Forgetting Communism's Evils

The non-appearance by the president of the United States to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall marks but one of many worldwide incidents of deliberate forgetting about the ravages of communism, an ideology that has killed over a hundred million people. We could have predicted during the campaign that President Obama would not think such an event important. The zeitgeist that rocked the vote ushered in a president who told a plumber that we should “spread the wealth”; in Stalinist fashion an Obama supporter / government official then used her powers to persecute him. A Rasmussen poll in April showed that only 37% of those under 30 favored capitalism over socialism; 33% favored socialism and the rest were undecided.

Voters have been educated for decades now on the standard of “social justice,” a Marxist concept but an oxymoron according to the founders of this republic. But our own president has taught such courses under the name of critical race theory. He did training and legal work for an organization that basically agitates the proletariat, ACORN. The year saw revelation after revelation about the socialist ties of his appointees.

So logically Chairman Mao graced the White House Christmas tree. This comes after the interim White House communications director was recorded as saying that Mao is one of her political heroes. The Chinese flag flew next to the American close to the White House, and the iconic Empire State Building lit up in China’s colors to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the communist regime. This all comes 20 years after the Tiananmen Square massacre.

The iconic Empire State Building is recognized by those around the world as a symbol of American freedom and prosperity. It, like the Statue of Liberty, has been recognized by immigrants, like my parents who escaped Marshal Tito’s communist regime with me in their arms as an infant. Such displays of tribute to communism are a slap in the face of those who lived through such murderous regimes.

The forgetting is happening in my native Slovenia, where it’s not even two decades since independence was won with the support of 95% of voters. Old peasant farmers still dare not speak of what they witnessed in 1945 when Slovenian refugees forced back home were shot and left to die in pits. Still a proposal came up to name a street in Ljubljana after Tito. Protests by those who remember Tito’s tyrannical rule may have led to a proposal to name instead a ramp connecting two highways after him. Pavle Borstnik, who follows politics in Slovenia, says that even the ramp name is an “abomination”; he is one of those who remember. In an article for a Slovenian-American newspaper, he writes about leaving Slovenia during his last visit:

Zbogom, Slovenia, I murmur to myself, farewell, you land of my youth. … I have spent only 20 years in your bosom and then people, who usurped the “powers,” slammed your door in my face. Forty-two years have passed before I saw you again and now, 65 years later, I am leaving you for the last time.

In the meantime, Slovenia grew up: it lived through a bloody catharsis and reached its independence, joined the circle of free nations, and then threw all of this to the wind, re-embracing the same criminals that disfigured its face.

Like most dictators, Tito had streets and towns renamed after him when he took power. After independence they were changed back. Borstnik laments in an email that the ramp renaming is likely to pass without notice, for “under [the] present government there is a tremendous pressure to reintroduce all kind of ‘old-time’ venues into the daily life of Slovenia.”

I saw evidence of this forgetting and denial when I attended the meeting of the Society for Slovene Studies at the annual American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS) conference in late 2008. A couple of survivors of Tito’s prison camps sat with me as we listened to young scholars and journalists advance the fashionable academic ideas that spring from Marxist ideology. While much needs to be done to wrest power from the old communist party bosses controlling much of the media and industry in Slovenia and in the old Soviet states, the organizers of the conference thought that gender should be the main concern. Academics parsed out such things as gender identities (they came up with a count of nine) and expounded on the insecure “masculinities” of Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev.

In the meantime, former KGB agent Putin has been working to rehabilitate Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, whose birthday is celebrated by Russians, who by a majority of 54% hold a high opinion of him. Here in the U.S. Stalin was included in the lineup of the D-Day Memorial, as Candace de Russy wrote in these pages. In the Czech Republic the communist party is the third largest; only now are there calls for outlawing it because of its advocacy of violence. The article points out that most other communists of the satellite states have melded into center-left parties. The communist criminals now “re-embraced” throughout the world often have a Ph.D. or J.D. after their names.

Our own communist indoctrinator and Obama pal Professor Bill Ayers appeared on Russia Television to give his opinion that we should withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan, and close down all our military bases around the world. “The idea that we have been a force for good for the last six decades is nonsense,” Ayers opined.

We can thank those like Bill Ayers who have ensconced themselves in positions of power in education for the revision of history and the change in attitudes towards socialism. The onetime bomb-setter Ayers is doing his damage by using the schools to advance the communist idea of “social justice.”

The denials, however, have real consequences. While the intellectuals look in the other direction to count the number of genders or “investigate” trumped-up charges of “right-wing extremism,” our president meets with and accepts money from the communist group Code Pink that has explicitly called for our defeat at the hands of the Taliban.

There is evidence aplenty that the Obama administration and Democrats support worldwide socialism. While the mainstream media harps about the mental fragility of our soldiers, a jihadist openly plans and executes the slaughter of fellow soldiers. The director of homeland security begins her tenure going after law-abiding citizens and soldiers as right-wing extremists, and then denies there were security breaches after a Christmas Day terror attack. “Fall of Capitalism and Rise of Islam,” in this light, is an apt name for a conference.