean Esmay here is no big fan of corporations; neither am I. I don't know any conservatives who want to have a cabal of state and business running the country -- but that's what can happen if you're not careful and everyone from anarchists to left-liberals should oppose it.
So I ignore the Nazi appellation.
Besides, there are very few actual fascists in this country. We're not Europe, and we haven't have a serious fascist movement in this country since the 30s. Fascism is a European thing.
Also, left and right refer to the French Revolution, not to America's political parties. We use the terms to describe how much state intervention we'll permit.
The vast majority of Americans are moderate and pretty much want to be left alone by the government, but want the government to watch out corporations don't ship all the jobs overseas or kill all the fish in the Great Lakes.
Good point Dean, though I tend to think of the Nazi version of "fascism" as being tied to the left, not the right, as it was after all a socialist party.
It is perhaps a Bad Thing that communism, and for that matter socialism, have not yet been discredited enough that it's almost universally considered as a horrific thing to call someone.
Running behind, no time to post, and I forgot one little question about Dean's original post: shouldn't that read "In the mid 20th century, the right was forced to confront Mussolini..." not "late 20th century?"
Mark Noonan, re Angela Davis, it's even better than you think: if I recall correctly, Angela Davis's tenured professorship is actually at Robert West's alma mater, UC/Santa Cruz. [ . . . checking . . . ] Yes, she holds a position in the History of Consciousness Program (I gather it's an interdisciplinary graduate-level quasi-department). Her bio on the UCSC website mentions that she lost her job at UCLA in 1969 partly because of her membership in the Communist Party USA; it neglects to add that she was the CPUSA's vice-Presidential candidate as late as 1984. (I think after that they stopped running tickets.)
NAZI is an abbreviation for the National Socialist Worker's Party (in German, of course). Jon Ray of Dissecting Leftism, a blog, has an extensive treatment of the roots of communism, NAZIism and Fascism that shows rather clearly that all are closely related to socialism, and are therefore leftist or leftwing. The effort to paint them as right wing is another try at disinformation, but it does not accord with history.
Here's a terrific movie I have yet to see: Total Eclipse. Read all about it.
IB Bill's spectrum is excellent: from total government, under any label, on the Far Left to no government at all, anarchy, on the Far Right. I'm on the Right, for limited Constitutional government and individual freedom with corresponding responsibility.
Mark Noonan is right. Castro and Angela Davis are still lionized by the left. I have heard so-called "liberals" praise Castro many times for giving his slaves "free" health care. Mao is still lionized by the left. Pol Pot, well, not quite, but we are also not reminded that the Chinese Communists were backing him. Mao was an unreconstructed Stalinist who condemned Kruschev as a heretic. Mao murdered at least as many millions as did Hitler.
About the double standard: I was at a Comdex (computer and software convenstion) in Las Vegas some years ago where exhibiters from around the world were displaying their wares. One exhibit featured a program from Russia, and the exhibiters were wearing Soviet Army uniforms. There was also a programmer from Germany, but I didn't see him in a German Army uniform. Remember what happened when England's Prince Harry wore a Nazi uniform at a party? Would we have seen the same kind of controversy if he had worn a Mao uniform or a KGB uniform? Hmmm....
One way you can tell if somebody is a villain in today's media is if they show him with his mouth open in angry speech of some kind. You've seen countless pictures of Hitler with his mouth open, screaming, ranting, and raving. You've also seen innmerable pictures of "Tailgunner Joe" McCarthy with his mouth open that way, too, snarling hysterically about "Commies in our midst".
By contrast, pictures of Stalin still show him as beaming, benevolent "Uncle Joe", and pictures of Mao show him calm as the Buddha, too, full of Oriental wisdom. His book, "The Little Red Book" or "Quotations from Chairman Mao", was very popular when I was growing up in the early 1970s. All the "cool", "liberal" kids carried copies of it with them. Only the evil, naughty boys would ever think of carrying a copy of "Mein Kampf". In fact, the Mao book was so popular that even conservatives copied its title. I have "Quotations from Chairman Jesus", "Quotations from Chairman San [Ervin]", and even "Quotations from Chairman Bill [Buckley]." Mao was cute and cuddly. By contrast, nobody named a book of theirs "Mein ____", even as a joke.
