In my last post, I discussed the neglect of communist atrocities. Although communist governments murdered and repressed even more people than the Nazis, their crimes have gotten only a tiny fraction of the public awareness and recognition extend to the latter. But does that neglect matter? After all, the major communist regimes have either collapsed (the USSR and its Eastern European satellites) or evolved into much less oppressive forms (China and Vietnam). But there are several reasons why increasing recognition of communist crimes should be an important priority: providing justice for victims and perpetrators; alleviating the oppression of the unreformed communist governments that still exist today; and ensuring that comparable atrocities are never repeated. The twentieth anniversary of the fall of communism in Eastern Europe is as good a time as any to reflect on these points.
I. Justice for Victims and Perpetrators.
Millions of victims of communism are still alive today. They include former Gulag inmates, forced laborers, dissidents subjected to political repression, ethnic minorities such as the Crimean Tatars who were forcibly deported, and many others. With a few exceptions (principally in Eastern Europe), little has been done to recognize the suffering of these victims or to compensate them for the wrongs they suffered. Obviously, the scale of communist crimes was so vast that complete compensation is impossible. However, the impossibility of perfect compensation is no excuse for doing nothing. After all, the same can be said for the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes. Yet extensive efforts have been made to compensate Holocaust survivors and return property confiscated from Jewish and other Nazi victims. The German government has paid reparations to Holocaust survivors and former forced laborers, among others. These efforts at reparations for Nazi crimes surely have many shortcomings. But they far outstrip anything that has been done for the even more numerous victims of communism.
The same can be said for the issue of justice for the perpetrators. The Nuremberg trials punished some of the most important perpetrators of Nazi atrocities. Even after sixty years, US and European officials continue to hunt down Nazi criminals. Yet very little has been done to bring to justice the perpetrators of communist atrocities. This, despite the fact that many of the communist atrocities are much more recent than the Nazi ones, and more relatively high-ranking perpetrators are still alive. As in the Nazi case, it is impossible to capture and punish all of the guilty. And there is the additional problem that some of the worst communist criminals are protected by governments in nations where the communist party is still in power (China and North Korea, among others). Still, the best should not be the enemy of the good. The international community should at least try to punish those communist perpetrators who can be found, while putting pressure on recalcitrant governments to try or extradite the others.
We must do more to give justice to the victims and perpetrators of communist crimes. It isn’t yet too late. But it might well be in a few years, as more members of both groups die of old age.
II. Focusing Attention on Oppression in the Remaining Unreformed Communist Governments.
Most of the world’s communist regimes have either collapsed or reformed. However, at least two unreformed communist governments still remain: Cuba and North Korea. North Korea, in particular, is probably the world’s most oppressive regime, having starved to death at least 1 million of its own people as recently as the 1990s. It also maintains a system of Gulags and secret police that is, if anything, even more draconian than that of the USSR under Stalin. Despite the good press it enjoys among some Western leftists, Castro’s Cuba is only modestly better. Since coming to power in 1959, Castro’s government has executed some 1.5% of Cuba’s population for “political” dissent, while incarcerating another 5.6% in concentration camps. These figures would be even higher if not for the proximity of the United States, which enabled a large part of Cuba’s population to flee. Nonlethal political repression in Cuba is less severe than in North Korea, but still worse than in all but a tiny handful of other governments.
Despite these atrocities, Cuba and North Korea receive only a tiny fraction of the attention that human rights groups and the international community pay to much lesser offenses committed by democratic governments or non-leftist dictatorships. Imagine if, after the fall of Hitler, an unreconstructed Nazi-like regime had remained in place in some small European country, and continued to run concentration camps, a Gestapo-like secret police, and so on. Would not that regime be an international pariah constantly targeted by human rights groups and subjected to severe sanctions by all self-respecting democratic states?
It’s difficult to say whether pressure by human rights groups and Western governments could force Cuba and North Korea to reduce their oppression. However, both regimes have weak economies and both seek to create a positive image in the West. A comprehensive system of sanctions imposed by all democratic states and a massive campaign of shaming might have at least a chance of success.
III. Never Again.
The extensive attention paid to the Nazi crimes has helped sensitize people to the dangers of racism, anti-Semitism, and extreme nationalism. These evils have not disappeared. But at least the need to oppose them is widely accepted throughout the democratic world. A similar focus on communist crimes might increase recognition of the dangers created by ideologies based on class warfare and socialism (by which I mean full-blown state domination of the economy, not merely government regulation of private industry or a welfare state).
It is unlikely that communism will reappear in the exact form practiced by Lenin, Stalin, or Mao. However, the core ideas of socialism and class warfare are still advocated by various political movements and governments, especially in the Third World; for example, by rulers such as Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, both of whom have cited the communists as models for their own policies. Sometimes, socialism and class conflict are coupled with extreme nationalism and oppression of minority groups, a combination pioneered by the Nazis. The debate over socialism is far from over. Moreover, future political and technological developments could make a resurgence of socialist totalitarianism more likely.
Of course, the combination of class warfare and socialism doesn’t inevitably lead to mass murder on the scale committed in the USSR, China, and Cambodia. However, they do greatly increase its likelihood. Almost every fully socialist government (by which, again, I mean a government that manage to take control over the vast bulk of the economy) that held on to power for more than a few years ended up murdering a substantial fraction of its population (usually at least 1–2%). Even the relatively moderate government of Yugoslavia –generally considered the least oppressive communist regime — killed some 1 million of its people, according to calculations by political scientist Rudolph Rummel. Indeed, the risk of mass murder associated with full-blown socialism may actually be even greater than that caused by racism or anti-Semitism. Many racist or anti-Semitic regimes have existed for long periods of time without committing mass murder — including the majority of such governments. Nazi Germany was an unusual extreme case — one where mass murder was itself partly facilitated by state control of the economy almost as extensive as that in communist states.
Of course, racism, anti-Semitism, and extreme nationalism are great evils that should be combatted even when they don’t lead to mass murder. Yet the same can be said for socialism and extreme class warfare. Even when socialist governments stop short of mass murder, they still suppress political and economic freedom in a variety of other ways — to say nothing of reducing the standard of living of the people.
In sum, there are many good reasons to increase awareness of communist crimes. Achieving that objective in the face of widespread indifference and occasional hostility will be a difficult task. But those who take the idea of “never again” seriously must not flinch from the challenge.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST WATCH: I suppose I should mention that many of my own relatives are among the victims of communist crimes and potentially could receive compensation for them, if serious compensation programs were established. At least one of my relatives (my late grandmother) also received compensation for Nazi war crimes from the German government.
UPDATE: I suppose I shoulld briefly rebut the silly but inevitable charge that my emphasis on the importance of recognizing communist atrocities is somehow a cover for attempts to discredit domestic liberals. This ploy is akin to saying that criticism of racists, anti-Semites, or Nazis is really just a ploy for discrediting US conservatives. In further response, I will say only that I have always carefully avoided labeling domestic liberals as socialists (to say nothing of communists), have criticized such labeling by others, and have not used that charge myself in my various VC posts and other writings criticizing liberal domestic policies. As people like Harry Truman, JFK, and Henry Jackson recognized, there is no necessary contradiction between being a liberal on domestic policy and a strong opponent of communism.
Mark N. says:
The 2nd point doesn’t seem wholly convincing to me as to North Korea. Is it really lack of a recognition of Communist crimes that is to blame in any way for the continuing situation there? Nobody likes North Korea’s government, but nobody is sure how to get rid of it, either. And in many ways, the problems with it are not so much Communist as Crazy-Dictator-ist. With a hokey invented religion, autocratic paranoid control, irrational decisions that result in widespread death and suffering, etc., North Korea bears similarities to non-communist autocratic regimes like, say, Turkmenistan under Turkmenbashi, or Iraq under Saddam. Is there really something distinctly Communist about its dictatorship that makes it particularly bad, compared to (for example) the more right-wing nationalism of the Ba’athists?
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November 8, 2009, 3:22 amStating the obvious says:
Despite the good press it [North Korea] enjoys among some Western leftists
Can you please provide one example of “good press” that North Korea enjoys among “some Western leftists”. I was under the impression that North Korea was almost universally recognized as a hellhole in the west that exists only because of the support of its neighbor, The People’s Republic of China.
It is interesting that your bar for “reform” is so low. By implementing some economic reforms, China is suddenly a “much less oppressive country” even though it is still a communist dictatorship that brutally suppresses dissidents and independent trade unionists and executes thousands of people a year (the exact number is a state secret)
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November 8, 2009, 3:32 amIlya Somin says:
The 2nd point doesn’t seem wholly convincing to me as to North Korea. Is it really lack of a recognition of Communist crimes that is to blame in any way for the continuing situation there? Nobody likes North Korea’s government, but nobody is sure how to get rid of it, either.
True, getting rid of the NK government is difficult. However, the difficulty is increased by the fact that no one has made a high priority of it. Certainly not as high as they would if Kim Jong Il and co. were Nazis rather than communists.
North Korea bears similarities to non-communist autocratic regimes like, say, Turkmenistan under Turkmenbashi, or Iraq under Saddam. Is there really something distinctly Communist about its dictatorship that makes it particularly bad, compared to (for example) the more right-wing nationalism of the Ba’athists?
NK is far more oppressive and has killed far more people than any of these other examples, or indeed all of them combined. In Iraq under Saddam (the worst of them), there was still some private property, many people could still travel outside the country, and minority religions could (sometimes) practice their faith openly. None of this is the case in NK. Saddam also didn’t have gulags comparable in scale to NK’s or kill as many people.
Moreover, Saddam explicitly cited Stalin as one of the models for his regime. So his government wasn’t simply a matter of “right-wing nationalism.” Rather, it was a strange combination of models.
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November 8, 2009, 3:36 amIlya Somin says:
Despite the good press it [North Korea] enjoys among some Western leftists
I was referring to Cuba, not North Korea.
It is interesting that your bar for “reform” is so low. By implementing some economic reforms, China is suddenly a “much less oppressive country” even though it is still a communist dictatorship that brutally suppresses dissidents and independent trade unionists and executes thousands of people a year (the exact number is a state secret)
China is still a bad government. But there is a huge difference between the current regime and the one that slaughtered tens of millions of people under Mao. Also, today’s Chinese have far more economic, religious, and even political freedoms than those of 30 years ago, to say nothing of a much higher standard of living. Today’s Chinese government is clearly “far less oppressive” than Mao’s China. That doesn’t mean that it is actually good or admirable, and I never said that it was.
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November 8, 2009, 3:40 amTweets that mention The Volokh Conspiracy » Blog Archive » Why the Neglect of Communist Crimes Matters -- Topsy.com says:
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by alkali_x86, Robot J. McCarthy. Robot J. McCarthy said: Bring back HUAC RT @alkali_x86 Why the Neglect of Communist Crimes Matters http://j.mp/4e28Xc [...]
cubanbob says:
Mark N: Ba’athists are Arab Nationalist Socialist. Arab Nazi’s.
All communist countries are totalitarian and often Stalin style dictatorships. Communism cannot work at all without a totalitarian regime. As they used to say in the fifties, the only good communist is a dead communist. There is yet a single communist country that is better for being communist than had it not undergone communism and there never will be.
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November 8, 2009, 4:51 amStating the obvious says:
Also, today’s Chinese have far more economic, religious, and even political freedoms than those of 30 years ago, to say nothing of a much higher standard of living. Today’s Chinese government is clearly “far less oppressive” than Mao’s China. That doesn’t mean that it is actually good or admirable, and I never said that it was.
Far more than none is not a lot. And contrary to what you believe, a higher standard of living does not necessarily mean more freedom. And while maybe a quarter of the population does indeed have a much higher standard of living, the economic improvements of the past thirty years have completely bypassed most of the people of China–and a good chunk of the country are certainly worse off economically than they were thirty years ago.
But you imply that it is much better than the current Cuban regime. The current Chinese regime is the main sponsor of the horrible North Korean regime. It brutally suppresses dissent. Executes thousands a year. Just because it makes lots of cheap toys and shoes doesn’t mean that it is better than Cuba. Your estimate of the number of executions carried out in Cuba after the revolution is off by at least a factor of ten.
The government of Cuba before the revolution was thoroughly corrupt. It was nothing but a branch of the Mafia, run by Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky.
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November 8, 2009, 5:56 amasdffdas says:
You state North Korea “starved to death at least 1 million of its own people as recently as the 1990s”, and as the source for that claim you link the article in Time http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1737780–1,00.html “The Next Great North Korean Famine” by Bill Powell.
That article does state that “nearly one million people starved to death when a murderous famine gripped North Korea in the 1990s.” But that statement does not imply yours. The statement that North Korea starved to death people connotes that the leadership intentionally starved a million people to death. All the article says is that a million or so people starved to death, there is no assertion of intentionality.
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November 8, 2009, 6:33 amBrett Bellmore says:
Tyrannical regimes so routinely experience famines, that it’s absurd to maintain that it’s just coincidence. Starvation is handy to a tyranny; It’s the only form of genocide that arouses any degree of international sympathy.
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November 8, 2009, 6:51 ampireader says:
Professor Somin –
I understand and sympathize with your desire for more recognition of the brutality inflicted by 20th-century communist regimes; but I believe that it’s unrealistic.
The problem is your benchmark: the extraordinary level of attention paid to the Nazi atrocities. That was an exception, due to a unique combination of political and social circumstances. More typical is the modest level of recognition given to Japan’s abuses in China and Southeast Asia, the Khmer Rouge’s in Cambodia, the Hutus’ in Rwanda, the Ottomans’ in Armenia, etc.
People close to the victims care intensely; the rest of the world mostly shrugs and goes on. The best evidence may be how little attention gets paid to today’s abuses, even while they are underway (the Serbs in Bosnia, the Sudanese in Darfur, etc.)
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November 8, 2009, 6:56 amPersonFromPorlock says:
asdffdas, if a million people starve to death in a state-controlled economy, it’s because the state intended them to. Growing food isn’t that hard.
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November 8, 2009, 6:58 amStating the obvious says:
if a million people starve to death in a state-controlled economy, it’s because the state intended them to. Growing food isn’t that hard.
By that token, the British are responsible for the deaths of 1 million Irish during the potato famine and about 750,000 Germans during World War I.
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November 8, 2009, 7:10 amJerome Cole says:
Does it really matter if famine is intentional or not? The fact is that totalitarianism kills on a massive scale and must be opposed.
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November 8, 2009, 7:14 amPersonFromPorlock says:
pireader:
pireader’s comment supports a point I’ve made in other threads, that our obsession with the Nazi Holocaust is a foil for our ignoring of other, ongoing ‘holocausts’. This is less true now than it was during the Cambodian holocaust (now we mostly just shrug and say “stuff happens”), but back then it gave us something to look at while we passed by on the other side. I suspect it remains the (safely over) holocaust of preference.
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November 8, 2009, 7:16 amsashal says:
Two points:
–I bet if Nazi Germany did not start the WWII we would not be hunting Nazi war criminals 60 years after and your grandma would not get the compensation from Germany..
–in ex-communist countries one of the major reasons the crimes of communist regimes got as much attention as they got and no more is because many of those communists chameleoned themselves into the new governments as a reformers.
Why wold they go after themselves or their brethren?
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November 8, 2009, 7:24 amMark N. says:
Sure, but I suppose what I’d blame for that is, “Kim Jong Il is even more murderously insane than Saddam, and was in power longer than Turkmenbashi”, rather than anything to do with Communism. Kim doesn’t even mention communism as far as I can tell, and the country is instead organized around his wacky “Juche idea” ideology. Saddam killed fewer people because he wasn’t as much of a total nut, and had some desire to keep his country functional (he also had some oil money that made it easier to prop things up and avoid things like famines).
I do think there could be some sort of historical argument, since Kim’s father was clearly a communist. It’s possible to argue (though I’m not sure it’d be successful) that Kim’s murderous insanity was only enabled, or was made worse, by the society organized along communist lines that he inherited from his father. But as for his own politics, I suppose I don’t see much communist about it; more of a founder-of-his-own-religion madman sort of thing.
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November 8, 2009, 7:57 amPersonFromPorlock says:
Stating the obvious:
Well, yes. Although some excuse can be made for the potato famine because of ignorance about the danger of a single food crop, and Britain was making war on the Germans, which isn’t how we usually expect a government to treat its own populace. But we aren’t talking about Britain then, we’re talking about North Korea now.
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November 8, 2009, 8:08 amanynonyno says:
Ilya, I for one appreciate the update at the end of your post. Although it isn’t your fault, it is difficult lately to take seriously anything written by someone from the right that contains the word socialism.
I think the other folks who’ve pointed out that the Nazi-perpetrated holocaust is an outlier in terms of recognition are basically correct. I wish all atrocities would receive such attention and efforts at both restorative and retributive justice — not just those perpetrated by communists, although those have certainly been major.
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November 8, 2009, 8:44 amNorthern Dave says:
“Moreover, future political and technological developments could make a resurgence of socialist totalitarianism more likely.”
Thanks for the well argued blog. This line caught my eye as I am considering as an option retiring in the not overly distant future to Northern Scotland so I keep an eye on developments there.
Provided Alex Salmond doesn’t get his Separation of Scots and Angles, Scotland will still be part of GB and GB now has a phenomenal number of cameras on the streets to watch the citizenry’s every move (sounds like something from an Ayn Rand novel doesn’t it...) and is seriously trying to move towards IDing all the serfs.
I don’t think (most) politicians in GB are intending an NK style horror government, but at what point do the tools you hand your government become impossible to defend against and too tempting for a Tyranny of One Man or an Oligarchy?
Thanks again for the cogent reminders.
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November 8, 2009, 8:55 amShelbyC says:
I don’t get it. Is there anybody who thinks they aren’t?
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November 8, 2009, 9:09 amDYSPEPSIA GENERATION » Blog Archive » Why the Neglect of Communist Crimes Matters says:
[...] Read it. [...]
