Communism, presumed dead in 1991, resurfaces at The Guardian

H/T Harry’s Place

Back in college (during the Cold War, while the Soviet Empire was still alive and, barely, kicking), at Temple University – the reddest of red of the far left radical chic campuses in the US – we used to joke that beyond the Iron Curtain the only place where communism still had any credibility was on Western universities.

22 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and 19 years after the Soviet Union collapsed due both to its internal contradictions as well as the courage, iron will and moral fortitude of those in the West who refused to bow to its expansionist totalitarian ideology, Communism is apparently alive and well, and is still able to get past the ideological gate keepers of the Guardian Left.

The Guardian has commissioned Peter Thompson (a UK Academic, naturally) to a 3-part series on the tragically misunderstood movement in, interestingly, the CiF Belief section:

As someone who remembers the bountiful pseudo intellectual Marxist apologias from the late 80s, Thompson’s tropes strike a familiar chord, especially his entertaining lament that:

 [Most critiques of Marxism assume that the ideology] led directly to the gulag, the Great Leap Forward, the Berlin Wall and Pol Pot’s torture chambers.

Yeah, what ever would lead us to that facile conclusion?

Actually, a group of preeminent historians quantified the death toll resulting from Marx’s “scientifically based” political musings, in The Black Book of Communism, at a number approaching 100 million – which includes up to 25 million in the former Soviet Union, 65 million in China, 1.7 million in Cambodia, and on and on.

The authors systematically show how and why, wherever the millenarian ideology of Communism was established, it quickly led to crime, terror, and repression.

But, as we continually see, deadly millenarian ideologies – whether religious or secular – never really die, they just escape and take refuge at The Guardian.

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