Senator McCarthy was made for Hollywood, the perfect villaim. The way he looked, his raspy voice, his evil laugh. The perfect villain. The Left can't get enough of him. Ask any college student or professor, or anybody in the media, who was worse, Joe McCarthy or Joe Stalin, and 9 out of 10 times, you can bet it will be McCarthy, or at least a draw. McCarthy is right up there with Hitler as the arch-villain of the 20th century, the man everybody loves to hate, the symbol of the Right as Evil. And, Owen Lattimore, John Stewart Service, and all the others he exposed, were just his innocent victims. Anti-Communism = McCarthyism = Evil.
Any admission that Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc., were mass murderers, that Communism was not so idyllic to live under after all, that Hiss or the Rosenbergs were agents of Stalin, will be grudging, "well, yeah, OK", as if you're spoiling everybody's party by bringing it up, and "now let's get back to denouncing McCarthy, Reagan, Bush, etc..."
Nazism is dead. Communism will be dead when we finally see "Total Eclipse" on the big screen.
"Fascist" has in fact a technical meaning, and fascism is related to Marxism-Leninism in that it takes the "class struggle" as being inevitable. Marx implicitly and Lenin explicitly would solve the class struggle by eliminating — liquidating — all social classes but the proletariat, through the imposition of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the elimination of private property; during the transition those incapable of being retrained from their bourgeois values must be liquidated. Fascism would mitigate the inevitable class struggle by forcing the classes to cooperate: the State will be above the classes, representation in the legislative/advisory councils will be by institutions and classes (the Army has seats in the Grand Council of Fasces, as does the Church, as do the Industrialists, and the Workers Unions, and so forth). The State will be the focus of loyalty, and while it is inevitable that there will be some class loyalty, everyone must rise above that to give their real loyalty to the State.
Now this is somewhat cobbled up theory. Mussolini was originally an anarcho-syndicalist and his origins are the Socialist Workers Party. He admired intellectuals although he wasn't one. His daughter married an intellectual, and Count Ciano was tasked with coming up with a definition of fascism for the Britannica on rather short notice. It's hardly surprising that fascist parties in other countries such as Spain didn't entirely embrace the theoretical niceties that Mussolini tried to inject. Huey Long had "his" professors at Louisiana State working on political theory that was explicitly not to be named fascism, but Long made it pretty clear to most of his intimates that the only reason for his rejection of fascism was the unpopularity of the name. He thought F. D. Roosevelt with his market orders, NRA, and other such institutions a fascist, and a clever one at that, and on purely technical grounds he had good reason for his views.
German National Socialism — Nazi, NDSAP, stands for National German Socialist Workers Party — wasn't "fascist" in any theoretical sense, and although Hitler expressed admiration for Mussolini, it wasn't reciprocated; Mussolini for years prevent the Anschluss with Austria, until Hitler became so powerful that it couldn't be prevented.
One of the goals of the left during that period was to create a "popular front" against fascism by lumping Nazi, Spanish Falange, and Italian Fascism into one group. The anti-fascist movement would inevitably be dominated by the disciplined Communist Party but appear to be independent of the CP. That fooled a lot of people, so much so that a number of American intellectuals went along with the Party Line. Then of course it changed, and for a while Hitler and Stalin were not only allies, but I can recall prominent Americans toasting the fall of Paris to German troops as "the victory of the working class over their French rulers." The fascinating part is just how many American intellectuals went along with that. Now that's my operational definition of an idiot, to get back to what this is about.
(An operational definition of a term points to an example of what the term refers to.)
In other words, neither "idiot" nor "fascist" has a great deal of meaning in the present world beyond being terms of opprobrium, and serious discussion of whether someone is or is not "a fascist" is futile; but to the extent that there's a point to any such discussion, I can give an operational definition of both anti-Communist and anti-Fascist by pointing to Robert Heinlein, who, like me, came to understand that belief in the inevitability of a class struggle in the Marxist sense was the beginning of idiocy...