BM says:
Interesting CNN article. Keep an eye on your 6 0’clock
http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/11/06/lapin.wrongful.conviction/index.html
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November 8, 2009, 9:32 amEdward Sisson says:
The public should be far more aware of the crimes of communism, and commentators often note that the public is far more aware of the crimes of the Nazis. The argument is then often made that somehow, the people or their leaders are to blame for not having an awareness of the communist crimes as much as their awareness of the Nazi crimes.
But there are very good historical reasons why the public has a high awareness of Nazi crimes. We fought a major war, WWII, against German armies. Germany declared war on us. German U-boats sank ships right off our coasts. We fought the German military in North Africa, Sicily, Italy, France, Belgium, and Germany itself. Our whole country mobilized against Germany. For 3 1/2 years, all the American press emphasized the German enemy. So of course Americans have a high level of awareness of Nazi crimes. By contrast, we never had a land war against the Soviets or the Chinese communists.
Should the American public have a higher awareness of the crimes of communism? Yes, definitely. But should the American public be blamed for not having as high an awareness of communist crimes as of Nazi crimes? Not at all.
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November 8, 2009, 10:10 amRicardo says:
That depends how much you weight a country’s foreign policy in deciding its level of horribleness. I would argue for not putting too much weight on foreign policy exactly because foreign policy is so often dictated by realpolitik. China allows its citizens to travel abroad, to choose their own occupation and to start their own businesses. That’s vastly more freedom than Cuba is prepared to allow.
Not to mention that, technically speaking, China is not a “dictatorship.” It is a one party state but there is no cult of personality there aside from some residual nostalgia for Mao. I was in Beijing just a few months ago and don’t recall ever seeing a prominent picture of Hu Jintao displayed anywhere. Certainly, Chinese schoolchildren are not being required to memorize passages out of a book of his or write poems about his magnificence. China is moving toward a Singapore-like one-party authoritarian regime and away from a totalitarian cultish dictatorship.
China’s Communists — mostly engineers by training — are more interested in the theories of bridge– and dam-building than in dictatorship of the proletariat or Hegelian theories of history.
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November 8, 2009, 10:15 amPaolo Pagliaro says:
I’m Italian — so my English isn’t probably always correct.
As you probably know, in my country’s recent history Communism has been a huge factor, both in cultural and political matters; even if the Communist Party, in the strict sense of the word, is not a big actor anymore (in the last elections it was ruled out for the first time in post-WWII history), its culture continues to shape many people’s views, especially in the elite circles and in the universities. This has been most apparent during the collapse of the soviet block twenty years ago — so many important people indifferent or openly sorry for their dream fading away; so much disregard towards Eastern Europe countries, perceived and depicted as right-wing bigots since they rejoiced in their own “petty bourgeois” liberation.
I want to make a couple of points:
1) speaking of “Justice for Victims and Perpetrators” I don’t think the important thing is the pecuniary reparation: that would be impossible and a source of further sterile litigations. What millions of heroic dissidents and many more simple people deserve is a clear, unmistakable condemnation of their oppressor and a universal recognition of their witness. I personally know persons who endured years in the communist prisons: they longed to be heard by the free west, only to be hugely disappointed by the coldness and embarrassment with which they were welcomed.
2) My second point concerns history as it is taught to our sons (for us is too late). Our school text are still almost completely silent about the crimes committed under communism, even in those countries few hundreds kilometers far from our houses.
In Italy the most murderous case against civilians — even compared to those committed by the nazi — happened at the end of WWII, when the Yugoslav communist army entered Istria (north-east of Italy) and pretended to occupy it — which they largely did: around 12,000 people were killed, mainly thrown alive — tied in couple with barbed wire– in the natural wells (“foibe”) so common in this region. The victims were usually chosen among those — local politicians, teachers, professionals, civil administrators — who could obstacle them: a policy well known in every East-European country fallen under Soviet power. Some 350,000 escaped from Istria to Italy, leaving all their possessions behind themselves: often, when they arrived by train or ship, they were welcomed by local Italian communists as “fascists and pigs”. This tragedy has been kept out of the school books and official history — but everyone knew it — till 2001 when a national memory has been introduced, among fierce complaints. I personally know some of these people: do you understand what’s been for them to endure the silence and the outrage for 50 years?
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November 8, 2009, 10:24 amMJ Sparro says:
You said:
“This ploy is akin to saying that criticism of racists, anti-Semites, or Nazis is really just a ploy for discrediting US conservatives.”
The Nazi’s were socialists, hence the word “socialism” in their own name(Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei). You can always read Mein Kampf for more proof.
I’m pretty sure you know this yet somehow you have managed to let yourself be conditioned by communist and subsequently democratic propaganda.
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November 8, 2009, 10:39 amsashal says:
and of course the clueless ignorant idiots like sparro, who stand for fascistic birds’ rights, contribute greatly for the lame discourse Ultra RW imposed on this country
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November 8, 2009, 11:03 amBozoer Rebbe says:
Was Ireland a “state-controlled-economy”? Was anyone preventing the Irish from growing a different variety of potato, one that was resistant to the disease that wiped out the Irish potato crop? The Irish potato famine was the result of monoculture farming, not bad governance by the Brits. We face a similar problem today because so many farmers grow a particular strain of Russett, highly preferred by McDonalds and other purveyors of french fries.
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November 8, 2009, 11:04 amInsufficiently Sensitive says:
Can you please provide one example of “good press” that North Korea enjoys among “some Western leftists”.
With pleasure. At some time during past decades, the formerly first-rate magazine ‘Scientific American’ dropped pretenses of the scientific method and turned sharply to the political left. Evidence: its wholly unscientific, but vicious attack on Bjorn Lomborg for his critique of global warming — in which he was refused more than token space to refute his critics. They attacked him partly on their caricature of his credentials, not on the evidence which he provided — meaning, that science was abandoned for political gain.
Long before that travesty, Scientific American published, under the guise of a sociological article, a breathlessly favorable puff piece (there’s no better description) on North Korea’s urban planning masterpiece of Pyongyang, in which its happy citizens were painted in blissful appreciation of their leaders’ thoughtful works of apartment blocks and mass transportation, making private markets for housing and mobility wholly unnecessary. Apologies for failure to locate the issue, but it ended my subscription on the spot.
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November 8, 2009, 11:16 amJakeCollins says:
While Mr Somin makes some effort to distinguish the “bad” socialism from the “good” socialism, it’s hard to understand what to make of the claim that “Almost every fully socialist government (by which, again, I mean a government that manage to take control over the vast bulk of the economy) that held on to power for more than a few years ended up murdering a substantial fraction of its population.”
I suppose the post-WWII “socialist” governments of Western Europe don’t qualify as truly “socialist” despite often having the world “socialist” in their party title?
The author claims he’s not trying to red-bait domestic liberals, but I think he doth protest too much.
As other commentators have noted, capitalist governments (e.g., UK in the 19th century) are just as capable of genocide as socialist ones. He’d be better off trying to form a consensus against totalitarianism rather than implying and then denying that there is a continuity between universal health care and the gulag.
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November 8, 2009, 11:19 amDave N says:
And, of course, ad hominems from people like sashal does much to discredit the left.
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November 8, 2009, 11:21 amKevin R.C. O'Brien says:
I’ve found the work of Dr R.J. Rummel interesting. Rummel’s emeritus at Hawaii, and has dedicated his career to the study of what he calls “Democide”: the murder of people (and entire populations) by their own governments. He has some grim numbers, but it’s pretty clear that Communist tyranny has killed more innocent humans than all the human beings (innocent and combatant) who have died in all the wars of all recorded history.
A truly grim statistibite, that.
Rummel’s website is at http://hawaii.edu/powerkills/ and it’s apt.
I’m always amazed when I’m in some cluster of supposedly educated people and someone trots out the old, “socialism has never been tried hard enough” meme.” Er, not exactly, whatever you fail Stalin and Mao for it can’t be vigour.
And those same people usually talk about how “the US is a new country compared to the nations of Europe.” Really? The US has been limping along in political gridlock for 230-odd years, while la belle France has burned through five (mostly weak) republics interspersed with various forms of absolutism, and Ancient Russia has gone through three forms of absolutism with the briefest flirtation with representative democracy between the second and third. Even Britain has seen vast constitutional changes in recent years, with the elimination of the sober check of the Lords; the danger of parliamentary primacy is that there’s no brake on the passions of the people.
The more I see of other nations’ governance, the more I’m humbled by what Madison and the gang built — as imperfect as it may be, it beats the hell out of all the alternatives.
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November 8, 2009, 11:21 amRon Norman says:
No one murders like the communist. At one prison camp called Kolyma [google it up] up to 3,000,000 people were exterminated and there were over 150 camps. The contrived starvation and murder of 8,000,000 to 10,000,000 Ukrainians in the early 1930’s by J. Stalin and the NKGB and was hidden by Walter Duranty of the New York Times [google it up] was one of the 1st Genocide’s of the 20th Century. Duranty was thought to be an agent of Stalin but won a Pulitzer for his cover up. Its thought that over 200,000,000 citizens of those countries which had communism imposed upon them were murdered, Mao’s total was over 70,000,000 just by it self. There has been lots of complicity in these murders by people in the West who turned their faces from the truth and so gave succor to tyranny; now they are ashamed and want it forgotten.
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November 8, 2009, 11:24 amInsufficiently Sensitive says:
As other commentators have noted, capitalist governments (e.g., UK in the 19th century) are just as capable of genocide as socialist ones.
Wrong, and slanderous. The difference is in government intent. UK in the 19th century made utmost efforts to alleviate mass starvation in its colonies, eg India, whereas Stalin deliberately exacerbated it as a form of punishment for populations whom he suspected of resistance to his enlightened rule, as in Ukraine.
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November 8, 2009, 11:27 amW.D. says:
Somin’s update would make more sense if it were a straightforward rebuttal of the silly-but-inevitable conflafation of communism/socialism/Stalinism/etc. with domestic political liberalism so popular in his circles, rather than a roundabout rebuttal of imagined liberal responses that only arise in reaction to said conflation. But that would put him on the wrong side of most of his commenters, not to mention several contributors at VC.
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November 8, 2009, 11:28 amJakeCollins says:
@Ron Norman
“There has been lots of complicity in these murders by people in the West who turned there faces from the truth and so gave succor to tyranny; now they are ashamed and want it forgotten.”
Given that it took place in the 1930s, most of the apologists are now as dead as the victims.
More non-red-baiting-red-baiting I suppose.
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November 8, 2009, 11:29 amJakeCollins says:
I’m sure the communists governments had their reasons for imposing starvation–reasons that made as much sense as those of the 19th century British.
Starvation is starvation. Communist totalitarianism is evil, but so is imperialism. Why do you feel the need to apologize for such a murderous economic system?
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November 8, 2009, 11:32 amInsufficiently Sensitive says:
I’m sure the communists governments had their reasons for imposing starvation–
Why do you feel the need to apologize for such a murderous economic system?
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November 8, 2009, 11:38 amtbrosz says:
That’s admirable, but speaking from a simple empirical standpoint, if I put a current Democrat leader and a socialist into the same room alone, it would take me quite a while to find an economic or other policy where they would strongly disagree.
One of the most powerful public relations weapons the modern “progressive” movement has is the ability to somehow completely disassociate themselves from earlier movements which supported exactly the same goals under a different banner.
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November 8, 2009, 11:39 amTBlakely says:
While the US did fight a vicious war against the Nazis, propaganda is another major factor why Nazis are portrayed as the personification of evil rather than the many flavors of Communism who killed and oppressed more people.
The left and their cohorts in Hollywood and academia have done an effective campaign of conflating Nazism with western conservatism. It’s very much in their interests to focus on the evils of Nazism and their not so subtle message that if not for the valiant efforts of the left the conservatives in this country would morph into Nazis.
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November 8, 2009, 11:46 amJakeCollins says:
I’m not... quite the opposite. I’m just saying there are always “reasons,” and trying to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate reasons is a fool’s errand.
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November 8, 2009, 11:49 amJakeCollins says:
So liberalism=mass murder. Check.
No wonder that no one takes libertarians seriously. Have fun with your 3% of the vote!
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November 8, 2009, 11:51 amtbrosz says:
I didn’t construct that syllogism. You did. And note the premise on socialists that you had to stipulate first. Is that something you believe?
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November 8, 2009, 12:05 pmShelbyC says:
Uh... err...
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November 8, 2009, 12:08 pmDuffy Pratt says:
The system of land tenancy in Ireland led to an absent aristocracy, a group of middlemen who had every incentive to suck the tenants dry, and a group of tenants who farmed on plots so small that the potato was the only crop they grow which would produce enough nutrition to feed their families. Thus, the British system of government led to precisely the situation that caused the famine.
Of course, the tenants on the very small farms in Ireland could have chosen to starve their families a bit more slowly by growing other crops. So you are right. It was their fault.
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November 8, 2009, 12:09 pmJakeCollins says:
Sorry if I assumed you agreed with the article’s claim that socialism led to mass murder.
So I take it that you don’t?
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November 8, 2009, 12:09 pmMike W says:
Another reason that the whole “Communist Crimes” issue is important, is the historic relationship between Communists and Progressives. All the good Progressives of America were, at first, just gaga over the Noble Soviet Experiment. Until Stalin showed the true nature of the experiment. Oh yeah, there was also this little thing called the Eugenics Movement. You know, the Forced Sterilization of the “Unfit”. Also heavily promoted by all those Compassionate American Progressives. Anytime that you mention these facts to them, you will allways meet with some form of denial. But I’m sure we can trust them with Health Care, After all, Their Intentions are so Noble.
Mike W
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November 8, 2009, 12:23 pmJakeCollins says:
It’s a bit rich hearing libertarians go on about the connection between eugenics and progressivism, given that the most famous proponent of eugenics was the libertarian economic theorist Herbert Spencer.
This whole discussion is ridiculous. Why can we take people’s word for what they actually believe, rather than debating about whether progressives are “objectively” pro-genocide? With all this delving into ideological complicities, ya’ll sound like a bunch of communist theorists circa 1935.
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November 8, 2009, 12:32 pmRandom Commenter says:
“I’m not... quite the opposite. I’m just saying there are always “reasons,” and trying to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate reasons is a fool’s errand.”
Yes, I did laugh out loud at this. You’re a human party favor, “Jake”...
Hats off.
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November 8, 2009, 12:41 pmBlackMinorcaPullets says:
A couple points here:
1) There is crime and then there is genocide. Let’s not dilute the message that communists committed more genocide than any other group.
2) The Nazis started WWII? Really? What of the attack of Poland from the east by Russia? What of the concurrent Russian invasion of Finland and the Baltic countries? What of the 1 million German colonists killed by Russia prior to 1939 — they had the misfortune of settling among Ukrainians several generations prior to the Holodomor that killed more than the battlefields of WWI.
WWII is actually an extension of WW1.5 — and as the Holodomor deaths peaked at tens of thousands per day in the winter of 1933, this is exactly when Germans flocked to Hitler. Berlin storefronts were displaying thousands of letters from German relatives in Ukraine protraying the horrors of the genocide while Duranty was getting feted with Pulitzer Prizes for its cover up — and FDR was opening trade with the commies (and son Elliot reaping huge “commissions” on the sale of warplanes to Russia). The Germans saw the world gone mad and is it any surprise they opted for a mad man?
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November 8, 2009, 12:50 pmCatoRenasci says:
Every high school and college in the country should be required to teach THE BLACK BOOK OF COMMUNISM: Crimes Terror Repression by a group of French and European scholars (mostly ‘men of the left’) published in France in 1997 and in English translation by Harvard University Press in 1999. Lefty Tony Judt, in the New York Times, blurbed the book:
“An 800 page compendium of the crimes of Communist regimes worldwide, recorded and analyzed in ghastly detail by a team of scholars. The facts and figures, some of them well known, others newly confirmed in hitherto inaccessible archives, are irrefutable. The myth of the well-intentioned founders — the good czar Lenin betrayed by his evil heirs — ha been laid to rest for good. No one wil lany longer be able to claim ignorance or uncertainty about the criminal nature of Communism, and those who had begun to forget will be forced to remember anew.”
It’s only 10 years later, and we see Marxism on the march in Latin America, a resurgent Russia, still Communist China (65 million + killed) rising, and liberty threatened in the US.
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November 8, 2009, 1:03 pmJakeCollins says:
So you think there are good reasons for imposing forced starvation on your populace? Please, inform me of them... in particular what were the UK’s good reasons for starving its colonies in Ireland, India, and Africa?
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November 8, 2009, 1:04 pmwilliam says:
The crimes of British Imperialism and laissez-faire capitalism have been documented with as much zest, if not as much frequency, as those of Nazi Germany. There is a vague awareness in the public mind that Communism is a bad thing but that awareness has never been dramatized in popular movies or novels.....For many years the best histories and novels of the Civil War were written by white southerners. As a result most people had a Gone With the Wind sensibility of the Civil War. Even in the Ken Burns documentary the southern Shelby Steele had the best delivery of the best lines....In the way that southern writers shaped our awareness of the southern cause, leftist writers have shaped our awareness of Communism. There’s a vague awareness in the public mind that Communism is a bad thing, but the evils of Communism have never been dramatized in a popular movie. In Reds, John Reed was presented as a sympathetic idealist not as a misguided scumbag. In Dr. Zhivago, the Alec Guinness character, the committed Bolshie, was presented as the one who understood the forces of history.....The American left is an entwined with Communism as Margaret Mitchell is with the Glorious Cause. Don’t expect a change of heart any time soon.
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November 8, 2009, 1:26 pmBrian says:
You know who recently promoted The Black Book of Communism, a compilation of the horrors and death-toll of Communism, in the various countries in which that system was implemented? Glenn Beck (on his Fox News show, October 15, 2009). There are sites that track Amazon rankings — can’t find them at present — and I’m sure those sites will show a concurrent spike in sales in the last few weeks.
I mention this because it’s interesting, but also to to prick Mr. Somin, who in a episode of T Coddington Van Voorhees VII’s disorder, recently branded Beck (along with Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, et al.) as “dubious.”
