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No, they are not true-believing Communists. No, they are not unaware of the toll of the Great Leap Forward or the Killing Fields. No, they are not plotting to undermine democracy.

But they will insist that there is an essential difference between Nazism and Communism between race-hatred and class-hatred; Buchenwald and the gulag that morally favors the latter. They will attempt to dissociate Communist theory from practice in an effort to acquit the former. They will balance acknowledgment of the repression and mass murder of Communism with references to its real advances and achievements. They will say that true communism has never been tried. They will write about Stalinist playwright Lillian Hellman in tones of sympathy and understanding they never extend to film director Elia Kazan.

Progressive intelligentsia is moralist against one half of the world, but accords to the revolutionary movement an indulgence that is realist in the extreme, the French scholar Raymond Aron wrote in The Opium of the Intellectuals in 1955. How many intellectuals have come to the revolutionary party via the path of moral indignation, only to connive ultimately at terror and autocracy?

On Thursday, I noted that intellectuals have a long history of making fools of themselves with their political commitments, and that the phenomenon is fully bipartisan.

But the consequences of the lefts fellow-traveling and excuse-making are more dangerous. Venezuela is today in the throes of socialist dictatorship and humanitarian ruin, having been cheered along its predictable and unmerry course by the usual progressive suspects.

One of those suspects, Jeremy Corbyn, may be Britains next prime minister, in part because a generation of Britons has come of age not knowing that the line running from progressive social commitments to catastrophic economic results is short and straight.

Bernie Sanders captured the heart, if not yet the brain, of the Democratic Party last year by portraying democratic socialism as nothing more than an extension of New Deal liberalism. But the Vermont senator also insists that the business model of Wall Street is fraud. Efforts to criminalize capitalism and financial services also have predictable results.

Its a bitter fact that the most astonishing strategic victory by the West in the last century turns out to be the one whose lessons weve never seriously bothered to teach, much less to learn. An ideology that at one point enslaved and immiserated roughly a third of the world collapsed without a fight and was exposed for all to see. Yet we still have trouble condemning it as we do equivalent evils. And we treat its sympathizers as romantics and idealists, rather than as the fools, fanatics or cynics they really were and are.

Winston Churchill wrote that when the Germans allowed the leader of the Bolsheviks to travel from Switzerland to St. Petersburg in 1917, they turned upon Russia the most grisly of all weapons. They transported Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus.

A century on, the bacillus isnt eradicated, and our immunity to it is still in doubt.

Originally posted here:
Opinion | Communism Through Rose-Colored Glasses