Another "double standard": I am sure that there are stores catering to neo-Nazis (all that memorabilia and literature must be sold somewhere), but has anyone seen such a place a block from a major university? Yet Berkeley's Revolution Books was still there, last I checked, tucked under a parking garage roughly between a coffee shop and a copy place, as you'd expect close to campus. I think the people behind RB are Maoists — that is, much enthusiasm evident in the posters and articles in the windows for such as Sendero Luminoso, rather less for North Korea. Not that it makes a lot of difference, honestly.
And who spread the lie that Nazis and Fascists were "conservatives"? Who concocted the ridiculous spectrum that puts violent collectivists at both ends? It wasn't libertarians or objectivists or even religious traditionalists. It was socialist media and academia, intent on portraying themselves as "moderates" because they didn't publicly advocate violence, although of course their favored reconstruction of society could never be achieved without the violence of redistributive taxation and propaganda monopoly.
Exactly. On the conventional spectrum in use in the schools and throughout the media, they have Communism (International Socialism) on the Far Left, Nazism (National Socialism) on the Far Right, and "democratic" or "creeping" socialism in the middle. The entire spectrum is socialist!
Where would you put an anarchist on that spectrum? Or a libertarian or an Objectivist or a conservative or anybody else who believes in limited government, individual freedom, and free enterprise? To get away from socialism we need another spectrum!
For starters at least, a much more logical spectrum is that described above which has total government, socialism, under any label on the Far Left, no government at all, anarchy, on the Far Right, and limited Constitutional government and individual freedom and responsibility in the middle or.... ....slightly to the Right.
Strictly speaking, Monarchy is the furthest of the far right - with the understanding of monarchy as Burke understood it in the late 18th century; constitutional and subservient to a parlaiment. Neither anarchy, nor Nazism, nor facsism has any actual affinity with the right - the complete conservative would be someone who would like to see a Hapsburg crowned in Vienna as Holy Roman Emperor (though, in a pinch, a Wittelsbach or Guelph would do), with the Pope ensconced in Rome looking after theological affairs.
I'm perfectly willing to admit that the socialist regimes of the twentieth century committed great evil. But I'm getting really tired of posts from aggreived conservatives complaining about how liberals won't recant and abandon socialism. No liberal of my generation ever adhered to it in the first place.
And just how many Che shirt have you seen in the last year? By your admition, no liberal of your generation (and mine, since I too was born in 1970) have learn history.
The right constantly and unendingly has the specter of fascism thrown in its face. Yet when you compare the left to Leninism, Stalinism, or just say "communist," people laugh and smirk and act like you're an idiot.
Don't play with me. It's 2005 and I still see it every day. Call someone a Nazi and they think you're really angry and calling someone the worst possible epithet. Call someone a communist and you think they're joking, or are a stupid buffoon.
Come on, Robert. Can you name any conservative of your generation who ever adhered to fascism? Can you even tell me exactly what fascism is besides snappy uniforms and hating minorities?
Don't lie to me: if I called you a Nazi you'd get all huffy, but if I called you a Commie you'd snort and laugh in derision.
No? Am I wrong?
No, I can't name an American conservative of my generation who adhered or adheres to fascism.
As for defining fascism - it's difficult to define, as there are very few tenets which seem to hold true for all of the political entities which are usually described as fascist (nazi germany, fascist italy, and francoist spain having quite different political systems). The way *I* use the word is roughly as follows: a political and economic system which attempts to treat society as a single corporate whole, in which individual political and economic rights are submerged into the rights of "society", and in which political rhetoric and debate is informed by a paranoid view of the threat to society by outsiders. Other people seem to use it differently.
I'm not playing with you. I see far more angry conservatives and libertarians denouncing moderate leftism as socialism than I see angry liberals denouncing moderate conservatism as fascism. (Mostly, I see angry liberals denouncing conservatism as the first step towards a theocratic state; but that's a different form of condemnation altogether than calling conservatives fascists).
... And how do you explain ANSWER? And the fact that ANSWER and various ancillary groups have proved vital to the "liberal" anti-war movement?
If you haven't seen many folks calling conservative or pro-war people facists you haven't been looking very hard.