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November 8, 2009, 1:36 pmInsufficiently Sensitive says:
to prick Mr. Somin, who in a episode of T Coddington Van Voorhees VII’s disorder, recently branded Beck (along with Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, et al.) as “dubious.”
Sorry, even ‘dubious’ blokes are allowed to make accurate observations and judgements. And these may serve, to objective observers, to reduce (the horror!) the alledged dubiosity.
Unless anyone once branded ‘dubious’ must remain so forever — sorta like the left’s vision of GWB.
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November 8, 2009, 2:05 pmA. Zarkov says:
Actually Scientific American has had a strong left orientation ever since Gerard Piel and his partners bought the assets of the original Scientific American in 1948. Gerard was a leftist who frequently published articles in The Nation Magazine. The left orientation was not so evident in the 1950s, but started to become more so in the 1960s. In those days at least one political article appeared in every issue. I particularly remember the viscous attack on the book On Aggression. I suspect that had a lot to do with the author Konrad Lorentz Nazi past. But the attack was on the science in the book, not on Lorentz the person. Nevertheless in those years the quality of the science articles was high although the editors hated equations, and kept their appearance in the text to a minimum. I remember one mathematician who published there complaining about the struggles he had with the editors over equations.
The magazine took a further downturn in 1984 when Gerard’s son Jonathan took over as editor. Neither Piel would publish critical letter to the editor. There was no room in their magazine for a contrary viewpoint. Articles pushed environmentalism and were always critical of missile defense and nuclear testing.
In 1986 the German publisher, the Georg Von Holtzbrinck Group bought SA. I find it somewhat ironic that the Germans now publish something called “Scientific American.” After the purchase the quality of the articles really began to descend, and today SA resembles Discover Magazine.
I finally stopped reading SA altogether after decades of subscribing when it published its notorious and unprincipled attack on Bjorn Lomborg and his book The Skeptical Environmentalist in the January 2002 issue. Not only did SA refuse to publish a detailed rebuttal in its own pages, it threatened Lomborg with a copyright lawsuit when he put up a detailed response on this own web page. Lomborg would quote specific sentences that appeared in the issue and respond to them. SA did not want what any sane person would regard as fair use to appear on a web page. The articles attacking Lomborg were of extremely poor quality, especially the one by the crackpot John Holdren (now science adviser to the president!). SA is now so terrible it be renamed Pseudo-Scientific American.
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November 8, 2009, 2:06 pmStrict says:
Ron Norman: “At one prison camp called Kolyma [google it up] up to 3,000,000 people were exterminated”
The 3 million figure is not accepted as true.
Ilya Somin: “Saddam explicitly cited Stalin as one of the models for his regime.”
And he also cited the Koran, but that make his regime “Islamicist” about as much as citing Stalin makes his regime “Stalinist.”
Cuban Bob: “Ba’athists are Arab Nationalist Socialist. Arab Nazi’s.”
It’s not that simple. Ideologically they were pan-Arabists: they believed that the divisions in the Arab world were a result of divide-and-conquer imperialism, and that a single, united Arab state would be a world superpower. It is true that a single Arab state would be a world superpower — but the unity never happened.
The Syrian Ba’athists and the Iraqi Ba’athists couldn’t agree on much — the two strongest Ba’ath regimes in the world (both allegedly “pan-Arabist”) couldn’t even unite.
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November 8, 2009, 2:08 pmShelbyC says:
I heard that Glenn Beck also said that Brian shouldn’t run through his neighborhood in his boxers singing the national anthym.
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November 8, 2009, 2:27 pmA. Zarkov says:
Why do you have to speak in the passive voice? Who specifically does not accept the 3 million figure as true? What’s a more accurate figure, and what’s the uncertainty on that figure?
“It is true that a single Arab state would be a world superpower — but the unity never happened.”
How is that? About three years (before the big run up in oil prices) ago I added up the GDP of all the Arab countries (including their oil income) and the sum total was less than the GDP of Spain alone. Is Spain a world superpower? I used the CIA World Factbook. I’m not the first to make this claim, and I was checking it because I was so surprised. On reflection I should not have been surprised because the Arabs export very little beside oil.
Note I do not use the passive voice and I give references.
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November 8, 2009, 2:29 pmInsufficiently Sensitive says:
Says ‘Strict’:
Ron Norman: “At one prison camp called Kolyma [google it up] up to 3,000,000 people were exterminated”
The 3 million figure is not accepted as true.
Not accepted by ‘Strict’ perhaps, but argument citing real evidence is a tad more credible than mere assertion.
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November 8, 2009, 2:29 pmNagarajan Sivakumar says:
Somin’s update would make more sense if it were a straightforward rebuttal of the silly-but-inevitable conflafation of communism/socialism/Stalinism/etc. with domestic political liberalism so popular in his circles.
The “conflation” as you call it is logically inevitable and by no means silly.Maybe you should take some time to listen to those who argue that modern day liberalism is an idealogical bedfellow of communism/socialism.
All three strains of political philosophies rest on sacrificing individual rights at the drop of a hat. Communism and Socialism have no bones about stating this openly and shall we add.. genocidally(in the case of communism).. in fact there is no such thing as the “individual”.
Modern day Liberalism comes closest to socialism because it is openly founded on
A)collectivism and appeals directly to emotion of the voters rather than reason — ” we are all fighting for the pooooor people and want to stand up against the (white) man/establishment !!!”
B)This collectivism (Medicare, Social Security) is mandated by Government at all levels.
The latest exhibit : That monstrous “health reform” bill the passed yesterday in the House MANDATES people to buy health insurance — the 1900 page bill has the word SHALL 3000 times !
What is this ? The Ten Commandments ?? This is the Land of the Free ??
EVERY Liberal — Democrat or Republican has ZERO problems with using Government co-ercion to force people to buy a service that would not do so out of their own free will. In fact, not only do they not have problems, liberals ACTIVELY welcome this coercion and will use every sinew of the Federal Government’s muscle to carry out this coercion.
You could have take a poll ANY DAY in the last two decades with a mix of liberals and conservatives and lnibertarians — and there would have been no prizes for guessing how much liberals like enforcing government mandates on individuals in such a personal financial and economic matter.
And what is this all done in the name of ? That’s right — the “collective good”/the “common good” — and who gets to decide what is the “common good”? or why it should overrule individual rights ? Why-its the central politburo –scratch, the Democrat party idealogues ofcourse !
And if you thought, this was the end of it — you would be wrong. Wait until “Cap and Trade” passes — and the Federal Government mandates even more than what it has done with this “health reform” monstrosity.
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November 8, 2009, 2:30 pmArthurKirkland says:
In my experience, those who attempt to make political points by directing intense attention to authoritarian Cuba while ignoring authoritarian regimes such as those of Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan are unpersuasive — unless the point is merely to lather up an excitable segment of Florida’s population for fundraising purposes.
Many of these people also criticize Venezuela’s government — for corruption, brutality, and the like — while refraining from mentioning governments such as those of Colombia and Tajikistan. This, too, is not the foundation of any persuasive argument concerning morality.
To borrow a label or two from Prof. Somin, most of these slanted, blindered arguments are as silly as they appear to be inevitable.
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November 8, 2009, 2:32 pmtbrosz says:
In every last case? No. Sweden was considered socialist at one time (not so much nowadays. Everyone can learn.)
On the other hand I have noticed that, to the best of my knowledge, every national government in the past century that has murdered hundreds of thousand to millions of its own citizens for its own ends has labeled itself “socialist” or “communist.”
That’s a lot of trout swimming in the milk.
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November 8, 2009, 2:36 pmA. Zarkov says:
Why do you refer to Cuba as “authoritarian” rather than totalitarian? Saudi Arabia, bad as it is, (see the book Hatred’s Kingdom) still allows its citizens to travel, and that’s more than Cuba allows. Cuba has a nationwide network of agents that reach into every village right down to the block level. It’s modeled on the Soviet totalitarian far more closely than any of the other countries you list.
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November 8, 2009, 2:53 pmyankee says:
I know very little about Cuba or human rights groups’ criticisms of it. But North Korea is the most repressive nation in the world and the suggestion that human rights groups refrain from devoting resources to investigating and criticizing it because they are sympathetic to it is nothing short of slanderous.
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November 8, 2009, 2:55 pmInsufficiently Sensitive says:
But North Korea is the most repressive nation in the world and the suggestion that human rights groups refrain from devoting resources to investigating and criticizing it because they are sympathetic to it is nothing short of slanderous.
Perhaps we could be furnished with some citations of the comparative ‘human rights’ NGO resources devoted to investigating North Korea as opposed to democratic Israel, let alone Communist Cuba? Or perhaps their international donors DON’T feel that ‘North Korea is the most repressive nation in the world’?
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November 8, 2009, 3:05 pmStrict says:
“Says ‘Strict’:
Ron Norman: “At one prison camp called Kolyma [google it up] up to 3,000,000 people were exterminated”
The 3 million figure is not accepted as true.
Not accepted by ‘Strict’ perhaps, but argument citing real evidence is a tad more credible than mere assertion.”
Lol. Not accepted by the historian who originally came up with the 3 million figure.
From wikipedia’s entry on Robert Conquest: “After the partial opening of the Soviet archives in the later years of the rule of Mikhail Gorbachev, Conquest was able to publish The Great Terror: A Reassessment, a consideration of his 1968 book in the light of newly available evidence.”
From wikipedia’s entry on Kolyma: “Robert Conquest, author of The Great Terror, now admits that his original estimate of three million victims [at Kolyma] was far too high.”
But I must be wrong, because the passive voice was used.
No one really knows how many died at Kolyma, but how is “3 million” not also “mere assertion”? No one doubts that the USSR was an evil empire, and that tens of millions were killed by its policies [uh oh passive voice, must not be true].
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November 8, 2009, 3:06 pmShelbyC says:
Well, I have no idea whay Kolyma is or any idea how many folks were killed there. But when I read your “that figure is not accepted as true” comment I thought you sounded like you were full of it. But when I read your last comment I was much more convinced.
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November 8, 2009, 3:14 pmA. Zarkov says:
No one said you were wrong because you used the passive voice. I didn’t even say you were wrong. I simply asked for who said it? Now you tell us: Robert Conquest. Why did’nt you simply say that Robert Conquest disputes the 3 million figure? I think that was a reasonable request unworthy of a snark response.
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November 8, 2009, 3:14 pmInsufficiently Sensitive says:
No one really knows how many died at Kolyma, but how is “3 million” not also “mere assertion”? No one doubts that the USSR was an evil empire, and that tens of millions were killed by its policies [uh oh passive voice, must not be true].
‘Strict’s latest unsupported assertion says ‘no one really knows how many died at Kolyma’. Unlike ‘Strict’, Conquest did his very best to determine the magnitude of the Soviet murders, investing years of work and study in the process — and was willing to correct when better information was obtained. That’s the basic difference between intellectual curiosity and argument from authority for cheap points on a blog’s comment section.
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November 8, 2009, 3:16 pmuberVU - social comments says:
Social comments and analytics for this post...
This post was mentioned on Twitter by alkali_x86: Why the Neglect of Communist Crimes Matters http://j.mp/4e28Xc...
Malvolio says:
As much? As much? Are you kidding me?
Make a list of all the movies from the last 50 years in which the bad guy was some evil corporation and its sleazy CFO. Go ahead: how many do you think you’d find? A thousand? Two thousand?
Now list how many movies have Communists as the bad guys. There’s Red Dawn, White Nights, and Little Nikita, but that’s about it.
Movies about imperialism are much rarer, but whenever they occur, imperialism is bad, bad, bad (exception: Life of Brian: “Apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order, what have the Romans done for us?”)
Also interesting: the near-total dearth of movies with Islamic terrorists as the villains. The most recent I can think of is True Lies, from 15 years ago. I guess since there have been so few actual incidents involving Islamic terrorists, the movie-makers have kind of lost interest..
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November 8, 2009, 3:21 pmStrict says:
“It is true that a single Arab state would be a world superpower — but the unity never happened.”
How is that?”
The vast majority of the world’s proven oil reserves.
400 million people. (compared to Spain’s 45 million people).
Enormous land area. (Saudi Arabia alone has more than 4 times as many square miles as Spain).
Millions of standing soldiers. (Egypt alone has 4 times as many soldiers as Spain)
Whatever. If you want, you can believe that Spain would be more “powerful” than all the Arab countries combined.
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November 8, 2009, 3:23 pmStating the obvious says:
On the other hand I have noticed that, to the best of my knowledge, every national government in the past century that has murdered hundreds of thousand to millions of its own citizens for its own ends has labeled itself “socialist” or “communist.”
Then you obviously don’t know much history. The Nationalist Chinese killed millions. Suharto in Indonesia probably killed upwards of million (but they were communists so they don’t count I guess). Don’t forget the Ottomans during WWI.
Also, don’t forget that Idi Amin (elevated by the British to keep the Communists out of Uganda) and the Juntas of Guatemala (which were installed by the CIA) certainly killed a large enough percentage of their populations to rank up there with the worst of the twentieth century.
And of course the Nazis were far from socialist in any meaningful sense of the word. They were virulently anti-communist.
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November 8, 2009, 3:24 pmStrict says:
Zarkov: “Saudi Arabia, bad as it is, (see the book Hatred’s Kingdom) still allows its citizens to travel, and that’s more than Cuba allows.”
This is correct. However, in evaluating a country’s record on civil rights, it’s also important to consider how it treats non-citizens.
In Saudi Arabia, like in Cuba, there is an “exit visa” process. In Cuba, it works to give the government a veto power over an individual’s choice to leave. Raul pledged in 2008 to eliminate the exit visa requirement, but it hasn’t happened yet. With Obama in power, I think Cuba will probably eliminate or relax the exit visa process in 2010.
In Saudi Arabia, the exit visa works mostly to give private employers a veto over a foreign worker’s choice to leave. If boss doesn’t sign off on your choice to leave, the government will not issue you an exit visa. All non-citizens must have an exit visa before they are allowed to leave.
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November 8, 2009, 3:37 pmSammy Finkelman says:
Don’t forget also what happeend in Indonesia from late October 1965 throuygh about march 1966 with sporadic outburts till about 1970. It was supposedly a murder of Communists (because people were afraid of them) but as you can imagaine it must been a siotuation where many people could get many other people killed.
Obama should know a little something about it since he lived in Indonesia in the aftermath and it is not posisble really that he learned nothing. His mother lived in Indonesia fro many years afterwards — and his sister and stepfather were there — he would have been very interested in the subject and it’s imposisble not to know.
It is soemtimes described as a genocide of Chinese but wasn’t
quite that really.
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November 8, 2009, 3:40 pmA. Zarkov says:
Population and land area (especially when a lot of it is desert) does not a superpower make. Japan is vastly more powerful than all the Arab countries combined with only 128 million people and 69% of the land area of France.
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November 8, 2009, 3:47 pmyankee says:
Malvolio, have you ever seen a James Bond movie?
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November 8, 2009, 3:49 pmSammy Finkelman says:
I tried to use a new editing tool, which suddenly appeared, but it didn’t seem to work — it never managed to save it in the 30 seconds that was alloted at one point.
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November 8, 2009, 3:50 pmA. Zarkov says:
How a country treats its own citizens is vastly more important than how it treats foreigners because usually foreigners are treated worse. Speculations on what might happen in the future also don’t count very much. Cuba is still much worse than Saudi Arabia, terrible as the latter is.
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November 8, 2009, 3:53 pmyankee says:
Or perhaps they believe, correctly, that devoting significant resources to criticizing North Korea would be futile.
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November 8, 2009, 3:54 pmJohn Warner says:
There is a more interesting dichotomy in the Wests dealing with totalitarian regimes — the interesting thing is more the tolerance of any nasty totalitarian regime as long as it is killing its own people. If it kills other countries people it tends not to be tolerated for long.
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November 8, 2009, 3:54 pmDrew Kelley says:
“...Should the American public have a higher awareness of the crimes of communism? Yes, definitely. But should the American public be blamed for not having as high an awareness of communist crimes as of Nazi crimes? Not at all.”
Agreed. The fault lies with Academia which “shields” us from such disturbing facts.
“...no one really knows how many died at Kolyma...”
A stuningly stupid statement. The KGB knows, but in a not-amazing act of self-preservation, keeps such data away from a curious world.
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November 8, 2009, 4:00 pmInsufficiently Sensitive says:
So their concern for getting in the news trumps their concern for the civil rights of the victims of Communist autocracies?
It’s cheap to issue press releases — the MSM loves to trumpet them all over world when they come from noble civil rights organizations. It wouldn’t cost those NGOs much to remind the world frequently that NK is the ‘most repressive nation in the world’, and why that is the case, and why getting access to the place for real reporting might cost lives and treasure.
More likely, issuing a series of press releases of that sort would not get the NGOs invited to United Nations forums, nor would they result in many donations from ‘concerned’ citizens — nor the totalitarian regimes who fund their Israel and America-bashing.
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November 8, 2009, 4:04 pmJay says:
“So you think there are good reasons for imposing forced starvation on your populace? Please, inform me of them... in particular what were the UK’s good reasons for starving its colonies in Ireland, India, and Africa?”
I dunno, Jake, what are your good reasons for willfully misreading the comment your whole shtick is based on, which did not concede that the UK intentionally starved people for “acceptable” reasons, but rather argued that the UK never intentionally starved people, in contrast to Stalin? Despite this, you’ve devoted multiple comments to demanding people defend a strawman position that was never stated.
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November 8, 2009, 4:05 pmDavid Nieporent says:
Well, no. You’ve confused so-called “Social Darwinism” and “Eugenics.” Spencer was a famous proponent of the former, not the latter. Except, well, he wasn’t a proponent of the former, either, but that’s what he’s often accused of. He wasn’t in the slightest bit a eugenicist.
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November 8, 2009, 4:08 pmyankee says:
Obvious counterexample: starting in 1937, Japan engaged in a genocidal slaughter of millions of people in China and other East Asian countries. The Western powers were not interested in getting involved, even though World War II in Europe had not yet broken out. The West didn’t get involved until Japan actually attacked the Western powers, and even then the Japansese genocide was not a motivating factor.
