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The Liberal Love Affair with Communists and Dictators
In response to Ricochet member Mark’s post about the failure of President Obama’s Cuba policy, Titus Techera, who is Romanian, left a comment that too few people born and raised in Western democracies will fully understand:
I was a bouncing baby boy when the communist tyrant was assassinated. I’m not sure it would have happened without Reagan and his foreign policy. Maybe the USSR was bound to collapse. But when? I am assured by the free-market devotees that it was born dead. What an attitude … So many people were cursed to live that death. My young miss told me the other day about how Americans go as tourists to Cuba, then go online and complain about the amenities. … We had a strange moment, again. Will no one understand what fate awaited us? Into what fate our parents were born? I’m not expecting world peace, but ridding Cuba of its communist tyrants is long overdue, and a permanent sign of American shame, of the cowardice of Kennedy and his followers.
Now, I myself understand a bit about communists, although not from first-hand experience; the first four years of my life don’t count. What I know was passed down through my own family. My family endured two consecutive communist regimes. The first was Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, followed by the Vietnamese-installed regime in Cambodia. The second was a paradise compared to the first, but it was nothing cheery to talk about, either. My grandfather did his undergraduate studies in China in the 1950s, slightly before the Great Leap Forward. He used to tell stories about his time there. He had next to nothing good to say about China under Mao. My family said the same about the Soviet Union: My uncle and a distant relative did their studies in Tashkent in the 1980s. They pretty much confirmed to me that communism only produces misery, suffering, and death. This is why it’s so infuriating for me to see people who were born into a freedom they take for granted gallivanting around with dictators and old commies.
What is it about communists and dictators that gets western liberals so hot under the collar? The countless deaths? The starvation? It’s happening right now in North Korea, but Dennis Rodman has a glowing view of Kim Jong-un. The whole country is a death camp, but the New York Philharmonic thought nothing of it when they went on a grand tour of Pyongyang in 2008. Thomas Friedman writes love letters to the ChiComs every other day. Sean Penn lost a friend he was blessed to have when Venezuelan president-for-life Hugo Chavez died. How many people have been killed, tortured, and imprisoned by Castro and the butcher Che Guevara? But Michael Moore thinks the Castro brothers are generous dictators. The Democrats are having a love affair with a presidential candidate who honeymooned in the Soviet Union. Anita Dunn, President Obama’s former communication director, says Mao Zedong is one of her two favorite political philosophers I don’t want to know who her other favorite is.
Why do liberals remain enamored with communists and dictators? What would it take to end this love affair?
Published in General
Just pointing out that without some degree of popular support you cannot have a revolution.
And this popular support stems from people seeing themselves in an awful situation with no hope for improvement as the system stands. (Hence: revolution.)
Imagine the attractiveness of “to each according to his needs” to a mother who’s lost three of her five children to hunger – though the landlord and his children never went without.
That’s the kind of thing that resulted in support for the Marxists in China, and more recently in Nepal and Eastern India. Ignoring that is ignoring half the story.
(Do the Marxists deliver? In the long run no, or at least not in full, but that’s not immediately apparent.)
Yes, and there have been a few others like that in the not so distant past.
Do you know how many of the millions who died under Mao died of starvation? Your example is appalling to those people who lived through that horror.
You really need to not support rabid dogs who come into a society and kill other dogs. They go after you next. Most people would gladly revert back to the previous regime after having to deal with Communists.
I guess it’s too bad the people who supported Mao couldn’t see the future. They could only see the past and their present.
Haha! My sister went to the Sorbonne and came back with new makeup ideas.
Yes, and of course the Communist past is filled with dead bodies so that’s the point here — we can see the past and we shouldn’t suggest to people that they should start a revolution if there is any possibility that it will be taken over by commies. There should be serious caution around these people and these ideas.
Yes, things can get worse.
But were they nonsense?