Beyond all that, you have changed the subject. Dean never said that the left has to repudiate socialism/communism because they used to follow said ideology; Dean said that the left never repudiated socialism/communism at all. No "this was a bad idea," no "socialist/communist ideas are morally bankrupt," nothing.
Ok, fine. You admit that "the socialist regimes of the twentieth century committed great evil." Are you willing to admit that said regimes were, in fact, evil? There's a difference you know.
BTW, you are way off on one remark. You claimed that "[the communist] philosophy ... was dying during my childhood." Since you were born "in the 1970s" (when, exactly?) that means you were born before Reagan took office. Now go back and try reading the contemporary commentaries, political speeches, and military forecasts. Communism was hardly "dying" at that time. In fact, the sudden changes in 1989 took the vast majority of the world by surprise.
Perhaps your memories are tainted by the fact that -by the time you became aware of the world outside the US- Reagan had already killed the monster... ;)
We can all watch those old WW2 movies with John Wayne in them, and maybe even forget ourselves to such an extent that we worry about who will win. But we already know the answer today.
It wasn't so obvious back in 1941, or even in 1943.
And when the cultural and political leaders of the left actually start condeming socialism and communism on a publicly regular basis... then you might have occasion for objection. Not until then.
Marxist college professors are hardly relevant to my point, given that very few people of my generation have yet achieved that rank.
But I find it an interesting question nonetheless, mostly because my experience on this score seems to have been quite different from everyone else's. I graduated with a degree from the University of California, Santa Cruz - theoretically a bastion of political corectness in a stunningly liberal town. My coursework was primarily in political science and history, with some classes in computer science and economics. The foreign policy specialists on faculty at that time were all realists; the other politics faculty members were, broadly speaking, neoliberals; the economics faculty I interacted with adhered largely to the Chicago school; the computer science faculty, at least the ones who would talk politics, were all libertarians. The only places I encountered socialist faculty were in sociology, (possibly) cultural anthropology, and a visiting history professor who came from Brazil.
I've gathered from talking to people about other universities that my experience is exceptional; that the faculty at my university, in the areas I studied, were unusual. But those stories contradict my experience, and I have a hard time taking them seriously without statistical data to back them up.
As for ANSWER - I can't explain them. I know that my friends who protested against the war had no clue who was organizing the protests; it was an anti-war protest, and it was axiomatic to my friends that, if they believed the war was bad, they had a duty to go to the protests. I'm not aware that any of them enquired further into the organization running them; they just assumed that the people running the show were there out of motivations similar to theirs. Which is a quite common human failing.
You are correct that Dean never said the left has to repudiate communism because it used to follow that ideology. I think it was quite clearly implied by the words he used, and I think that it would be a valid argument to say that much of the interwar and post-war left were, in the best of cases, fellow travellers on the road to socialism; but Dean did not say that in this post.
Of course I'm willing to admit that Lenin and Stalin were evil, and that their regimes were as well. (I'm not going to say that with respect to Mao, because I know next to nothing about Chinese history and am therefore reluctant to say anything on the subject) Stalin, in particular, was responsible for more deaths than Hitler was, and the Gulag Archipelago was one of the great evils of the modern era. The system that allowed him to come to power and stay in power was fundamentally broken, and the governments which adopted that system represented a string of economic, political, environmental, and social catastrophes.
There's no controversy here that i'm aware of. I've rarely held a conversation about politics with anyone who would not admit this. (I know one person who doesn't, who basically thinks the stories of the gulag are conservative propoganda; I don't understand what he is thinking).
I was born in 1973. While it is the case that people in western Europe and the United States did not understand that commuism was dying, it is also quite clear that significant portions of the the people of the Soviet Union, and of its eastern European satellites, knew it to be dying. There's a terrible joke that they used to tell, in the Soviet Union:
Stalin, Khruschev, and Brezhnev were travelling on a train that had stopped. "I will see to it!" said Stalin, leaving the compartment. On his return, he declared "we are ready to go, I have shot the engineer." Nothing happened. Khruschev got up and went to the front of the train. When he came back, he smiled, and said "I have rehabilitated the engineer." Still, the train did not move. Suddenly Brezhnev stood up and pulled down the blinds plunging the compartment into total darkness. "There! Now the train is moving."