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November 8, 2009, 4:19 pmStrict says:
Malvolio:
“Now list how many movies have Communists as the bad guys. There’s Red Dawn, White Nights, and Little Nikita, but that’s about it.”
“the near-total dearth of movies with Islamic terrorists as the villains. The most recent I can think of is True Lies, from 15 years ago. ”
Your movie test is ridiculous.
It’s especially ridiculous because you clearly don’t know that much about movies.
How about Rambo 3, when Rambo goes to Afghanistan to help Bin Laden and the Mujahideen fight the Soviets?
How about “From Russia With Love,” and other Bond movies with KGB and other Soviet villains.
How about “Zelary,” where Czech villagers hide a runaway Jew from the Nazis. The village is then savagely attacked by Soviet “liberators.”
“Big John McLain,” where John Wayne fights communism in Hawai’i.
Or “Interrogation,” where communist secret police in Poland torture a criminal suspect?
Or “Repetance,” a critique of Soviet rule in Georgia.
Or “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” about a prisoner in a gulag.
Or “Against All Hope” about Cuba’s gulags, or “Before Night Falls” about Cuba’s repressive response to the AIDS crisis.
There’s “The Witness,” criticizing show trials in communist Hungary.
“The Hunt for the Red October.”
There are just so many! There are dozens from South Korea, as well.
“Ashes and Diamonds.” “I Married a Communist.”
Most recently, there’s “The Soviet Story.”
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November 8, 2009, 4:21 pmwilliam says:
The James Bond villians were so blatantly evil that they lacked all credibility. The left’s version of the cold war was written by John Lecarre. The commie villians were presented as morally complex characters who, in the end, weren’t really worse than Smiley’s people....Now that I think about it, there were more movies detailing the evils of McCarthyism than there were of the evasions and hypocrisies of American communists. How about a movie about Alger Hiss that dramatizes his plight from the point of view that he had to live his entire life as a liar and a hypocrite.....Some time back there was an article in the New Yorker about the Dreyfus case. The writer told about how the French conservatives, even after exculpatory evidence was presented, refused to believe in the innocence of Dreyfus. His larger point was that conservatives are stupid. He drew no parallels to the Sacco, Hiss, or Rosenberg cases. This proves my point that liberals are stupid.
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November 8, 2009, 4:21 pmStrict says:
““...no one really knows how many died at Kolyma...”
A stuningly stupid statement. The KGB knows, but in a not-amazing act of self-preservation, keeps such data away from a curious world.”
Lol. It’s so stuningly stupid. lol
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November 8, 2009, 4:23 pmArthurKirkland says:
I am not persuaded that Cuba is worse than Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia flogs gays, dictates religion, forbids women to drive, fields religious police, rigs its justice system and then engages in public beheadings and amputations based on rigged results, forbids unions and political organizations, engages in stoning, and is ruled by a bunch of greedy, brutal hypocrites. Plus, it funds and breeds terrorists.
What makes Cuba as bad, or worse?
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November 8, 2009, 4:26 pmLTEC says:
A previous commenter seems to think that the James Bond movies were anti-Soviet. There was only one such movie I can think of (the one which took place partly in Afghanistan) where the bad guys were Soviet. In all the others, the bad guy was typically some third party who was trying to trick the superpowers into going to war, or who was trying to extort money from them.
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November 8, 2009, 4:26 pmTMLutas says:
The stalinist crime against Ukraine was one of shipping food out. The similar crime in North Korea is one of not permitting food to come in (North Korea tightly controls food aid) and of shifting food out of the hands of starving peasants and diverting them to the army (the policy of army first). It is certainly intentional and the behavior has happened over multiple famines.
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November 8, 2009, 4:40 pmStrict says:
“How a country treats its own citizens is vastly more important than how it treats foreigners”
Zarkov,
I think generally this is right, based on sheer numbers of people involved.
But in cases like Kuwait, where citizens are the minority, how Kuwait treats Kuwaitis is not “vastly more important” than how it treats non-Kuwaitis, who are the majority! I wouldn’t say it’s the opposite, but rather that how Kuwait treats non-Kuwaitis is indeed a main factor in evaluating its record on human rights.
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November 8, 2009, 4:40 pmInsufficiently Sensitive says:
Cuba jails gays, dictates communism, fields intrusive communist police, rigs its justice system and turned loose Che Guevara to shoot citizens based on rigged results, forbids unions and political organizations, engages in torture, and is ruled by a bunch of greedy, brutal hypocrites. Plus, it funds other antidemocratic governments to spread communism.
Enough said.
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November 8, 2009, 4:41 pmStrict says:
” It wouldn’t cost those NGOs much to remind the world frequently that NK is the ‘most repressive nation in the world’, and why that is the case, and why getting access to the place for real reporting might cost lives and treasure.
More likely, issuing a series of press releases of that sort would not get the NGOs invited to United Nations forums”
Umm, NGOs do frequently remind the world that NK is extremely repressive.
The UN also constantly criticizes NK.
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November 8, 2009, 4:43 pmStrict says:
“Japan is vastly more powerful than all the Arab countries combined”
Zarkov, you missed the entire point. The point wasn’t to just tally up all the individual Arab countries as they now are, as individual countries. The point of the Ba’athists was that if the Arab countries all united into one Arab country, assuming it functioned, it would be a superpower. It’s a type of “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” theory, and trying to refute that by summing up its parts as they now stand doesn’t quite work.
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November 8, 2009, 4:47 pmyankee says:
“Goldfinger” features the Communist Chinese attempting to provoke economic chaos in the West. In “Die Another Day” the enemies are North Koreans. (Neither of these are “Soviet” per se but Malvolio’s original claim was about “communists” rather than “Soviets.”) You are correct that “For Your Eyes Only” also features Russian agents as villains. Many of the Cold-War-era movies feature Soviets as secondary antagonists, though you are correct that the primary villain is usually a third party.
And of course Strict documents lots of other movies featuring Communist villains; using the Soviets as antagonists was an extremely common Cold War action-movie trope.
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November 8, 2009, 4:49 pmStrict says:
“Cuba jails gays, dictates communism, fields intrusive communist police, rigs its justice system and turned loose Che Guevara to shoot citizens based on rigged results, forbids unions and political organizations, engages in torture, and is ruled by a bunch of greedy, brutal hypocrites. Plus, it funds other antidemocratic governments to spread communism.
Enough said.”
But what about scale? Assuming that the types and methods and results of repression are equal, Saudi Arabia represses more than twice as many people as Cuba does.
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November 8, 2009, 4:51 pmTMLutas says:
The willingness of the western public to continue to have their children educated into the philosophy of naziism is about nil. The same is very much not true about communism. Communist academics remain acceptable in a way that is shameful for our academy.
University professors have a higher obligation than steel workers to maintain a proper perspective. They, after all, are supposed to be dedicated to a life of the mind. They are actually worse than most steel workers. This inversion of the proper state of affairs is inexplicable except that there is a strong feeling in the academy that somehow the communist dead are excusable in a way that the nazi dead are not.
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November 8, 2009, 4:51 pmToby says:
Similar comment upstream claims Arab National Socialists were not, well I’m not sure, but they weren’t, because they could not agree.
Way back in Ecology 101, there is the lemma that there is no competition as intense as intra-niche competition. A statement that two identical parties that feel that the world would be better lead by the elite [themselves] fight fiercely does not rebut that they are substantially the same, but instead probably indicates that they are...
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November 8, 2009, 4:52 pmStrict says:
“And of course Strict documents lots of other movies featuring Communist villains; using the Soviets as antagonists was an extremely common Cold War action-movie trope.”
How about “TOP GUN”? Weren’t all the enemy pilots supposed to be Soviets?
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November 8, 2009, 4:54 pmStrict says:
“Similar comment upstream claims Arab National Socialists were not, well I’m not sure, but they weren’t, because they could not agree”
No, the Ba’athists were not Nazis. Saying the Ba’athists are Nazis is a useless oversimplification. Ilya is right on this: the Ba’athist model was a strange mix.
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November 8, 2009, 4:56 pmDavid Nieporent says:
Already answered: Cuba keeps all its residents prisoner. Saudi Arabia allows people to leave if they’re unhappy. Also, Saudi Arabia does not regulate all private behavior; only public. Cuba does not recognize any distinction.
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November 8, 2009, 4:57 pmArthurKirkland says:
Cuba-Saudi Arabia might be called a draw from some perspectives, but the September 11 attacks — commanded by a Saudi, conducted by Saudis, funded by Saudis, fueled by religious extremism endorsed by the Saudis — should tip the scales for anyone examining this from an American perspective.
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November 8, 2009, 4:57 pmDr. Caligari says:
Ilya wrote:
“Imagine if, after the fall of Hitler, an unreconstructed Nazi-like regime had remained in place in some small European country, and continued to run concentration camps, a Gestapo-like secret police, and so on. Would not that regime be an international pariah constantly targeted by human rights groups and subjected to severe sanctions by all self-respecting democratic states?”
Ever hear of a not-so-small European country by the name of Spain? While the worst of Franco’s repression was during the Civil War (1936–39)and in the years immediately afterward up till about 1943 (the Falangists received some technical assistance in repression from the Gestapo) things were still pretty bad in the years immediately after 1945. Admittedly there were never extermination camps and such concentration camps as had existed during and immediately after the Civil War were soon replaced with conventional prisons, still there was a secret police and people were imprisoned for decades for acts such as speaking and writing against the regime that would be recognized as a basic human right in a Western democracy. The fact that Franco gradually lessened the repression over time and that he became an ally against the USSR led the Western democracies to accept his regime from the early 1950s on. Spain, of course, had to wait for Franco to die before it could again become a real democracy.
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November 8, 2009, 4:57 pmyankee says:
They do spend less time doing this than they do criticizing other repressive nations, or repressive policies of democratic countries, which seems fair enough to me. Democratic nations can be shamed into improvement, but North Korea cannot. Human rights groups may be able to get democratic nations to exert pressure on undemocratic ones, and that might induce them to improve their human rights policies. But the chance of this working with North Korea is infinitesimal.
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November 8, 2009, 4:58 pmConstantin says:
The dearth of light shed on communist atrocities is one reason I’m so glad our president is traveling to Berlin to proudly celebrate his nation’s triumph over the evil regimes responsible for such calamity.
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November 8, 2009, 5:08 pmyankee says:
I would say the same about any other nation with very strict nationalization laws. In some nations, such as Japan, these laws result in the existence of ethnic minority groups who remain non-citizens in perpetuity. I think all such policies are unjustifiable, but they are much worse if the non-citizen residents are also repressed in other ways. It is not as bad if they are treated relatively well, though I still oppose it.
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November 8, 2009, 5:15 pmFub says:
I read the rest of that paragraph wondering if they dragged it through the mud, boiled it in axle grease, or rendered it into oatmeal.
Eventually the diabolical nature of spelling checkers soaked into my poor slothful brane like cold molasses through a sieve.
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November 8, 2009, 5:22 pmLTEC says:
Step back a minute people.
Do we really want to be arguing about which of Saudi Arabia or Cuba is worse? Like comparing Superman to Batman, this is the kind of discussion one should have in private, with friends, over beer.
The important issue of the moment is: should we really regard the James Bond films as being anti-communist? It’s true I did forget about “Die Another Day”. But “Goldfinger”? The villain was Goldfinger, despite the brief scene (that I won’t apologize for forgetting about) with the Chinese. And “From Russia With Love”??? Both the KGB and British Intelligence were clueless pawns used by SPECTRE, the only real bad guys in the movie.
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November 8, 2009, 5:26 pmMalvolio says:
I’ve seen every Bond movie, and unlike the books, the super-villain is usually an autonomous criminal or, at most, (Octopussy) a Soviet renegade. The Soviets were often the victims (!), as in From Russia With Love and You Only Live Twice.
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November 8, 2009, 5:27 pmDavid Nieporent says:
That’s even more nonsensical than usual. We’re discussing governmental systems. Who cares what the citizenship of 9/11 attackers were? They were people who hate the Saudi government, not people acting on behalf of the Saudi government.
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November 8, 2009, 5:30 pmMichael Haas says:
I think Prof. Somin’s point might be rephrased to say that it is important who you recognize as an Other. I was struck for instance today that in a Cistercian priest’s sermon he referred to a ‘wise rabbi’ in a modern story. Consideration of who is an Other is why Medvedev wanting to have some institutional recognition of the victims of communism seems exciting. As to the Irish famine, we descendants of Irish appreciate Queen Victoria’s gift of 2 pounds.
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November 8, 2009, 5:34 pmDavid Welker says:
Really? David Nieporent, your truly being idiotic. I wish you were a poor woman in Saudi Arabia. I wonder how you would pay for your plane ticket and arrange for your visa and where you would go?
Saudi Arabia is as bad as Cuba. And so is Iran. And so is the Taliban.
Next thing you know, David Nieporent is going to be arguing that right-wing death squads in Columbia are not as bad as the FARC.
The bottom-line is that evil is evil, regardless of the cause or ideology. The ends do not justify the means. That is common-sense. As soon as people lose sight of that, that is when they start committing evil themselves.
I am all for talking about the evil perpetrated by Communist regimes or by anyone else. As long as such discussion is not intended to minimize the evil committed by others.
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November 8, 2009, 5:45 pmArthurKirkland says:
.
I’ll call that point and raise it one Wahhabi.
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November 8, 2009, 5:47 pmArthurKirkland says:
Bingo!!
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November 8, 2009, 5:50 pmMalvolio says:
Oh no he didn’t. It’s on!
I think we can fairly dispense with outliers like One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich — which was made 40 years ago in freakin’ Norway and has probably been forgotten even by the people who made it — and McCarthy-era relics like I Married a Communist and Big Jim McLain (the latter I should note though, was about drug dealers when it was dubbed into European languages, in an amusing preview of modern Hollywood’s morphing of Islamicists into Serbians and narcotraffickers).
What does that leave?
From Russia With Love? The one where SPECTRE steals the Soviet’s decoding device and sends Robert Shaw and Lotte Lenya to seduce Sean Connery and Daniela Bianchi (gulp) respectively?
Octopussy, with its Soviet renegade General Orlov.
Die Another Day, with its North Korean renegade villain (at the end killing his PDRK Army General father who tries to stop him)?
Can you imagine what would have happened if Inglourious Basterds had portrayed Standartenführer Landa as a renegade, persecuting Jews against the orders of his superiors? Tarantino would be back clerking in the video store before the second reel started.
Rambo 3 and The Hunt for the Red October were genuinely anti-communist, or at least, anti-Soviet (and genuinely movies, not “films” nobody actually saw) — though Hunt was greatly watered down from the book. Both movies (and White Nights and Red Dawn) were subjected to withering derision from the chattering classes when they were released.
They were supposed to be, but they weren’t. The planes were unmarked!
[ Threadjack engaged in three, two, one... ]
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November 8, 2009, 5:52 pmA. Zarkov says:
I understand the theory of a magical synergism making the Arab world into a superpower. But that’s pure speculation. Besides the meager data we have suggests otherwise. The United Arab Republic (Egypt + Syria) lasted three years, then fissioned. The United Arab States (UAR + Yemen) did likewise. The Federation of Arab Republics and Arab Islamic Republic were stillborn. I think their problem is fundamentally one of human capital– they don’t have enough of it. Compare and contrast to Israel which has something like 10 times the per-capita GDP. Not only that Israel has more patents (and not per-capita either) than any other country but the US. In short there is no compelling reason to believe an Arab superstate would be anything more than the sum of its parts and perhaps less.
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November 8, 2009, 5:55 pmPersonFromPorlock says:
Yes indeedy. In “The Spy Who Came In From the Cold,” the only character who doesn’t exist in a perpetual state of angst and self-loathing is a seventeen year old East German border guard le Carré introduces and kills (via a British agent) in a single paragraph.
In the book, the killing results in a furor among the East German people and a hue-and-cry after the agent. Quite amusing when compared to the actual sentiments of East Germans towards former Stasi after the regime collapsed.
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November 8, 2009, 6:03 pmAppalled says:
What’s to argue about? Superman could kick Batman’s bat-butt, obviously! But good point about FRWL. In the book, the villains are SMERSH, the Soviet counterespionage service. SPECTRE wasn’t introduced in the Bond books until much later. I’ve never understood why the plot was changed that way, and it certainly didn’t improve it. I smell a commie plot!
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November 8, 2009, 6:20 pmTruePath says:
While these are interesting points I think there are reasonable responses to all of them.
1) The scale and nature of communist crimes make anything like reparations or other attempts to compensate victims unworkable. Unlike in the Holocaust where at least in some sense you can lay the blame for the horrific treatment of small subgroups on the larger society virtually every element except for the political elite under these communist regimes can make some claim to victimization. So who would pay whom? Do you want to create commissions to determine the overall level of victimization to decide if people are net recipients or payers of retributions? I doubt it.
As far as punishing those responsible there are several problems with this. Primarily the fact that these same leaders or those politically sympathetic to them still occupy significant national officials (sometimes as a result of genuine popular support). The harm that would likely result from even the whiff of the suggestion that we intended to prosecute people with similar pasts as those currently in Russian/Chinese government would far outstrip any benefit.
Moreover, punishing communist crimes presents a much more difficult line drawing problem as the actors have a much more plausible claim that they feared behaving otherwise would result in their own deaths.
2) As Eugene (and you) are constantly pointing out on this blog there is no rule that requires people to express outrage exactly in proportion to the badness of the behavior. People are never going to be as vocal about North Korea and Cuba because there are so few reasonable people who disagree with the criticisms of these regimes. The worst actors are simply going to generate agreement on their badness and sighs about our apparent inability to do anything about it.
3) The problem with all these “never again” type arguments is that successfully avoiding repetition requires not just awareness of the event but accurate identification of the factors that should alarm us in the future. As your very post shows some people take the very same events you discuss and draw the lesson that anything but pure Randian capitalism heralds more communist style atrocities. Others might draw the lesson that such and such specific means of implementing communism is the problem. Given the lack of agreement here I’m unconvinced this kind of awareness actually provides much protection while at the same time it might unreasonably bias certain kinds of policy debates on issues that aren’t warning signs of coming atrocities.
