Liberals still have a soft spot for Communism. They believe that Communists needed more time to ensure its success but the evils of capitalism thwarted its forward progress. “Salon’s Jesse Myerson published an article, ‘Why you’re wrong about communism: 7 huge misconceptions about it (and capitalism),’ that attempted to deny the scale of communism’s mass murders, among other dubious claims.”

It’s not hard to distinguish between a Communist nation and a free nation. Communist nations build walls to keep people in. Capitalist nations that put up fences to keep people out, they will climb over them or dig under them to get in. How many stories have you read of people risking their lives in less than sea worthy boats to get back into Cuba?

Communist regimes view the State in religious terms — God walking on earth — and have no problem eliminating tens of millions of non-compliant citizens to advance its worldview in the name of its god.

“A large percentage of the generation that knew Joseph Stalin died as a direct result of his directives. These were purely political killings, ‘exterminations,’ ‘liquidations’ of ‘the enemy class’ and ‘undesirable elements.’ How many were involved? Solzhenitsyn’s estimates reach as high as sixty million. Robert Conquest, author of The Great Terror,1 fixed the number at well into the millions. It is doubtful if we will ever know the true total—God alone knows.”2

During the era of glasnost, Stalin’s past had literally been dug up. “A government commission has found that thousands of skulls and bones buried in a mass grave outside Kiev were those of victims killed during dictator Josef Stalin’s repressions, not by Nazi soldiers, Tass, the state-run news agency, has reported.”3

Under Stalin, “more than 600,000 death sentences” were meted out and “at least five million” people were arrested “in the worst years of 1937–38. He destroyed children as well as old people, nobodies and party favorites. . . . In the countryside in 1932–33, as many as eight million starved to death in accordance with an agricultural policy based on killing kulaks (farmers) outright or just wasting their lands.”4

In The Black Book of Communism, the total number killed by Communist regimes around the world approaches 100 million.5 Former Communists have described Communism as “the god that failed.”6 Even though millions were offered on the altar of atheism, Communism still had its apologists.7 Jesse Myerson is a new breed of delusional useful idiot.

There is so much wrong about the content of Myerson’s article that it makes my head hurt trying to figure out what to answer next.

Consider this:

“For me, communism is an aspiration, not an immediately achievable state. It, like democracy and libertarianism, is utopian in that it constantly strives toward an ideal, in its case the non-ownership of everything and the treatment of everything – including culture, people’s time, the very act of caring, and so forth – as dignified and inherently valuable rather than as commodities that can be priced for exchange.”

Myerson can aspire all he wants. Communism is the god that’s failed over and over again. Cuba, Venezuela, and North Korea are its dilapidated sign posts of abject failure. The economy of North Korea is so bad that from space it’s nearly pitch black while every non-communist country lights up the sky at night.

Gary North writes: “In 1953, South Korea was poverty-stricken. Today, it is among the richest nations per capita in the world. Its economic growth per capita dwarfs China’s.” Who benefits? The people. Who benefits under Communism? The State.

As they say, if Myerson is so enamored with Communism, maybe he ought to take a slow boat to North Korea or Cuba to try it on for size.

1. Conquest has a done a major revision of this work using newly available evidence from the glasnost era: The Great Terror: A Reassessment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). [↩]
2. Lloyd Billingsley, The Generation that Knew Not Josef (Portland, OR: Multnomah Press, 1985), 37. [↩]
3. “Mass Grave Near Kiev Holds Stalin’s Victims, Panel Says,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch (March 26, 1989). [↩]
4. Peter Keresztes, “Murder of Millions,” The Wall Street Journal (August 31, 1989), A13. [↩]
5. Stéphane Courtois, et al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 4. [↩]
6. Richard H. Crossman, ed., The God That Failed (Chicago, IL: Regnery Gateway, [1949] 1983). [↩]
7. S.J. Taylor, Stalin’s Apologist: Walter Duranty—The New York Times’s Man in Moscow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). [↩]