I don’t disagree with you Larry. But consider:
Marxist movements have generally only gotten mass support when they involve some of the most disadvantaged, least educated people in the world. (I’m thinking Chinese and Russian revolutions; the Sendero Luminoso, Naxalites in India.)(Kerala is….different, and I’d love your view of that.) These people don’t know history, they can’t assess their options in that context.
What they do know is their present-day problems. Without context, a Marxist response can seem a good one to these.
Warning people of the dangers of Marxism is less than useful without actually giving them a practical alternative that helps in the right now – and that means recognising the validity of their issues, and owning how our system has failed them.
People don’t support Marxism because they’re possessed, they support it because they’re hungry.
NB: I am seeing it from an Indian perspective, and Naxalites in India are 100% due to India failing to give meaningful opportunities to disadvantaged, uneducated populations in the East. It’s our own fault.
Some of the Khmer Rouge soldiers who joined in the early 1970s were illiterate farmers and peasants.
I have read a lot on the Khmer Rouge, and it never ceases to amaze me how such stupid ideas can be implimented. The first thing they did was kill all the people who knew how to do anything. The doctors, the engineers, anyone with an education (other than the jerks in the leadership). No wonder it was probably one of the worst regimes in history.
But I think those in the west are enamoured with strong men. I think, when you become and adult and see how harsh the world really is, it is comforting to think that there could be a figure who will run things for us. That will take care of us the way we were taken care of as children. I think that is what makes socialism so attractive.
Well, my concern is that people who are intelligent and able to get the true story stop promoting Communists. Education doesn’t do it because there are any number (probably a majority) of college professors who would love to meet with Castro and they love him and they defend him and they should not do this. This is Lidens’ point here — this “love affair” has to stop. Society should shun any and all people who can’t see evil of this extent.
Zafar, it takes no public support to have a Communist revolution. It is a democratic delusion of the worst kind. In practice, it serves to legitimize massacre & tyranny. The few important Communist regimes cam up by slaughter in a time of great crisis. It is pathetic to call that crisis capitalistic in any way. It was government legitimacy that was at stake. To think of the Tsar’s legitimacy as somehow tied up with capitalism is laughable. Something similar can be said for Q’ing China or Dr. Sun Yat Sen’s republic or even Chiang Kai-Sheck.
Let us say plainly that the people tend to obey rule, especially after long suffering or in terror. It is no virtue in them or the rulers.
Now, as to where it all started, Russia had an enormous population, so the only thing communism could have enjoyed was public indifference; secondly, the population was mostly rural & illiterate & separated by enormous distances from communist propaganda. Thirdly, support for communism spread among certain classes in certain cities, because of the incredible strain of the war. Then there was the collapse of the Romanovs, also nothing to do with communism or the people.
Then the October revolution came. The Bolsheviks got to victory & power by luck & iron will, & it was mostly luck, even in circumstance more inimical to legitimate government than Russia had seen in centuries.
The appeal of Communism looks mysterious from an American perspective mostly for two reasons.
First, it’s so difficult for us to imagine the level of poverty that most of the world lived in during the early 20th century.
Second, as it’s mostly been framed in this thread, we pretend that Communism’s main competitor was capitalism. It wasn’t, and capitalism was not an option for most of the world’s population.
Communism saw its greatest gains in countries that had even worse economic/political systems to begin with. Why did the US side with the ChiComs in WWII? They were the only faction that had their act together well enough to put up a realistic fight against the Japanese. How? The critical thing you have to remember is that Communism is a Modernist system. Awful as it is, it still beats premodern systems any day of the week.
Mao’s reign saw massive annual economic growth for almost thirty straight years, and a doubling of life expectancy over that same period. Castro and Chavez both turned things around drastically–for the desperately poor factions of their countries.
Why does socialism persist in Venezuela? It’s not that mysterious. Because even though the country as a whole is poorer, with the toilet paper shortages and inflation and all, Chavez still raised the standard of living for the worst-off. And they have enough votes to have kept him in power and continued the nonsense under Maduro.