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November 8, 2009, 6:28 pmSam Hall says:
In the movie “Hunt for Red October,” the ending was changed from the book so that the Soviet system was not at fault, only a “few corrupt men.” Tom Clancy was very upset about the change, but Hollywood wasn’t going to bend in their protection of their friends.
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November 8, 2009, 6:36 pmStrict says:
Malvolio: “What does that leave?”
hahah!
Can you explain “The Manchurian Candidate”??
Or “The Killing Fields”??
Or “Rescue Dawn”? (The Pathet Lao prison guards were definitely “bad guys.”
Or “The Blue Kite” and its critique of China?
Or “The Tango Player” and its critique of repressive laws in East Germany?
Or “East-West”?
Come on!! Let’s DO THIS!
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November 8, 2009, 6:42 pmStrict says:
Sam Hall:
“Hollywood wasn’t going to bend in their protection of their friends.”
The change in Red October still doesn’t matter — Communists were still portrayed as “bad guys.” That was the inquiry, right? What movies depicted Communists as bad guys — well, Red October did!
Anyway, how about Walt Disney? Was he a “friend” of Communists?!
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November 8, 2009, 6:46 pmwillis says:
“in particular what were the UK’s good reasons for starving its colonies in Ireland, India, and Africa?”
Jake, why stop there. Ask about the motives of the Romans, the Mongols, the Spanish army sacking Rome. If history can be so easily collapsed to make a comparison, you can make better ones. Also, for the folks arguing which is worse, the communist remnants of the cold war or the rising Islamic regimes of today, I say you are making a pretty good case that the one is the successor to the other. Not so coincidentally, the western MSM and academia that were so enamored of communism are taking so readily to the champions of Islamic totalitarianism.
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November 8, 2009, 6:51 pmHarryEagar says:
I fully endorse Professor Somin’s call to hunt down and persecute the persecuters. It will be, as he says, difficult to do with North Korea, as it was difficult to do with the USSR. We had an army occupying Germany, which made it easier with Nazis.
However, until I see Professor Somin calling for hunting down and persecuting and gaining compensation for the victims of Roman Catholic terror, I will continue to regard his obsession with communism as a sort of personal jihad, not a general distaste for oppression as such.
There’s no problem with attaching the assets of the Catholic church, and Pacelli was up to his elbows in Jewish gore. We could have a retrospective condemnation of him for starters, could we not?
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November 8, 2009, 7:04 pmBlargh says:
The real question is: how many communists could dance on the head of a pin?
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November 8, 2009, 7:15 pmwillis says:
“The real question is: how many communists could dance on the head of a pin?”
Or a pinhead? Ask Jake.
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November 8, 2009, 7:50 pmVisitor Again says:
Already answered, it’s communist.
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November 8, 2009, 7:51 pmFub says:
Then don’t forget Animal Farm (1954), though made in Britain, not Hollywood. Not rated in the USA.
Animal Farm (1999), made in USA and rated PG. Not as true to Orwell’s novel, with different perspective on communism according to some reviews.
I saw the 1954 film decades ago. The visual allusions to specific communists and communist tropes, as well as the moral perspective, were quite clear. Can’t speak to the 1999 Hollywood remake.
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November 8, 2009, 7:53 pmVisitor Again says:
William says:
“This proves my point that liberals are stupid.”
Congratulations!
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November 8, 2009, 7:56 pmArthurKirkland says:
If a cinematic test has any validity, the greatest evil that forces of good must overcome, the most despicable ideology ever known to humankind, and the greatest threat to any decent way of life, all are to be found at one location . . . Omega House.
Followed closely by Judge Henry T. Fleming.
No one else is on the lead lap.
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November 8, 2009, 8:00 pmPaolo Pagliaro says:
I read the comments above about Cuba and Arabia: IMO the difference is that while very few in the west long for the Saudi life-style, there’ve been and still there’re many who extoll Cuba as the paradise and precisely a paradise according to western values. This is contradictory with so much evidence, while Saudi Arabia is ruled in compliance with Islamic values, largely shared by its citizens. Of course, the Islamic countries will face huge conflicts the more people come to appreciate different values, but this is a different problem.
Returning to the main subject of the post, I’d say that while Nazism deserve to be forever stigmatized for its unparalleled organized cruelty and gelid disregard for human persons, Communism has a its own unique place in the realm of criminal mendacity and wishful ideological blindness — and this has been able to produce more deaths, for more time, than the former, often greeted with applause or defended in view of “superior hopes”.
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November 8, 2009, 8:02 pmPaolo Pagliaro says:
Has anybody seen Andrzej Wajda’s Katyn: it’s the most explicit film about communist crimes I happen to know. Of course it’s not produced in Hollywood.
In Italy it was very (and I mean, very) poorly distributed, so I had to see it at a private showing, sponsored by the Polish consul. By the way, I heartily recommend it to anybody.
I’m just reading on Wikipedia: ‘In April 2009, the authorities of the People’s Republic of China banned the movie from being distributed in the country due to “its ideology being not in line with the official view of the Chinese state”.’
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November 8, 2009, 8:14 pmDavid Welker says:
Well, since you say this is the belief system of “many,” it should be very easy for you to provide some examples.
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November 8, 2009, 8:21 pmA. Zarkov says:
How many movies has Hollywood made that were set in the Gulag? As far as I can tell, zero. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was a UK/Norway product. Let’s not forget that Denisovich first appeared in 1962 in the Soviet Literary Magazine Novy Mir, so no one was being particularly anti-Soviet in producing this film. One would think this vast penal system that endured for so many decades and touched so many lives would provide fertile material for human drama to be captured on the screen. But it seems Hollywood didn’t think so. One story in particular was especially moving– that of Victor Herman (an American caught up in the camps) published as the book called Coming Out of the Ice. However Ice did make it onto television in 1982, but very few people saw it. This whole story has remained almost completely invisible in America, which is strange because it was all about the adventures of American zek.
The Communist influence in Hollywood is no secret, and while Hollywood didn’t make many (any?) really pro Soviet films, it pretty much stayed away from any serious work that was critical of Communism in a fundamental way. And no the Rambo films don’t count because they are almost cartoons, and neither do adventure thrillers like Hunt for Red October. I’m still waiting for a Schindler’s List set in the Gulag. I would even settle for the Birdman of Chernogorsk.
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November 8, 2009, 8:23 pmBlargh says:
That’s not a real Scotsman! i.e. care to expand on the criteria of which films count? (not to dispute your main point though).
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November 8, 2009, 8:25 pmJoshua Stanton says:
The North Korean regime classifies its subjects according to a highly complex system (in Korean, songbun) of 51 different political castes, which can be generalized into “core,” “wavering,” and “hostile” classes. Aid organizations report that the during the famine, the “hostile” classes were essentially written off as expendable and allowed to starve as food aid was channeled to the “core” classes and the military. Meanwhile, the regime squandered its income on weapons and luxuries for its elite.
The regime continues to spend millions on yachts, expensive liquor, and Mercedez sedans for itself, even as the food situation for the “hostile” classes is worsening and the World Food Program goes begging for donations. And there are still plenty of apologists for North Korea in New York and Berkeley, and yes, some favorable press coverage.
So it’s more than reasonable to infer that North Korea starved those people knowingly, and perhaps intentionally.
The question of whether North Korea is really communist is more complex. It is a racist, nationalist monarchy that deifies its god-king, in a way that seems to emulate Japan’s state Shinto religion (which was, after all, the system that Japan imposed on Korea from 1905 to 1945). I can’t think, off-hand, of a society less equal and more stratified economically. But no country has ever had such complete control over the nation’s resources and means of production.
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November 8, 2009, 8:26 pmA. Zarkov says:
Polish film maker Andrzej Wajda who made Czlowiek z zelaza (Man of Iron) and Czlowiek z marmuru (Man of Marble) provide examples of what I mean by serious anti-communist films.
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November 8, 2009, 8:33 pmJerome Cole says:
I say we nuke’em. That’ll learn them commies over there in Moscow real good.
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November 8, 2009, 8:43 pmDavid Welker says:
Hollywood has a lot of issues with respect to the films it is willing to make. But a major concern is profitability. I can imagine the concern about making such a film. Would anyone want to watch it?
Of course, Hollywood does misjudge these issues from time to time. Further, it is important that the trend of including increasingly diverse characters and stories in movies continue. But ultimately, Hollywood is probably driven by its executive’s predictions (prejudices?) concerning what will be profitable more than anything else.
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November 8, 2009, 8:48 pmMichael says:
Catholics sometimes create what I would call a death card, maybe 1x3 inches, about their dearly departed. They will have some traditional religious picture on one side and something about the departed on the other. One I saw had a traditional reproduction of a Calvary death of Jesus scene with Mary below. On the obverse was a picture of a young man in a Wehrmacht uniform; he was shot in the gut a few months into the Russian campaign. On a grander scale, neither Trotsky nor Hitler ended up where they had in mind.
As far as Pacelli is concerned, there are several books fun now for showing the the emperor walking around in his frilly underwear. Hitler’s Pope shows him more into his elbows in blood over is it the Serbian Orthodox? From people inside the Church what I hear is that if a bishop would say anything one of his priests would be beaten up by the Nazis. They excused themselves by saying that they could have spoken up if they were attacked, but they couldn’t when it was their priests. A confirmatory example of this happened in Holland I think where the nun, formerly Jewish, was taken and executed.
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November 8, 2009, 8:50 pmLTEC says:
Michael Moore, Sean Penn, Oliver Stone, Steven Soderbergh, Benicio del Toro, and much of Hollywood. Also, (at least) six members of the Congressional Black Caucus who even the Washington Post accuses of Coddling Cuba.
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November 8, 2009, 9:00 pmMark in Texas says:
Stating the obvious — By that token, the British are responsible for the deaths of 1 million Irish during the potato famine and about 750,000 Germans during World War I.
Why leave out the 3 million who died during the Bengal Famine of 1942–1943?
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November 8, 2009, 9:05 pmcubanbob says:
“Strict says:
Cuban Bob: “Ba’athists are Arab Nationalist Socialist. Arab Nazi’s.”
It’s not that simple. Ideologically they were pan-Arabists: they believed that the divisions in the Arab world were a result of divide-and-conquer imperialism, and that a single, united Arab state would be a world superpower. It is true that a single Arab state would be a world superpower — but the unity never happened.
The Syrian Ba’athists and the Iraqi Ba’athists couldn’t agree on much — the two strongest Ba’ath regimes in the world (both allegedly “pan-Arabist”) couldn’t even unite.
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One of the principle charges the Islamacists leveled against Saddam Hussein was that he was a socialist. Perhaps you should study the ideology of ba’athism. That the Syrian branch differed in opinion from the Iraqi branch means nothing more than Chinese communist under Mao did not agree on all that much with Soviet communist. Think of them as crime families and the issue is not good guys vs. bad guys but of rival gangsters in a fight to be the top gang. As was said in the past “the only good communist is a dead communist.”
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November 8, 2009, 9:11 pmDavid Welker says:
LTEC,
Please go a step further and provide quotes along with the relevant context for the views you attribute to these individuals.
Remember, the claim is that many people believe Cuba is a paradise based on western values. The claim isn’t that some people believe that some aspect of some policy that exists in Cuba makes sense.
Get quotes or consider your claims discredited.
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November 8, 2009, 9:11 pmwilliam says:
Some facts are more facts than other facts. The Pope did speak out against the bombing of civilian populations. This is more than the Archbishop of Canterbury did. My guess is that not too many Serbian Orthodox priests or Jewish rabbis were forceful in their condemnation of the bombing of Dresden. The Pope in some tacit way participated in the Holocaust, but there were other atrocities and other silences.
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November 8, 2009, 9:20 pmcubanbob says:
“ArthurKirkland says:
In my experience, those who attempt to make political points by directing intense attention to authoritarian Cuba while ignoring authoritarian regimes such as those of Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan are unpersuasive — unless the point is merely to lather up an excitable segment of Florida’s population for fundraising purposes.
Many of these people also criticize Venezuela’s government — for corruption, brutality, and the like — while refraining from mentioning governments such as those of Colombia and Tajikistan. This, too, is not the foundation of any persuasive argument concerning morality.
To borrow a label or two from Prof. Somin, most of these slanted, blindered arguments are as silly as they appear to be inevitable.
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November 8, 2009, 2:32 pm”
Funny I never noticed any of the hollywood types and members of congress shilling for the Saudi’s like they do for Castro and Chavez. As for the stans you mentioned, it must of skipped your attention that they were all former Soviet Republics, one supposes bad habits die hard. The only good communist is a dead communist.
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November 8, 2009, 9:21 pmArrowSmith says:
The policy creates starvation. It hardly needs to say “we wish for a million to starve” for it to be very intentional. You are simply being obtuse.
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November 8, 2009, 9:21 pmDavid Welker says:
This is a very good example of why it is a bad idea to minimize the evils committed by different groups. In general, I would consider it evil to kill someone merely because they have a different belief system than yourself. (Unless, of course, that belief system implied that they were an imminent threat in a particular context. But the reason for the killing in that case would not be because of the belief per se, but instead because of the threat.)
So cubanbob, if someone living in your community who claimed to be a communist was murdered, would you praise the killer? Is murder “good” in that case?
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November 8, 2009, 9:23 pmArrowSmith says:
You sound very approving of Communists. Fess up.
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November 8, 2009, 9:34 pmcubanbob says:
“Stating the obvious says:
On the other hand I have noticed that, to the best of my knowledge, every national government in the past century that has murdered hundreds of thousand to millions of its own citizens for its own ends has labeled itself “socialist” or “communist.”
Then you obviously don’t know much history. The Nationalist Chinese killed millions. Suharto in Indonesia probably killed upwards of million (but they were communists so they don’t count I guess). Don’t forget the Ottomans during WWI.
Also, don’t forget that Idi Amin (elevated by the British to keep the Communists out of Uganda) and the Juntas of Guatemala (which were installed by the CIA) certainly killed a large enough percentage of their populations to rank up there with the worst of the twentieth century.
And of course the Nazis were far from socialist in any meaningful sense of the word. They were virulently anti-communist.
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November 8, 2009, 3:24 pm”
Nazi’s were not socialists in any meaningful sense? Who are you kidding? They are only ‘right’ in the sense they were a bit less socialist than Stalin. Stalinist are virulently ant-Maoist. Different sects of the socialist faith war against each other. No different that Shia vs. Sunni among others. Not as a justification but adding up the numbers killed by your counter example and those are only a fraction of the numbers killed by Stalin, never mind Mao’s count. And thanks for admitting that the only good communist are dead communist. You are right, dead communist hardly count. Killing those who if given the chance will either enslave you or murder you or your loved ones is never a bad thing.
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November 8, 2009, 9:36 pmRicardo says:
Some Progressives were Communist sympathizers for sure. Others, not so much. No history of American Progressivism is complete without pointing out the sizable contingent of Protestant evangelicals in the movement — people who most assuredly objected to Communism’s attacks on religion. All this effort to shoehorn past political movements into current partisan categories is wasted effort. History isn’t that simple.
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November 8, 2009, 9:36 pmA. Zarkov says:
Why would anyone want to watch Stalag 17, Bridge Over the River Kwai, Cool Hand Luke, or Schlinders List– to name a few? It fact it’s largely impossible to determine which films will be profitable as proved in Hollywood Economics: How extreme uncertainty shapes the film industry. No, I’m afraid the answer lies in Hollywood ideology and culture not economics. It’s true that Hollywood won’t make a pure propaganda movie– we know that from the making of Spartacus. The original screenplay so propagandistic and boring, the producers really did fear a flop, and that’s why they brought Dalton Trumbo to do a speedy re-write. The pro-communist tilt in Hollywood shows up in terms of the films they didn’t make, not in the ones they did.
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November 8, 2009, 9:39 pmcubanbob says:
” David Welker says:
As was said in the past “the only good communist is a dead communist.”
This is a very good example of why it is a bad idea to minimize the evils committed by different groups. In general, I would consider it evil to kill someone merely because they have a different belief system than yourself. (Unless, of course, that belief system implied that they were an imminent threat in a particular context. But the reason for the killing in that case would not be because of the belief per se, but instead because of the threat.)
So cubanbob, if someone living in your community who claimed to be a communist was murdered, would you praise the killer? Is murder “good” in that case?
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November 8, 2009, 9:23 pm”
Yes. Provided said communist was active in implementing communism. No different than a rapist being killed while committing the rape. Which is exactly what communism is; the rape of the individual.
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November 8, 2009, 9:44 pmLTEC says:
Ya got me. I was going to quote Sacha Trudeau calling Castro
but then I realized that even he doesn’t literally claim Cuba is a paradise, so I guess I’m discredited. But I’d rather be discredited than have to see the movie “Che” just to find quotes for you.
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November 8, 2009, 9:55 pmDavid Welker says:
Fine. I confess to believing that it is wrong to murder someone because of their ideology, whether they are a libertarian or a communist. (Not that I see a lot of difference between the two ideologies, or anything.)
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November 8, 2009, 9:58 pmDavid Welker says:
LTEC,
You are right. You are discredited.
If the assertion is that someone said X, and you can only find people who say Y, then your assertion that they said X is discredited. That is basic logic.
And besides that, I have never even heard of Sacha Trudeau.
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November 8, 2009, 10:02 pmcubanbob says:
“Strict says:
“Japan is vastly more powerful than all the Arab countries combined”
Zarkov, you missed the entire point. The point wasn’t to just tally up all the individual Arab countries as they now are, as individual countries. The point of the Ba’athists was that if the Arab countries all united into one Arab country, assuming it functioned, it would be a superpower. It’s a type of “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” theory, and trying to refute that by summing up its parts as they now stand doesn’t quite work.
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November 8, 2009, 4:47 pm”
Absent oil, Israel has a GDP nearly equal to the combined Arab states. And Israel completely outclasses the entire Arab world in scientific achievement. And thas just Israel.