The point to the joke is that the people living under communism understood it to be a farce, its promises to be meaningless, its economy stagnant, its politics morally bankrupt, even in the 70s. The system was dying. That we could not see it, that we were not aware of it because the leaders of the Soviet Union put on a great face and bluffed their way through, did not make it any less on its deathbed.
It is possible that my memories are tainted by the fact that I first became politically aware in 1986-1987, and that by then communism was on its last legs. But, if so, that simply makes my point stronger: communism has never in my mind, or in the mind of my contemporaries, been seen as a workable system, let alone an admirable one. Why are we being asked to confront it? It was a miserable failure; its leaders so profoundly misunderstood human nature that it could not have been anything but a miserable failure. Everyone knows this. Why are we still talking about it? :)
Well, we're still talking about it because we've got an endless supply of people of the left still lauding Castro...heck, I understand that Angela Davis is a tenured professor somewhere (in case you're unaware, Davis is a genuine, dyed-in-the-wool communist who had terrorist affiliations in the 1960's); in short, communists are still considered persona grata on the left side of the aisle. It should be borne in mind that to the average conservative, there really isn't any fundamental difference between a communist, Nazi or fascist - they might use different slogans, but their aims and means are essentially the same; and all of them piled up corpses at an amazing rate in the late, unlamented 20th century. We just don't understand why a person on the left would consider Nazism horrific and not feel exactly the same about communism - and we are left to assume that to the left, communism is ok; ergo, 100 million murders were ok, because it was communism doing it.
There is a heavy communist/socialist influence in the American liberal/left - in fact, to a large degree the communists have hijacked the term liberal to the point where in the minds of a large swath of the American people there is no difference between a liberal and a communist - and this is why the far left must be rejected...and not just by saying "I disagree"; they have to be hounded out of political/social/economic/intellectual life just as any fascist or Nazi would be. Everyone has a right to believe as they wish, of course - but some ideals are just not consonant with American ideals and have to be driven out of proper society. Worn out communists like Davis shouldn't be given tenure - they shouldn't even be given the time of day.
On the far right are anarchists. Just to the left of them are libertarians. Next Paleocons. Then other various kinds of conservatives. All believe in a smaller state, and there are strong populist movements all over the right, including anti-corporatist agenda. Dean Esmay here is no big fan of corporations; neither am I. I don't know any conservatives who want to have a cabal of state and business running the country -- but that's what can happen if you're not careful and everyone from anarchists to left-liberals should oppose it.
So I ignore the Nazi appellation.
Besides, there are very few actual fascists in this country. We're not Europe, and we haven't have a serious fascist movement in this country since the 30s. Fascism is a European thing.
Also, left and right refer to the French Revolution, not to America's political parties. We use the terms to describe how much state intervention we'll permit.
The vast majority of Americans are moderate and pretty much want to be left alone by the government, but want the government to watch out corporations don't ship all the jobs overseas or kill all the fish in the Great Lakes.
FWIW.
It is perhaps a Bad Thing that communism, and for that matter socialism, have not yet been discredited enough that it's almost universally considered as a horrific thing to call someone.
Everybody knows of Auschwitz and Belsen. Nobody knows of Vorkuta and Solovetsky.
Everybody knows of Himmler and Eichmann. Nobody knows of Yezhov and Dzerzhinsky."
(Martin Amis, "Koba The Dread -- Laughter And The Twenty Million", 2002, p. 257)
IB Bill's spectrum is excellent: from total government, under any label, on the Far Left to no government at all, anarchy, on the Far Right. I'm on the Right, for limited Constitutional government and individual freedom with corresponding responsibility.
Mark Noonan is right. Castro and Angela Davis are still lionized by the left. I have heard so-called "liberals" praise Castro many times for giving his slaves "free" health care. Mao is still lionized by the left. Pol Pot, well, not quite, but we are also not reminded that the Chinese Communists were backing him. Mao was an unreconstructed Stalinist who condemned Kruschev as a heretic. Mao murdered at least as many millions as did Hitler.
