Red's Dead, Baby...Red's Dead

It has become fashionable of late for people to pine for the days of the Cold War.  I am not the first to notice this phenomenon.  The anarchy of the post-Cold War world, with its lack of uniforms and greater difficulty in determining the motives of non-state actors, is naturally going to produce a longing for times when it was easier (unless you were one of the New Left critics like Sen. Chris Dodd or John Kerry) to determine who the bad guys were.  The historical distance from the collapse of communism in Europe (almost 25 years now) has enabled people to look upon those days with a certain kind of whimsy.



I am not one to pooh-pooh humor of any sort.  As long as it's a good joke, pretty much any subject is fair game.  However, lest we forget, communism killed about 100 million people in the 20th century.  But because it killed them in pursuit of the oh-so-noble goal of equality for all mankind, we are supposed to temper our outrage in ways that no one would ever do in regard to the other great killer of the 20th century, Nazism.

I just finished reading Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe by Anne Applebaum, who previously won the Pulitzer Prize for Gulag, her history of the enormous Soviet system of concentration camps.  Check out Gulag's 1-star review entitled "Neo Con Propaganda" for evidence that Soviet communism still has its defenders.  I highly recommend Iron Curtain for a view of the sickening ways the people of East Germany, Poland, and Hungary were oppressed immediately after they had just been traumatized by World War II.  For a wider, international view of the dark record of communism, read The Black Book of Communism, a joint project of French, Polish, and Czech historians.

One of the most fascinating revelations of both these texts is the consistency of the communist techniques, regardless of what part of the world they called home.  In order to achieve power, they would first form alliances, or "Popular Fronts", with Left and Center-Left parties to gain power and eliminate the threat from the Right.  Next, purge the government of the non-communist Left through violence and intimidation.  Once in power, they would systemically imprison and/or execute various classes of people, at various times, usually starting with the aristocracy and other elites and work their way through society.  A final step is the legacy of Stalin:  the purging of the Communist Party itself.  Often, it was a never-ending purge.

Communism was a real ideology that REALLY wanted to conquer the world and actively tried to do so.  For much of the Cold War, it seemed like the better bet to win in the contest with the western democracies.  The former communists who fought against it, and they were legion, often felt they had left the winning side.  And then it all collapsed in 1989.  We should all be grateful for that.

Three novels to help you better understand life under communism:

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitszyn
Darkness At Noon by Arthur Koestler
The Captive Mind by Czeslaw Milosz