If the ba’aathist were to ever create a single unitary and functioning state, Japan with it’s GDP, industrial and scientific capabilities is easily without question more powerful than such a state as it currently is and if Japan ever re-militarized and reasserted old tendencies it would have no problem crushing that combined Arab state.
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November 8, 2009, 10:05 pmleofromlansing says:
One of the really groovy aspects of continually harping on the evils of the bad ol’ communists is that it allows many people to avoid facing up the the horrific things that the United States (and Israel) have been doing in recent years.
How much more enjoyable (and safe) it is to tut-tut about nasty Joe Stalin than to make any effort whatsoever to end the US practice of torturing detainees or the Israeli practice of firing missiles into buildings containing women and children.
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November 8, 2009, 10:13 pmRicardo says:
NGOs have limited resources and, like any organization, have to figure out where their resources will have the most impact. In North Korea, the impact is virtually zero. As the Hermit Kingdom, North Korea doesn’t care what foreigners think about it. With at least one nuclear weapon, it has a credible deterrent against “regime change” and it is already so isolated, there is really nothing Western countries can do to put additional pressure on the regime. Except by getting China to put pressure on North Korea. Which means downplaying China’s own human rights record, among other things.
On the other hand, a country like Egypt does actually have to pay attention to what foreigners think considering the billions of dollars in aid money it receives every year. And China is well-known to release political prisoners in advance of meetings with U.S. officials as quid pro quo (it is possible, of course, that this could perversely encourage China to be more repressive — that way it can periodically release the people it has locked up to show how “reformed” it is becoming). But still, pressure works for many countries. It doesn’t for North Korea.
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November 8, 2009, 10:25 pmArthurKirkland says:
How does the generic rape of the individual stack up against the rape of nuns arranged by right-wing ideology in Central America?
I respect those who oppose politically inspired rape and murder, gulags, death squads, authoritarianism, torture and other atrocities regardless of the political labels applied (correctly or incorrectly) to those who commit, arrange, fund, command or accept the benefits of atrocity.
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November 8, 2009, 10:26 pmDavid Welker says:
cubanbob,
You are officially insane. You are every bit as evil as your communist enemies. It is precisely the sort of thought process that you are exhibiting that has lead to mass murder in many different historical contexts.
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November 8, 2009, 10:34 pmStrict says:
Cuban Bob,
In every election in the Czech Republic, the KSCM get 10–25% of the vote, mostly from the countryside and from the elderly whose pension plans were scrapped along with the rest of the communist system.
Looks like you have a lot of killing to do in those little Czech villages. Enjoy.
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November 8, 2009, 10:38 pmStrict says:
“Israel has a GDP nearly equal to the combined Arab states.”
I thought that Saudi Arabia alone has twice the GDP of Israel.
And anyway, I don’t believe in a pan-Arab superpower. It didn’t and won’t happen. But that was a founding tenet of Ba’athism — to unite the Arab world into a single superpower. It’s not exactly a mind-boggling concept. There’s nothing “magical” about it.
Of course, those in charge didn’t really believe in Ba’athism — they just believed in their own power. The Assads and Saddam Hussein just cared about themselves and their small cliques.
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November 8, 2009, 10:46 pmASlyJD says:
Fub,
Strangely enough, I found the 1999 remake of Animal Farm quite good and powerful. They did add a totally new ending, in which [SPOILER] after “I could not tell the humans from the pigs” scene, the sheepdog and goat run away from the farm, only to return after the farm as completely collapsed from mismanagement. A new human family, blond haired and blue eyed, move in and restore the farm to better than its revolutionary glory.
Other changes included a number of rather good mockups of Soviet propaganda films made by the pigs in which “spontaneous demonstrations” break out, and the hanging of dissidents and political criminals. Ducks look rather strange when hung on a scaffold, though.
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November 8, 2009, 10:48 pmsecond history says:
BlackMinorcaPullets sez:
Apparently you are channelling Pat Buchanan .....
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November 8, 2009, 10:58 pmOnly sane one left says:
Fine. I confess to believing that it is wrong to murder someone because of their ideology, whether they are a libertarian or a communist. (Not that I see a lot of difference between the two ideologies, or anything.)
They are polar opposites.
You are officially insane, please seek help.
[Is some group sending trolls to spew nonsense on all non-leftist sites to alloy readers?]
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November 8, 2009, 11:36 pmDavid Welker says:
I agree that they are dissimilar in many important respects.
However, it should be pointed out that both ideologies share a similar and fatal intellectual flaw in that they are both totalizing, top-down, and all-encompassing ideologies. In both cases, the adherents to these belief systems are quasi-religious and in both adherents claim to have found “the answer.” (In one case it is the state that is worshipped, in the other case it is the market that is worshipped). Most importantly, belief in either of these ideologies is more a matter of faith than reason.
So, these ideologies are definitely not polar opposites. They both stand on similar ends of the spectrum and in opposition to pragmatism.
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November 8, 2009, 11:55 pmA. Zarkov says:
I don’t know about the million German colonists part, but the Soviet Union certainly attacked Poland from the east. Germany and Russia certainly started WWII as allies, no one disputes that. Now why did Britain declare war on Germany and not on Russia? When asked the British forign minister came up with non-answer to the effect “We guarantee Poland’s security but not its frontiers.”
Viktor Suvorov, who was a defector from the GRU, claims the USSR did start WWI in his controversial book, Icebreaker: Who Started the Second World War? An updated and more referenced version of this theory appears in Chief Culprit: Stalin’s Grand Design to Start World War II. Naturally many historians dispute Suvorov, but his ideas deserve study. Certainly more than the usual mindless snark like “Apparently you are channelling Pat Buchanan .....”
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November 9, 2009, 12:09 amRicardo says:
As far as Asians are concerned, Japan started WWII in 1937 with the so-called Marco Polo Bridge incident. But as for the European half of that war, you would have to discount the stated aims of the National Socialists in Germany to claim they did not instigate war. The most that could be said is that Stalin and Hitler were collaborators in carving up Europe between the two empires. Hitler probably had in mind all along that the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement was a grand (and successful) deception.
In some alternate history in which the National Socialists never came to power in Germany, by all means its possible to imagine Stalin invading Finland, the Baltic states and Poland on his own. That isn’t the history we are left to study, though.
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November 9, 2009, 12:33 amcubanbob says:
“leofromlansing says:
One of the really groovy aspects of continually harping on the evils of the bad ol’ communists is that it allows many people to avoid facing up the the horrific things that the United States (and Israel) have been doing in recent years.
How much more enjoyable (and safe) it is to tut-tut about nasty Joe Stalin than to make any effort whatsoever to end the US practice of torturing detainees or the Israeli practice of firing missiles into buildings containing women and children.
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November 8, 2009, 10:13 pm”
Being the cowards that they are the terrorists you are pimping for surround themselves with woman and children as shields. A tactic they learned from communist. Not a coincidence that North Vietnamese air defenses were sited near schools and hospitals. If the Americans destroyed the schools or hospitals in the attempt to take out the enemy air defense sites that would make great propaganda for trolls like you. If the Air Force did not take them out it would put US airmen at greater risk. A lot of pilots died because of that. I suppose that killing more than 30 million people is but a trifle for you, hardly worth sullying your Dear Uncle Joe’s blessed memory.
The question isn’t why Israeli’s fire missiles in to building that besides containing terrorists also have woman and children in them. The question is why those woman and children don’t spit on the cowards who hide behind them. Interesting the only time dead Arabs are of use is when they are killed by Americans or Israeli’s. When Arabs kill Arabs no matter how many woman and children are killed it’s not much of a story. King Hussein killed more Palestinians than the Israeli’s ever have but that doesn’t fit the narrative so down the memory hole. Your concern for dead woman and children is only evident when they are killed by the politically correct villain. Otherwise dead Arabs have no value for you. Now do the world a favor and make yourself a good communist.
“Strict says:
“Israel has a GDP nearly equal to the combined Arab states.”
I thought that Saudi Arabia alone has twice the GDP of Israel.”
If you are going to quote someone at least be accurate. I said absent oil. “Of course, those in charge didn’t really believe in Ba’athism — they just believed in their own power. The Assads and Saddam Hussein just cared about themselves and their small cliques.” Agreed. Funny how you tend to find more real believers in countries that never suffered under communism that in those that did.
“Strict says:
Cuban Bob,
In every election in the Czech Republic, the KSCM get 10–25% of the vote, mostly from the countryside and from the elderly whose pension plans were scrapped along with the rest of the communist system.
Looks like you have a lot of killing to do in those little Czech villages. Enjoy.
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November 8, 2009, 10:38 pm”
First there is an old expression that goes like this ‘if a million people believe a foolish thing it’s still a foolish thing”. Which explains why a certain segment of the population keeps perusing what is at best and in the kindest possible light delusional thinking. As for those Czechs’ that vote for communists almost all of them were part of the communist ruling class. They lost their status, perks and benefits. Of course they miss the good old days for them. Not much use today for degrees in marxism and socialist doctrine of late.
That 10% figure corresponds neatly with the communist party membership limited to 10% of the population. Considering the misery those bastards imposed on the rest of the population I fail to see the compassion you seem to have for that scum but then again it appears that you share a common ideology with them. Be useful and make yourself a good communist.
“David Welker says:
cubanbob,
You are officially insane. You are every bit as evil as your communist enemies. It is precisely the sort of thought process that you are exhibiting that has lead to mass murder in many different historical contexts.
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November 8, 2009, 10:34 pm”
Mass murder has been taken to it’s apex by communist. Communism can never work organically and can only be implemented through murder and terrorism. Every confessional type of socialism requires force or it’s threat to be imposed. That is why socialism in all it’s forms is inherently evil and so are those who advocate socialism. Incidentally you do realize that one of the signs of insanity is attempting to do the sign thing over and over and each time expecting a different result. So Mr. Welker as a shill for communism in addition to being officially and clinically insane you are also evil to the core. So do the world a favor and make yourself a good communist but in an earth friendly way and have a nice day.
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November 9, 2009, 1:09 amcubanbob says:
A. Zarkov says: Stalin indeed is a co-conspiritor in the war with Hitler. But that is more as result of Stalin recognizing he went to far in his purge of the Red Army and his need to buy time to rebuild the Red Army Officer Corp and his complete distrust of the British and French to honor any agreement with the USSR against Germany. Ricardo states that Hitler thought (correctly) that the treaty would cover his intentions against the USSR. Stalin though he could deceive Hitler long enough to rebuild the Red Army sufficiently to deter the Germans long enough until he though the USSR was ready to be able to defeat the Germans.
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November 9, 2009, 1:25 amloki13 says:
I am dumber for reading this thread (even after excluding cubanbob’s posts).
I wish there was some cause of action that could compensate me for reading this crud. That is time that I will never get back.
1. Anonymous internet commenters are rarely your best sources of information.
2. I would be surprised if there was a single person here who was actually open to the idea of changing their mind.
3. Yes, communism was bad. There’s clearly some coverage of how bad it was (or else we wouldn’t be having this STUPID debate), but it pales in comparison to the Holocaust. Well, a lot of things pale in comparison to the Holocaust. The Holocaust is sui generis. There also isn’t enough coverage of any given atrocity, from the Armenian massacred to, well, whatever. You know why? Because *nobody likes downers*. So they’re not made that often. Think y’all are worked up about this? Imagine being Armenian, or from Cyprus, or from anywhere in Africa..... and trying to pitch your film.
So– here’s my solution. If you think this is what we really, really need– pull a Mel Gibson. Show THE POWERS THAT BE that what really works at the box office is films about how bad those Reds were. Go and start financing instead of bitching.
It’s what John Galt would do, right?
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November 9, 2009, 2:10 amDavid Welker says:
cubanbob,
I can only conclude that you are a troll, because no one could really be that dumb in real life.
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November 9, 2009, 2:22 amDavid Welker says:
No one forced you to read it. But you do have my sympathies.
I only skimmed it.
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November 9, 2009, 2:26 amMalvolio says:
You mean the one Denzel Washington version, with the evil Manchurian Corporation, or the Frank Sinatra version that was immediately pulled from release?
Did you miss Sam Waterston’s long speech about how it was all Kissinger’s fault?
Let’s keep this about movies people actually saw. (Actually, I rented Rescue Dawn, mostly because I had just gotten back from Laos myself, but couldn’t get through it.)
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November 9, 2009, 2:29 amJB says:
Anytime you see someone wearing communist symbols and garb, get in their face and ask them if they would wear a swastika.
If they say no, then tell them that what they are wearing is worse.
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November 9, 2009, 2:47 amcubanbob says:
“David Welker says:
cubanbob,
You are a complete and irredeemable idiot. Not to mention a coward who hides behind anonymity.
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November 9, 2009, 2:22 am”
To call you an idiot is to insult idiots. So I won’t insult idiots. I am no more anonymous than you are. Who is this person who calls themselves David Welker? Is there some internet certificate of authenticity to prove that you are the David Welker? Hey, my real name is Barry Soetero. Can you prove I’m not? As I said before all socialist no matter the flavor are inherently evil and insane and you just keep proving my point over and over. As for cowardly behavior all you can do is make silly statements but can never actually refute the facts and that is because you can’t.
loki13 don’t flatter yourself, you were dumb to begin with and can’t get any dumber.
Still a broken clock is right twice a day. The Holocaust was unique simply due to the utter mindlessness of it. The industrial extermination of a people who not only posed no threat to the Germans but the single minded focus of the killing was such that Germans devoted enormous resources to the killings even when it seriously degraded their war effort.
The communist usually eliminated only those they believed to be threats to them and their rule and as examples to the rest. Still Stalin had the anti-semtic mania as well and was preparing to stage a Holocaust of the remaining Jews at the time of his death. As for numbers of people killed the communist beat the nazi’s hand down, they having a greater number of years to do so. And the victims are equally dead. Internationalist communists versus nationalist racial communists. Nazi’s and communists ultimately two sides of the same coin and the only good ones are the dead ones. loki13 judging by your snark your of the opinion that communists are not so bad, what is a hundred million dead in a world of six billion? Is that your point? if one group kills a few million then one hundred million is not so bad and we should judge them so harshly. That we peasants should be grateful that the wise and compassionate vanguard of the proletariat will impose on all us every thing and anything necessary for our own good whether or not we know or understand what is in our own interest because we are not sufficiently enlightened; that killing those who oppose the vanguard and refuse to be broken is a necessary good in the service of the revolution? Obama’s buddy Ayers and his wife shared those same sentiments. I have yet to see any proof that your mind could be opened. Perhaps you could surprise us.
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November 9, 2009, 3:24 amDavid Welker says:
cubanbob,
You are probably a troll. Enough already. Your antics cease to amuse me.
Alternatively, if you aren’t a troll, your arguments are really emotional and irrational. In that case, you need to take a course in logic 101. Seriously. I hope for your sake that your a troll. =)
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November 9, 2009, 3:33 ampmorem says:
It’s easy and natural to see Stalin and Mao as monsters (and Hitler as the same kind). They did not act alone, though. They were also creatures of their environments.
A collective identity defines itself by both what it is and who is not a part. Over and over we have seen collective identities grind down and slaughter those who are not a part. The collective identity simply cannot tolerate those who do not belong.
It’s not just that Communism allows monsters to rise to power, it also creates them.
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November 9, 2009, 3:36 amcubanbob says:
“ArthurKirkland says:
No different than a rapist being killed while committing the rape. Which is exactly what communism is; the rape of the individual.
How does the generic rape of the individual stack up against the rape of nuns arranged by right-wing ideology in Central America?
I respect those who oppose politically inspired rape and murder, gulags, death squads, authoritarianism, torture and other atrocities regardless of the political labels applied (correctly or incorrectly) to those who commit, arrange, fund, command or accept the benefits of atrocity.
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November 8, 2009, 10:26 pm”
Not just rape in the literal sense which is also quite a common communist terror tactic but rape of one’s soul. Most authoritarian states leave the individual alone provided he stays out of politics. Give the devils their cut and stay quiet and one can live their lives pretty much as they want. As an example Cuba under Batista. Not a justification but an observation. Communist are not content with that. No they want to turn you in to their idea of what you should be and if you resist, death, torture, imprisonment or banishment. Cuba under Castro.
Now while I make no defense of fascist in Central America for the rape and murder of nuns, but you seem to conveniently overlook the same actions when done by communist terrorists in those countries. And they have killed far more over the years than any of the right wingers as you call the fascists. And should those communists win the killings will be far worse than those they have already committed.
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November 9, 2009, 3:43 amcubanbob says:
‘David Welker says:
cubanbob,
You are probably a troll. Enough already. Your antics cease to amuse me.
Alternatively, if you aren’t a troll, your arguments are really emotional and irrational. In that case, you need to take a course in logic 101. Seriously. I hope for your sake that your a troll. =)
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November 9, 2009, 3:33 am”
And you are suffering from a severe case projection. Seek medical assistance immediately and by the way your antics amuse no one. And once again with your comments you prove my point that you are delusional.
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November 9, 2009, 3:52 amDavid Welker says:
Indeed. I am delusional for wasting even a second on you. I will be sure to correct my error.
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November 9, 2009, 3:56 amcubanbob says:
” David Welker says:
cubanbob,
I can only conclude that you are a troll, because no one could really be that dumb in real life.
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November 9, 2009, 2:22 am
David Welker says:
I wish there was some cause of action that could compensate me for reading this crud. That is time that I will never get back.
No one forced you to read it. But you do have my sympathies.
I only skimmed it.
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November 9, 2009, 2:26 am”
It is rather obvious that you really are that dumb and probably in real life as well. But go on pimping for communists and keep proving over and over just how delusional and dumb a leftist is. No truer words have ever been spoken ‘the only good communist is a dead communist’. No go on and make yourself a good communist in an earth friendly way and have a nice day. And thanks for not bothering with me any further. Now seek help immediately. Somewhere a nut is missing his nuthouse. Or an inmate his gulag. Be gone troll.
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November 9, 2009, 4:00 amDavid Welker says:
Any more insights, cubanbob? Maybe if you repeat yourself enough, you will start making sense. =) I am clearly awake WAY too late.