About the double standard: I was at a Comdex (computer and software convenstion) in Las Vegas some years ago where exhibiters from around the world were displaying their wares. One exhibit featured a program from Russia, and the exhibiters were wearing Soviet Army uniforms. There was also a programmer from Germany, but I didn't see him in a German Army uniform. Remember what happened when England's Prince Harry wore a Nazi uniform at a party? Would we have seen the same kind of controversy if he had worn a Mao uniform or a KGB uniform? Hmmm....
One way you can tell if somebody is a villain in today's media is if they show him with his mouth open in angry speech of some kind. You've seen countless pictures of Hitler with his mouth open, screaming, ranting, and raving. You've also seen innmerable pictures of "Tailgunner Joe" McCarthy with his mouth open that way, too, snarling hysterically about "Commies in our midst".
By contrast, pictures of Stalin still show him as beaming, benevolent "Uncle Joe", and pictures of Mao show him calm as the Buddha, too, full of Oriental wisdom. His book, "The Little Red Book" or "Quotations from Chairman Mao", was very popular when I was growing up in the early 1970s. All the "cool", "liberal" kids carried copies of it with them. Only the evil, naughty boys would ever think of carrying a copy of "Mein Kampf". In fact, the Mao book was so popular that even conservatives copied its title. I have "Quotations from Chairman Jesus", "Quotations from Chairman San [Ervin]", and even "Quotations from Chairman Bill [Buckley]." Mao was cute and cuddly. By contrast, nobody named a book of theirs "Mein ____", even as a joke.
Senator McCarthy was made for Hollywood, the perfect villaim. The way he looked, his raspy voice, his evil laugh. The perfect villain. The Left can't get enough of him. Ask any college student or professor, or anybody in the media, who was worse, Joe McCarthy or Joe Stalin, and 9 out of 10 times, you can bet it will be McCarthy, or at least a draw. McCarthy is right up there with Hitler as the arch-villain of the 20th century, the man everybody loves to hate, the symbol of the Right as Evil. And, Owen Lattimore, John Stewart Service, and all the others he exposed, were just his innocent victims. Anti-Communism = McCarthyism = Evil.
Any admission that Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc., were mass murderers, that Communism was not so idyllic to live under after all, that Hiss or the Rosenbergs were agents of Stalin, will be grudging, "well, yeah, OK", as if you're spoiling everybody's party by bringing it up, and "now let's get back to denouncing McCarthy, Reagan, Bush, etc..."
Nazism is dead. Communism will be dead when we finally see "Total Eclipse" on the big screen.
Another "double standard": I am sure that there are stores catering to neo-Nazis (all that memorabilia and literature must be sold somewhere), but has anyone seen such a place a block from a major university? Yet Berkeley's Revolution Books was still there, last I checked, tucked under a parking garage roughly between a coffee shop and a copy place, as you'd expect close to campus. I think the people behind RB are Maoists — that is, much enthusiasm evident in the posters and articles in the windows for such as Sendero Luminoso, rather less for North Korea. Not that it makes a lot of difference, honestly.
Where would you put an anarchist on that spectrum? Or a libertarian or an Objectivist or a conservative or anybody else who believes in limited government, individual freedom, and free enterprise? To get away from socialism we need another spectrum!
For starters at least, a much more logical spectrum is that described above which has total government, socialism, under any label on the Far Left, no government at all, anarchy, on the Far Right, and limited Constitutional government and individual freedom and responsibility in the middle or.... ....slightly to the Right.
And here are the Pournelle Axes, as spectrum which reverses those definitions somewhat and also adds a dimension of Rationalism-Irrationalism.
Here is the Wikipedia article on ideological spectra.
Strictly speaking, Monarchy is the furthest of the far right - with the understanding of monarchy as Burke understood it in the late 18th century; constitutional and subservient to a parlaiment. Neither anarchy, nor Nazism, nor facsism has any actual affinity with the right - the complete conservative would be someone who would like to see a Hapsburg crowned in Vienna as Holy Roman Emperor (though, in a pinch, a Wittelsbach or Guelph would do), with the Pope ensconced in Rome looking after theological affairs.
I kid you not, the sales pitch says "A CPUSA travel mug, for fellow travelers (and members)."
Totally weird.