You all might find this article from the NYT about current day Venezuela interesting:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/09/world/americas/a-reporter-travels-through-venezuela-a-country-teetering-on-the-brink.html?partner=msft_msn&_r=2
To paraphrase Mencken, to the extent the people chose Socialism, they are getting it good and hard.
Jason, you’re wrong about Mao standing up to the Japanese. Chiang Kai-shek was sandbagged by Soviet spies in our government. He was actually fighting the Japanese while Mao was keeping his powder dry for his takeover. Read Jung Chang’s book, Mao.
Also, the book by M. Stanton Evans: Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy is full of details of how China was lost by our state department and some DOD people. The chapters in Part II are especially relevant if you don’t want to read all the details on McCarthy but only want to get the details on what happened during the war and during the years leading up to Chiang Kai-shek having to leave and set up camp in Taiwan. It’s heart-breaking to realize how easy it was done by these people (John Stewart Service, Solomon Adler, Harry Dexter White and other traitors) because Roosevelt and Truman were so incompetent.
Way late to the (Communist) Party, but I just wanted to say Lidens, this is a magnificent rant. Well done.
I’m kind of partial to Reticulator’s approach–maybe we should just ask them why.
Thank you.
Chiang fought both Japan’s and Mao’s armies.
He was the fourth ally in World War II.
Exactly. And it shows how history books — thru evasion or mendacity — have given people the opposite impression. Sickening, really.
I realize I’m walking straight into this, but really? It is not a generally known fact that Mao kept his powder dry until after the war and then turned on the Republic of China’s government? I mean if you don’t know that then how can you make sense of the “who lost China” question that dominated politics in the early 50s?
He didn’t exactly not fight. Mao was advancing through China in his communist revolution. He was not fighting the Japanese. He was fighting the Nationalists. That’s why the history books don’t describe what happened accurately.
Chiang was fighting on both fronts. He assumed or at least hoped that the allies would help him eventually. The Chinese Civil War
Amnesia of the leftists — they promote amnesia of all things that go against their world viewpoint.
It was certainly the impression I was left with reading history in the 1960s and 70s – that Mao was leading the fight against the Japanese. Since then I’ve read more accurate about Chiang being much more active, though he also kept his power dry at time, because both Chiang and Mao knew the big fight would be after the war with Japan ended. There is a new book on the topic by Rana Mitter that I’d recommend: China’s War With Japan 1937-45.
My grandmother shared a suite at Wellesley College with May-ling Soong Chiang, who later became Madame Chiang Kai-shek. In my grandmother’s books is a first-printing copy, inscribed to my grandmother, of War Messages and Other Selections, also called Madame Chiang’s Messages in War and Peace, published in September 1938.
Because of her student life in the United States, she was an unofficial ambassador to the United States from her husband, the Generalissimo. Madame Chiang was fighting Japan’s propaganda, which was as prolific as the Third Reich’s propaganda.
I have not read the book until today. I shall look through it for references to Mao.
For now, this reminds me a bit of where we are now in terms of the Middle East:
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Thanks, Marci. In the last year of the war Chinese people were dying or being killed at the rate of 250,000 per month. Only the Soviets lost more people during the war (I don’t know about the number of losses before the war). If there was no other good that came from our use of the atom bomb against the beasts in Japan at least stopping the slaughter of Chinese was by itself a noble good.
You’re welcome. I am retyping it by hand. :) :) :)
Yes. I can really see that.
I can’t believe I have never read this book. The massacres she describes are horrifying.
I am also understanding why the Chinese Communists went after Christians so aggressively. Madame Chiang was a Christian, and it was Christian missionaries who were helping the Nationalists.
You have a great story about Madame Chiang. I suppose everyone knows Chiang & Missus were Time‘s man & wife of the year in ’37–a horrible year for China. Also, she made the cover at least three times & was a friend of Henry Luce.
She also spoke to the US Congress.
Incredibly popular…