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November 9, 2009, 4:07 amA. Zarkov says:
So your name is really “loki13?” Your post self destructs or even worse becomes self-referential in the Godel sense.
If you feel diminished then don’t read the posts. Go watch television.
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November 9, 2009, 6:35 amA. Zarkov says:
That’s pretty much the standard theory. But Viktor Suvorov presents a really different viewpoint. According to him, Operation Barbarossa was a preemptive strike against the USSR. Hitler learned that Stalin was preparing to attack him, and had to act quickly. Thus the ill-prepared German attack was launched out of desperation. Suvorov claims Stalin wanted to start WWII to Sovietize Europe and he essentially seduced Hitler into attacking Poland and starting the war.
I don’t necessarily subscribe to Suvorov because I have not read him in detail or his critics. But I don’t reject him outright either.
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November 9, 2009, 6:44 amA. Zarkov says:
Gentlemen: please stop the childish insults– both of you. It diminishes the thread and makes people skip your posts.
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November 9, 2009, 6:46 amPersonFromPorlock says:
Well, since the thread seems to have reached the ‘mutual micturation event’ stage, I won’t feel too bad about a little reductio ad absurdum: if we’re going to dredge up past sins and demand reparations, isn’t the ur–sin the extinction of H. sap. neandertalensis? If that was done by force then we’re all equally guilty: but if it was done by interbreeding, those of us with Neandertal genes have a bunch of money coming!
As a ginger-haired person, I eagerly await developments.
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November 9, 2009, 7:51 amSarkozy says:
David Welker:
“your truly being idiotic.”
Thanks for the laugh.
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November 9, 2009, 8:34 amStrict says:
Cuban:“Israel has a GDP nearly equal to the combined Arab states.”
Strict:“I thought that Saudi Arabia alone has twice the GDP of Israel.”
Cuban” If you are going to quote someone at least be accurate. I said absent oil.”
But why absent oil? Oil exists, it’s real.
—————————
Cuban: “As for those Czechs’ that vote for communists almost all of them were part of the communist ruling class.”
Not at all. Most are rural, poor laborers.
As for the movies, this is getting ridiculous.
“There are THREE movies about Communist badguys.” lol
“There are ZERO Hollywood movies set in the Gulag” (especially if you discount the Hollywood movie entitled “Gulag”!). lol
Movies that aren’t made in Hollywood don’t count. Movies that weren’t #1 blockbusters don’t count. Movies that are “almost cartoons” don’t count. Movies that are “adventure thrillers” don’t count.
How can Rescue Dawn NOT count? Werner Herzog is one of the most acclaimed directors in the history of film.
Ok, maybe “Ilsa, Tigress of the Siberian” doesn’t count, I’ll admit that.
But “Gulag 113″ should count. I think Tarkovsky’s “Stalker” should count. Kalik’s “And the Wind Returneth” should count.
And the old version of “Manchurian Candidate” was NOT pulled from distribution. It’s very popular, and I saw it last year!
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November 9, 2009, 9:24 amInsufficiently Sensitive says:
Again, it appears that to such NGOs, their desire to ‘make an impact’ on their assumed peers (and donors) trumps their expressed human rights principles. OF COURSE the impact of their propaganda is zero inside of North Korea, unless somehow one or more of its citizens encounters it outside of its regular channels. But don’t their principles somehow require that they direct their opprobium where the actual need is greatest?
Of course the place where their resources have the most impact is exactly among their ‘liberal’ peers among the democracies. So why do we but rarely see their j’accuse against the evils of NK’s treatment of its own citizens, based on their supposed principles of civil rights? They seem to spend the majority of their resources marshalling the public opinion of the liberal democracies against easy targets whom they are confident will not retaliate — the United States and Israel come immediately to mind — for alleged (or even faked) crimes and misdemeanors which are paltry by comparison with NK’s behavior. Such NGOs appear to have more complex motives than simply identifying civil rights violations to world opinion, and so designating some murders or starvations as equaler than others.
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November 9, 2009, 9:38 amStrict says:
“So why do we but rarely see their j’accuse against the evils of NK’s treatment of its own citizens, based on their supposed principles of civil rights?”
This just isn’t true. NK is criticized ALL THE TIME by NGOs.
For example, Human Rights Watch, which is accused of “only” focusing, as you said, on the US and Israel — issued a July 3, 2009 report called “Allies in Paranoia and Repression” about Burma and North Korea. Here.
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November 9, 2009, 9:59 amStrict says:
And what do you mean that Israel “won’t retaliate”? We’ve seen right here on VC Israeli retaliation against (reports by) HRW, for example.
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November 9, 2009, 10:01 amKen Arromdee says:
Can you explain “The Manchurian Candidate”??
The original Manchurian Candidate was produced before Hollywood became that leftist. The 2004 one, of course, removes the Communist references.
Or “The Killing Fields”??
Since Communist Vietnam overthrew the Khmer Rouge, this subject matter would be acceptable to leftists.
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November 9, 2009, 10:27 amAndrew J. Lazarus says:
This strikes me, considering Guatemala and El Salvador, as highly unlikely. Would you be so kind as to supply a sourced comparison?
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November 9, 2009, 10:46 amStrict says:
Ken,
You missed the point.
There are communist bad guys in The Killing Fields.
COMMUNIST BAD GUYS!
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November 9, 2009, 10:56 amMalvolio says:
Look, anybody can point a camera out of a window and call the result a movie. You have to have some minimum definition of watch constitutes a movies in order to have a discussion about them. Yes, mine is both vague and commercial: widely released in the US, shown on television, available on DVD, that sort of thing.
Really, I am willing to count Rescue Dawn, if for no other reason than it was advertised on TV. Also, Hanoi Hilton, Hamburger Hill, and We Were Soldiers.
But compare them to all the other movies movies about the US involvement in Indo-China. Platoon, Apocalypse Now, Deer Hunter, major movies by major directors and the bad guys are ... US and ARVN officers. Even smaller movies like Casualties of War and Air America and movies where Vietnam is peripheral like Hair and Forrest Gump focus on American wrongdoing.
It was unavailable from 1963 until 1988 and no one seems to know why.
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November 9, 2009, 10:59 amCJColucci says:
The original screenplay so propagandistic and boring, the producers really did fear a flop, and that’s why they brought Dalton Trumbo to do a speedy re-write.
Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood ten, was brought in to tone down the agitprop in Spartacus? So who wrote the original and what kind of boring propaganda did Trumbo excise?
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November 9, 2009, 11:02 amTo Hayek With You says:
The key point lost in all of this is the concentration of power. Regimes with the greatest power over their citizens and the least respect for individual rights commit the greatest atrocities. Political philosophies that espouse the concentration of power such as socialism or communism lead to the conditions that greatly increase the chances of atrocities being committed. It is appalling that with all we know of history there are still people who will deny the obvious or who will quibble over what brand of insanity a particular leader hews to most closely. It does not matter whether we call China communist or socialist or any other damn thing. To the extent they use force on their own citizens we know all we need to know.
The left/right, communism/nazism/socialism paradigm has never been a particularly useful one, unless your use for it is to obscure the true nature of the argument. Then it is very handy indeed as we see from all of the wasted energy in the discussion thus far as to what label to assign to this or that regime or tyrant. The true issue is... force. How easily and commonly does a government use it? How safe does a populace feel in calling for it to be used on those who disagree with them? How accepted is it in everyday life? How concentrated is it?
The chains lay more heavily on some than others and they tend to be libertarians. They would no more hold a chain than bear one. For others the chains are the chief attraction. Those are the people who are ascendant in many of our institutions now and they are to be feared... and loathed... in equal measure. Most people are in the middle and endure their government to the same extent to which they can ignore it. It is when the state intrudes into every aspect of life that conflicts become most bitter and violence most common. Eventually, if the state is allowed to grow powerful enough, atrocity becomes inevitable.
Call it red baiting if you like but the conflict is ageless and existed long before the scourge of communism ever appeared on the scene. It does not matter what color tunic tyranny wears. Eventually, it will be stained with blood all the same.
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November 9, 2009, 11:13 amRandy says:
Malvolio: “What does that leave?”
The Manchurian Candidate. The Red Violin. The Last Emperor. Kundun. The Kllling Fields.
Also the whole genre of scifi movies of the 50s, from The Blob to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which have been interpreted as thinly veiled attacks on the cult of communism.
Not to mention comedies such as “The Russians are Coming! The Russians are Coming!”
Not to mention The Man From Uncle and other tv shows that portrayed the Cold War.
Not to mention screwball comedies such as Green Acres that would occasionally have a plot device involving someone going to Washington and getting caught up in some cold war schenanigans.
I’d say that leaves quite a lot! However, the larger point is well taken — we have fewer actual movies about communism than nazism. Part of that is because we had dozens of movies made during the actual war or shortly thereafter, such as (my fav) The Guns of Navaronne.
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November 9, 2009, 11:19 amAnderson says:
According to him, Operation Barbarossa was a preemptive strike against the USSR. Hitler learned that Stalin was preparing to attack him, and had to act quickly.
This has been pretty well exploded. Hitler told his generals to prepare to attack the Soviets (not a mere contingency plan) in summer 1940. Whatever the Russians were planning, Hitler definitely intended to attack Russia no matter what. Conquest of Russia was always the point of the game for him.
The Russians did have a preemptive-war plan, and Chris Bellamy (Absolute War) even goes so far as to believe that Stalin did plan such a war ... in 1942. Some tend IMHO to place too much emphasis on Russia’s mobilization in 1941, but I think this overlooks non-offensive motives, such as “being the only major European land power not dominated by the ridiculously successful Wehrmacht.”
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November 9, 2009, 11:22 amDotar Sojat says:
All this fuss over the broken eggs. Look what a terrific omlette it made.
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November 9, 2009, 11:24 amAnderson says:
(To qualify: Stalin feared that relations w/ Hitler would go south, and expected — for some unguessable reason — that this deterioration would occur in formal, diplomatic stages, right down to a declaration of war, upon which an offensively-situated Russia could attack Germany before Germany finished its own mobilization. This notion fell short in that (1) Hitler did not play the game according to Hoyle (any more than did Stalin), and (2) Stalin managed to be oblivious to the marshaling of a 3-million-man army on his borders.)
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November 9, 2009, 11:48 amRandy says:
“But compare them to all the other movies movies about the US involvement in Indo-China. Platoon, Apocalypse Now, Deer Hunter, major movies by major directors and the bad guys are ... US and ARVN officers. ”
Yes, of course. Because Vietnam was a traumatic event for the US. It started out as a war to prevent communism from spreading to that country, and ended up being a war that no one could quite figure out, to being a very unpopular war.
Which is, in my opinion, one of the big reasons we don’t see such outrage against communism.
As I pointed out in another thread, our obsession with Nazism is the exception, not the rule. We Americans ignore most foriegn entanglements and problems. Historically, that has been our official stance. Only since WWII, when we became a superpower, did *some* of us believe that we have a role to play as international policeman. (I would hasten to add that many people, Pat Buchanan included, believe that this is NOT our proper role, and we should avoid any of these debates).
We had a hot war with Nazism and we defeated them cleanly and completely. That’s makes for a good story. We never defeated communism cleanly and completely — it still survives, and we didn’t have a hot war with them, at least not in Europe.
But it was our humilating defeat in Vietnam that soured Americans on fighting communism. Imagine making a film anytime in the late 60s through the 70s on fighting communism! It would be a box office disaster. And once that mentality gets cemented, it’s hard to change it. I hardly think it’s some sort of conspiracy by Hollywood execs to be soft on communism — they generally aren’t smart enough to know who is our current president, let alone know the nuances of international policy.
But back to my first point: Aside from Nazism, we simply don’t care about what happens in the rest of the world. We don’t care about Bosnia or Serbia, or Rwanda or Darfur. We don’t care Saudi Arabia, or the Left Bank, or Burma, or N. Korea, or China. We don’t care about Argentina or El Salvador or Grenada. or the Philippines. We Americans show very little care about atrocities that happen *as they happen*, and even less once they are past. Sure, some special interests or ethnic groups get hotly involved (Cuban nationalists, Croatian-Americans and so on, and perhaps a few college students), and yeah, they may hit the news cycle a bit, but that’s pretty much the end of it.
So don’t feel bad if Americans don’t get all hot and bothered over communism. We don’t get hot and bothered about anything outside our borders. It isn’t a grand conspiracy. And if it is, then you have to blame just about all ordinary Americans.
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November 9, 2009, 12:02 pmKen Arromdee says:
These Communist bad guys are ones who were eventually overthrown by other Communists that the movie industry sympathizes with. That makes them okay to portray as bad guys even if the industry is generally biased against showing Communist bad guys.
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November 9, 2009, 12:15 pmKen Arromdee says:
This has the same problem as the Manchurian candidate–because these movies were so long ago, they were made before the movie industry got the biases it has today, so they’re irrelevant.
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November 9, 2009, 12:18 pmKen Arromdee says:
Also, the Man from Uncle doesn’t count either. Far from having Communist enemies, it had an evil organization that both American and Soviet worked together to stop.
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November 9, 2009, 12:22 pmRandy says:
I should of course add the long history of atrocities that the US committed against Native Americans. And wiping out indian culture was our official policy for a long time, right up until the mid-20th century.
If you really believe that some past or present horrible hasn’t gotten it’s due, then the answer is quite simple: Make your own movie. It isn’t that hard. People do it all the time. Get it shot and in the can, and then peddle it to independent filmfests, Hollywood or wherever you can get it shown. Can’t get it shown? Contact Mel Gibson — he knows how to get around the distribution system.
It turns out that instead of actually doing anything, people constantly bring up two points: Liberals all loved Stalin in the 1930s, and Marxists are everywhere in college campuses today.
And somehow, the fact that communism in N. Korea exists, or China, or Cuba, all flows from these two points. It’s absurd, of course, and a pointless argument. No one is able to identify more than a handful of actual Marxists in the entire university system, yet these few control everything in America.
And of course, they conveniently leave out all the right wing apologists for the brutal dictators that we have supported, be they in S. America or Africa, or whatever. No one remembers Jeane Kirkpatrick? It seemed as though we supported any tinhorn dicatator as long as he was anti-communist.
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November 9, 2009, 12:32 pmCJColucci says:
This has the same problem as the Manchurian candidate–because these movies were so long ago, they were made before the movie industry got the biases it has today, so they’re irrelevant.
So if Hollywood made anti-communist movies when they would sell (there is, by the way, a fair amount of literature on Hollywood’s active cooperation with the government during the Cold War — check it out) it’s irrelevant, and when they stop making them when they won’t sell, it reflects bias? Got it. Anyone serious want to talk about this?
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November 9, 2009, 12:35 pmyankee says:
This is getting absurd. Malvolio’s original complaint: “Now list how many movies have Communists as the bad guys. There’s Red Dawn, White Nights, and Little Nikita, but that’s about it.” I and others responded by pointing out that there are lots of films that have communist bad guys, only to have them explained away with one excuse after another. Movies from the 1950’s don’t count because they’re too old. Rambo doesn’t count because it’s “cartoonish.” Hunt for Red October doesn’t count because it’s an “adventure thriller.” The Killing Fields doesn’t count because the communist villains in that movie were eventually overthrown by other communists several years after the events portrayed in the movie.
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November 9, 2009, 12:36 pmfirst history says:
[The Manchurian Candidate] was unavailable from 1963 until 1988 and no one seems to know why.
FWIW, this is from the Wikipeida entry (footnotes removed):
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November 9, 2009, 12:50 pmMalvolio says:
Isn’t it? I mean, I hate to be one of those people but still. When Red Dawn and the Rambo movies and were very successful, you’d figure there’d be a whole bunch of them — nothing Hollywood likes to do more than take a successful idea and run it into the ground — but no.
Similarly, True Lies was very successful, as is “24” on television, and the huge parade of anti-GWOT movies (Rendition, Valley of Elah, Lions for Lambs, &c.) tanked utterly, so you would think the movie studios would get the message: Americans don’t like terrorists and therefore like movies in which terrorists get their asses kicked. Nope. When Clancy’s popular terrorists-get-their-asses-kicked book Sum of All Fears was made into a movie, the terrorists became ... wait for it ... neo-Nazis, because, according to the studio, that was more “realistic”.
The only pro-GWOT movie made, 300, was done in allegorical form. It didn’t fool anybody, on either side of the issue, but one can’t help suspecting it did fool whoever originally greenlighted it and that that guy was in big trouble at the next meeting of the Conspiracy...
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November 9, 2009, 1:18 pmRich Rostrom says:
Ilya Somin: The main reason there has been no true settling of scores with the ex-tyrants of Communism is that they surrendered peacefully. The collapse of Soviet bloc Communism happened with scarcely a shot fired. Accordingly, there was a corresponding reluctance to conduct formal judgments of them. The leaders were nearly all elderly men, whose direct involvement in obvious crimes was hard to establish clearly. The worst crimes of Communism were long ago. The more recent crime was the diffuse one of maintaining a totalitarian regime.
The judgment of the Nazi leaders was a different situation. They were taken by force, in the immediate wake of spectacularly lurid crimes, by their enemies in open war, who were the most powerful nations in the world and had nothing to restrain their wrath. As noted upthread, this was an exceptional case, and the absence of parallels is to be expected: inertia normally prevails and nothing is done. And even in the Nazi case, there was not a complete resolution. Only a small portion of the Nazi criminals were actually punished.
As to the historical record: the Nazis’ few virtues were not anything the great mass of Western intellectuals sympathized with, their vices were particularly revolting, and they flaunted those vices. The virtues of Communism included things which many Westerners actually liked, and their vices were veiled (they always pretended to be democrats, whereas the Nazis openly embraced dictatorship).
Another factor is that the Nazis committed their worst crimes against the most articulate and proportionately most influential group in the world: the Jews. How many refugees from Nazi oppression ended up in Hollywood? How many Hollywood figures (and scholars, journalists, and millionaires) had relatives murdered by the Nazis?
