Today is May Day, once celebrated throughout the communist world -- when there was one.Venezuela's Hugo Chavez is celebrating by impoverishing the future of his people, in today's case by stealing the last privately-operated oil fields in Venezuela. That kind of thing ought to work out just about as well as it has everywhere else it's been tried.
Speaking of which, today's probably a good day to remind everyone of Bryan Caplan's Holocausts of Communism Quiz. Here's what I wrote about the quiz when I discovered it in 2004:
Go ahead. Take the test. I'll wait.
And then think, and try grasping the numbers, the numbers, the numbers. Victims in the millions--and, in case after case, all in one place.
I've been reading, for the first time, the classic espionage thrillers of Eric Ambler. Very well done, all of them. But this struck me: in Background to Danger, the hero is a Brit caught in machinations far beyond his own imaginings, and the only help he receives--at all--is from two dedicated Soviet agents.
The evil, of course, was perpetrated by fascists and by the nefarious machinations of Big Business in the City of London.
Well.
Those are by all means evildoers, are they not? But Background to Danger was written and published in the late 1930s, and yet its villains have their ideological descendents in today's America: as for Big Business, Microsoft has been persecuted for the unspeakable evil of offering its Internet Explorer browser free on both the Windows and Macintosh computer platforms, and Martha Stewart is about to be incarcerated for five months for a "crime" no accuser can quite explain.
On the political side, we have Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo, Admiral Hortha: none of them are admired today; their names and ideals are not fashionable, and it's a damn good thing. The very thought is considered objectionable, and novelists with far less ability than Eric Ambler are able to cash in on such villains.
I have no problem with associating these men's names with ultimate evil.
Why, then, are "idealistic" Marxists considered intellectually and morally capable of teaching in American universities? Why do so many Americans of the entertainment industry persuasion laud the intelligence and "idealism" of Fidel Castro, and the "achievements" of his island Gulag?
It's not recent, either, this bifurcation: Franklin Delano Roosevelt referred to Stalin as "Uncle Joe," and cooperated with Churchill in the pro-Stalin evils delivered at Teheran and at Yalta. British and American lawyers and judges, including an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, took part in the Nuremburg trials, thus making themselves and the Anglo-American legal tradition an accessory to Soviet evil. I myself have seen "idealistic" American protesters march down an American street, chanting simplistic slogans as some among them hoisted images of Ho Chi Minh and a North Vietnamese flag. An unregenerate, unrepentant Stalinist, the "poet" Pablo Neruda, is having his centenary celebrated as I write this.
As I write this...this...this mere blog entry, this solitary, at-the-keyboard activity which amounts to no more than pissing into the cultural wind, PETA activists will fling blood-colored water on those who wear mink or sable, while pleas are entered for understanding the dictators in North Korea and China, and Castro and the remaining, graying Sandinistas are openly lauded as idealists.
Another memory: reading the leaders of the Sandinista junta, interviewed in Playboy, one of whom sobbed that since Ronald Reagan had been elected to the presidency of the United States, he had been unable to write a line of poetry.
Well.
Well, Boo fucking hoo.
A hundred thousand lines of some poseur's pro-prole doggerel do not add up to the value of one honest peasant's life, his one, single, irreplaceable life, whether that life was stolen in Russia or China or Cambodia or Cuba.
Take the test. Take it now. I told you, I'll wait.
Done? Now, try grasping the numbers--some of the smaller numbers, say, the number of Cambodian victims of the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s. Try grasping those numbers, the numbers, the numbers... and...well, let me offer some help:
You have never had that many friends.
Friends, hell: you have never encountered that many people in your life.
You wish you had that many dollars.
You probably haven't ever had that many pennies, let alone dollars.
The pages in the books in your library don't add up to that high a total.
And yet these weren't pages in books, or pennies in a jar: these were individuals, they were human lives snuffed out because they didn't fit with someone's idea of what belonged where on the chessboard. Sons and daughters, parents and grandparents, poets and guitarists and clowns and rice farmers.
Here's the message I recieved when my own quiz results were scored: "You correctly answered 57.5% of the questions. This marks you as an Advanced student of Communist atrocities."
I don't think so.
I know how to read, and I was fortunate enough to have been born in a land where reading is legal. That's it.
Take the test.
I dedicate this
to all those who did not live
to tell it.
And may they please forgive me
for not having seen it all
nor remembered it all,
for not having divined all of it.
--Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The GUlag Archipelago
Food for thought: some observers, such as Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand, argued that Communism would fall of its own weight. When it did just that, conservatives rushed to hand the credit to three heads of state (Reagan, Thatcher, and Vatican head of state Pope John Paul II).
Nice job, guys. Way to show integrity. Way to defend America.