August 20, 2009
NYT: You know what's cool? Communism
Perhaps book reviewers over at the New York Times should spend less time reading biographies of the founding fathers of communism and more time reading the biographies of the tens of millions killed -- in a single century! -- by the followers of that ideology?
[Right: Gulag slave laborers dig the Balamor canal]
I always got a kick out of communists in grad school. On the one hand, always eager to excuse the crimes of Stalin as somehow connected only to his own ego and having nothing to do whatsoever with the tenets of Marx.
On the other hand, Hitler's crimes were always somehow inseparable from the tenets of National Socialism or the broader fascist movement.
Perhaps if Stalin was the only person to have committed genocide in the name of communism you might argue that he was an outlier -- that the Soviet Union under Stalin was not representative of communism in general.
But, dude:
Mao -- 65 million dead
Pol Pot -- 2 million dead
Kim Il-sung -- 2 million dead
Ho Chi Minh -- 1 million dead
The list goes on and on. Are we seeing a pattern here?
It's odd that the most educated among us -- presumably trained in the ancient art of seeing patterns -- can't make the connection between the underlying ideology and the acts committed in the name of that ideology.
UPDATE: Oh, the agony and the irony -- it's killing me!
By Rusty at August 20, 2009 01:56 PM | | l digg this