On the other hand, the USSR began by overthrowing what was then the most notoriously anti-semitic regime in the world, fought and (mightily) helped destroy the Nazi regime, and never explicitly practiced anti-semitism. Communism generally stood in opposition to the reactionary and tradionalist forces commonly associated with anti-semitism, such as the Catholic Church.
So Jews, as Jews, had no particular quarrel with the USSR and Communism. There have always been some Jewish opponents of Communism, but no great force. That changed somewhat in the 1970s, when the Soviets became the chief backer of the Arab war against Israel and the refusenik issue arose. A segment of Jewish opinion was mobilized against Communism, and combined with other factors, such as the revelations of Solzhenitsyn and the long work of traditional anti-Communists, to overcome that inertia and and bring about the exposure and condemnation of Communism.
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November 9, 2009, 1:39 pmInsufficiently Sensitive says:
But it was our humilating defeat in Vietnam that soured Americans on fighting communism.
Said Humiliating Defeat was largely due to the successful domestic activities of communist-financed and inspired activism, if not actual communist subversion, of our open society. Afterward, the Gramscian takeover of education and the media just increased, and still does so.
It’s interesting that Obama’s very best talent is the slick and constant demonization of any organization opposed to leftism — his community organizing training was a drink from the same Gramscian river.
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November 9, 2009, 2:22 pmRandy says:
Malvolio: “When Red Dawn and the Rambo movies and were very successful, you’d figure there’d be a whole bunch of them — nothing Hollywood likes to do more than take a successful idea and run it into the ground — but no.”
But yes. Rambo spawned an entire cottage industry of films, and they kept making them until....they started failing at the box office.
Apparently, the only films that will fit your criteria is a film in which communism is clearly explained to be evil and horrible, the US is perfectly wonderful, and, well, as long as that’s the message, it should be a terrific hit at the box office. And if it isn’t, they should continue to remake that film just to prove to you guys that there isn’t some sort of vast conspiracy to make communism look terrific.
If there is this vast conspiracy that doesn’t care about box office returns but only about propaganda, you should be able to support your claim with *dozens* of such films. I will be happy if you list just three.
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November 9, 2009, 2:36 pmAndrew J. Lazarus says:
If we are still hearing the Vietnam Dolschtoßlegende, then the history of Nazi Germany is still not taught enough.
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November 9, 2009, 3:11 pmCJColucci says:
It would be interesting to find out how old some of the commenters are. Middle-aged folk like me were steeped in so many explicitly anti-communist movies and tv shows, not to mention myriad other shows that carried the message not far under the surface, that trying to recall and name more than a few would be like asking a fish to identify specific water. It was drummed into me at my lib’rul public school that the commies were 10 feet tall and ate their young. (Bad long-term strategy, by the way. I saw a fair number of my peers react so badly when the exaggerations were exposed that they later scoffed at truthful reports that the commies were a bit under 6 feet tall and sometimes beat their young.)
There has never been a time when being against communism was unpopular with the general public or lacked major support from many powerful institutions. Getting sneered at at a few Upper West Side cocktail parties is small potatoes by comparison. Let’s not dislocate our shoulders patting ourselves on the back.
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November 9, 2009, 3:19 pmAnderson says:
If we are still hearing the Vietnam Dolschtoßlegende, then the history of Nazi Germany is still not taught enough.
The history of the Vietnam War is probably not being taught at all, or else by a man named “Coach.”
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November 9, 2009, 3:44 pmRichard Aubrey says:
I was born in 1945, which gives me a couple of years on some of the folks here.
I grew up in the garrison state. My father, my uncles, my adult male neighbors, my scoutmasters, my male teachers, were generally veterans of WW II.
They didn’t have a lot of gratitude to the Russians because it was due to them that we lived in a garrison state.
Some pop-culure examples: The Plymouth F85. Right between tne Republic F84 Thunderchief and the F86 Saberjet. One car had faux gun ports faired into the hood with vertical fins–like sights. A family of Oldsmobiles had faux exhaust ports on the front fenders, faintly reminiscent of those on some fighter aircraft. A bread company–Bond, I think–had trading cards with military aircraft on them. Which I suppose could have functioned–did–as aircraft identification cards.
When my daughter was in high school, she had to do some kind of report which could be researched, in part, in old Life magazines, so we went to the library HQ and got out the Fifties Life mags. I had forgotten that about once a month there was a puff piece in the military (B52s circle the globe non-stop). There was even an artist’s rendering of an ABM battle.
I found out, when I had the misfortune to be assigned to air defense, that it had taken sixteen batteries of the Nike Ajax to defend Detroit, where I grew up. That explained why you would see them on a non-rare basis going about your business. There was Conelrad. Tornado drills were then air raid drills. Duck and cover. “Red Dawn” was a movie, but there were high school kids talking about what to do if.... years before.
John Hersey’s “Hiroshima” was in our high school library for anybody who wanted to see what might just happen sometime next week.
My chem teacher in high school showed how to make a radiation detector from household supplies. Not sure if it would work on gamma rays.
One contemporary report on UFOs included gathering a bunch of shrinks who opined that it was a matter of war nerves. It didn’t seem necessary to the author to explain to his audience what the war nerves were all about.
Sometime later was the bomb shelter scare.
It makes no sense whatsoever to lament the anti-communist, anti-Russion hysteria and insist simultaneously that the American people didn’t care much about the Russians’ crimes.
You don’t need card-carrying Marxists in the universities to teach, formally, or by comment, a negative view of the US, along with whitewashing the crimes of the left. Hell, any liberal can do that in his sleep. See POTUS.
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November 9, 2009, 4:15 pmRichard Aubrey says:
Randy. Sure I remember Kirkpatrick. She’s the one who pointed out that right-wing dictators are not nearly as bad as the lefties, and that they tend to stay home, not like the lefties.
And conservatives do not wear shirts with, say, Somoza’s mug on them.
Sort of like palling up with Stalin. It was a nose-holding least-worst option.
But you knew that.
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November 9, 2009, 4:18 pmA. Zarkov says:
This statement is false. The USSR practiced anti-Semitism on a grand scale. Jews (like everyone else) had to carry internal passports, which listed their nationality. But the Jews had no nation within the Soviet group, and were identified as being Jewish. This led to problems. For example the Steklov Institute of Mathematics had an on-going policy to flunk Jews on their oral mathematical exams. The details are given in the book: It Seems I am a Jew.
Then we have Stalin’s Stalin’s unfinished holocaust as described in the book: Why Didn’t Stalin Murder All the Jews? If anything the Communists were worse to the Jews than the czars.
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November 9, 2009, 4:49 pmStrict says:
Zarkov is probably right on those points. The USSR definitely actively practiced anti-semitism.
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November 9, 2009, 5:10 pmRandy says:
Richard: ” It was a nose-holding least-worst option.”
Yes and no. Certainy, we didn’t want the communists to gain footholds around the world. But it still amounted to killing lots of people. If you were the one tortured by Pinochet, or your dad was killed by him, it’s pretty chilly comfort to know that the US backed his policies because he wasn’t as bad as the commies.
And Colucci is right — growing up in the cold war, we were taught that communists eat their young’uns. And we had an official push-pull in the US: Hate the communists, but reach out in friendship whenever we can. Remember detente? Remember all those cultural exchanges? So were supposed to hate them AND welcome them with open arms. There was no such ambiguity with the Nazis, and perhaps this ambiguity contributed to our wavering commitment to see anti-communist propaganda in the form of films.
And then, when we actually DID attend the Bolshoi Ballet and met the communist dancers, we found out that we sorta liked them — all those beautiful ballerinas and handsome male dancers. And their handlers were so cultured, more so than people in the US. And we found out that they really didn’t eat their young, so we figured that the anti-communist propaganda we were served up in the US wasn’t always true. And if some of it isn’t true, then how much more isn’t?
When you over play your hand, you can’t complain when people call you on it, and then lose faith in the entire message.
Oh, and still waiting for that list of pro-commie films that Hollywood produced to indoctrinate us all...
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November 9, 2009, 5:17 pmMalvolio says:
[No list of such films is forthcoming.]
Lions for Lambs
Rendition
Redacted
In the Valley of Elah
Stop Loss
All of them had big stars and big directors and none of them made a nickel. (There was also The Kingdom, but that had far less of a US slant, as did The Hurt Locker.)
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November 9, 2009, 5:17 pmRandy says:
Zarkov: “This statement is false.:
Wow! We finally found something to agree on. Russia has a long history of anti-semitism that predates the communists. During the Brezhnev era, I believe the word as ‘cosmopolitan’. But there was no benefit to being a Jew in the USSR.
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November 9, 2009, 5:19 pmRandy says:
Malvolio: “Lions for Lambs”
Rendition
Redacted
In the Valley of Elah
Stop Loss
Nope. Not one of these films has anything to do with communism. Remember? That was the cause here. Please try again.
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November 9, 2009, 5:25 pmRandy says:
Malvolio: “no list forthcoming”
(sigh) I guess I have to do all the work here:
First Blood (1982)
Rambo:First Blood part 2 (1985)
Rambo 3 (1988)
And the new one simply called Rambo (release date January 25 2008)
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November 9, 2009, 5:27 pmA. Zarkov says:
Stalin’s code word for the Jews was “rootless cosmopolitans.” In other words people lacking a national character.
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November 9, 2009, 6:27 pmA. Zarkov says:
You won’t such a list, at least from me because that’s not how Hollywood works. The culture is anti-anti communist as opposed to pro communist. They obviously can’t make propaganda films because those films won’t make money. Nor will you find a memo that says “don’t make serious and artful films that attack communism at a root philosophical level.” It’s a shared value not to make that kind of film and with a few exceptions they don’t. You won’t see something come out of Hollywood like The Confession 1970. Amazingly this film was directed by the leftist Costa Gavras who made Z, Missing, State of Siege and other films with a left viewpoint. He must have been pissed about the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
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November 9, 2009, 6:43 pmDr. Caligari says:
An anti-Communist film produced in Hollywood that hasn’t been mentioned is Elia Kazan’s MAN ON A TIGHTROPE (1953), a drama set in then-comtemporary Czechoslovkia. It’s been about 20 years since I saw it, but I recall it as being very good, not quite as good as ON THE WATERFRONT, but worth seeing. It doesn’t appear to be in the TCM library (TCM being about the only place on TV that shows films of this vintage today) and I don’t know if it has ever been released on VHS or DVD.
At the other end of the spectrum of quality is the awful 1987 miniseries AMERIKA, about a Soviet-occupied USA. I gave up on this after an installment or two. It really helped kill the long-form miniseries on network TV. It obviously must have been in the planning stages for years, because it was certainly out of date in the Gorbachev era.
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November 9, 2009, 7:15 pmRandy says:
Zarkov: “They obviously can’t make propaganda films because those films won’t make money.”
You need to tell that to Malvolio, because he is convinced that Hollywood makes films like that regardless of whether they make money.
But in general, I think you are much closer to the mark. Since the 70s, it has become much more fashionable to be anti-anti-communists. I think a lot of that has to do with the McCarthy era, when people saw that red-baiting was destructive and, yes, even ‘un-American.’ Couple that with Watergate two decades later, and you have a great story line — our government, once considered so benign and helpful, is actually corrupt! And it serves the wealthy and elite! It was only after Watergate and Vietnam that we really began to see movies that send a message that you can’t trust the government to do the right thing, or can’t do it competently.
Strangely, McCarthism, Watergate and the debacle that became Vietnam are owned by the Republicans. (I know, Kennedy started Vietnam and Johnson scaled it up. Plenty of blame to go around, but in the end, it was only conservatives who supported the war, not liberals.) Perhaps if it weren’t for these mistakes, we wouldn’t have a film industry that writes plotlines about the corruption of goverment? I don’t know — I’ll leave that to others to argue.
Even more strangely, I would suspect that most people who believe as Malvolio does that Hollywood unjustly produces movies that tell tales of a corrupt and incompetent US government are probably the types who are convinced that our current government is in fact corrupt, incompetent, and serves only the wealthy elite. Not to mention Marxist. So, in a way, they are right (in their own minds), and should in fact welcome the now-honestness of Hollywood.
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November 9, 2009, 8:24 pmRandy says:
Before Night Falls is another recent film that made Cuba’s communist government look pretty bad. IT starred Javier Bardem.
Malvolio will undoubtedly say that doesn’t count because it starred a Spaniard, not a real Cuban.
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November 9, 2009, 8:26 pmHarryEagar says:
Lazarus sez: ‘If we are still hearing the Vietnam Dolschtoßlegende, then the history of Nazi Germany is still not taught enough.’
Amen.
Hollywood certainly tried to make anti-red movies, because Richard Nixon pretty much promised he would terrorize it if it didn’t. “Red Snow” was the result.
The funniest anti-red movie ever made.
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November 9, 2009, 11:08 pmRichard Aubrey says:
I don’t pay much attention to movies, so I’m out of the movie question.
However, currently there is an interesting issue at Washington U.
They’ve shut down a student demonstration and fake Gulag. It’s “offensive”. That implies the university in all its wisdom–remember, they’re professors like many of you all–are convinced there are many on campus who would be offended by being reminded of the gulag.
Now, the question is, is the U right? If not, who’s being offended?
I figure Washington U, being full of advanced degree types, knows more about their own establishment than redstater Aubrey.
That is, to be explicit, the U knows there are a lot of employees who would be offended by the reminder of the gulag. Either they’d think it was directed at them as a reproach, which is likely, or they wouldn’t want others reminded of what they, themselves, whitewashed.
Don’t blame me. It wasn’t my idea. I’m not Washington U.
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November 10, 2009, 10:06 amMalvolio says:
[ I list five]
My point was that Hollywood doesn’t release movies with anti-Communist themes. If I listed movies with anti-Communist themes, I would be proving myself wrong.
My list was of propaganda movies made at great expense, advertised heavily, and released, despite the virtual certainty they would lose money.
One sequel (the first Rambo had nothing to do with Communism) does not a cottage industry make. By that standard, dressing up in a hockey mask and vivisecting promiscuous teenagers would be 12 times more important economically than anti-Communism.
It doesn’t count because no one saw it, but I think it’s instructive that it got made at all. The only movie about the evil of a dictatorship that’s closer to Miami than San Francisco is to San Jose, and what is the particular evil highlighted? That they persecute homosexuals.
Hey, guys, how about a movie about how Cuba persecutes heterosexuals? They do that too, you know. They persecute everybody!
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November 10, 2009, 10:47 amCJColucci says:
By that standard, dressing up in a hockey mask and vivisecting promiscuous teenagers would be 12 times more important economically than anti-Communism.
Are you suggesting that it isn’t?
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November 10, 2009, 11:58 amRichard Aubrey says:
Reading The Hinge of Fate, the part about Churchill and the “Darlan Deal”.
Seemed a reasonable bit of realpolitik, and Churchill makes it out to have been a useful way to speed the Allies’ war aims and save the lives of Allied soldiers.
He describes some of the political and chattering class grief he got, which leaves one to wonder what those objecting thought would be the results of acting differently.
In the end, btw, he is surprisingly generous to Darlan.
As Kirkpatrick said, more or less, there are fewer victims of right-wing tyrannies, and if you live next door to one, you don’t have to worry about them coming after you.
The Salvadorans didn’t have to worry about Somoza promoting and supporting anti-government war in El Salvador. Things changed when the Sandinistas took over.
A plague on both their houses, which is not to say there are no differences.
The real point, though, is that there are no tee shirts with Somoza on them. In fact, no presidential candidate’s local office had a Somoza poster on the wall.
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November 10, 2009, 12:07 pmRich Rostrom says:
I wrote: “... the USSR ... never explicitly practiced anti-semitism.”
A. Zarkov says: “This statement is false. The USSR practiced anti-Semitism on a grand scale.”
But not explicitly. One can search the entire corpus of Soviet law without finding any statute which discriminates against Jews as such. One can search the back numbers of Pravda and Izvestia without finding articles denouncing Jews as such. Yes, there was much covert discrimination. There were tacit quotas, and code words in the press such as “cosmopolitan”. Another private code word was “fifth pointer” — a reference to line 5 of a Soviet identity card, which was the person’s nationality.
But this was very different from conditions in Nazi Germany, or under the Czar. In Imperial Russia, Jews were restricted to living in the Pale of Settlement, barred from political office, subjected to explicit quotas in the universities and professions, brutally attacked by state-sponsored mobs (the pogroms of the Black Hundreds), libeled daily in the popular press, and even put on trial for ritual murder.
The Bolshevik Revolution ended all that. The Old Bolsheviks included many Jews; four of the seven members of the first Politburo in 1917 were Jews. Trotsky, Kamenev, and Zinoviev held high office until purged by Stalin — whose Jewish crony Kaganovich sat in the Politburo till 1957. In the wake of the Revolution, freed of Tsarist barriers, able Jews rose to high positions in all areas of the new society (including the secret police).
There was a reaction to this later, of course. There was some scapegoating of Jewish chekists for the Stalinist terror, and Stalin himself in his dying madness plotted an abortive pogrom. Quotas came back unofficially. But these problems were much less significant for the image of the USSR than the earlier contrast with Tsarist Russia and Nazi Germany. It was not until the 1970s that Soviet anti-semitism got much attention; and the relatively mild abuses of that period did not provoke the sort of outrage that Nazi crimes had.
This is not to say that Jews have been particular apologists for the USSR or Communism; only that they have never had the motive to denounce it as they have Nazi Germany.
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November 10, 2009, 2:26 pmRafael says:
Manuilsky, a prominent Soviet professor at the School of Political Warfare, said: “The bourgeoisie will have to be put to sleep. We shall begln by Launching the most spectacular peace movement on record. There will be electrifying overtures and unheard-of concessions. The capitalist countries, stupid and decadent, will rejoice to cooperate in their own destruction. They will leap at another chance to be friends.” And Khrushchev, a more contemporary Soviet prime minister, said: “We cannot expect Americans to jump from capitalism to Communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving Americans doses of socialism until they suddenly awake to find out they have Communism.”
http://www.marianland.com/marx01.html
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November 20, 2009, 10:06 pm