I could hardly believe it when I watched on live television the Berlin Wall being torn down stone by stone in 1989. The mighty Soviet Union, which had oppressed hundreds of millions of people, murdered millions, and incarcerated millions more in icy gulags in Siberia, was down for the count.
A few years later, Francis Fukuyama wrote "The End of History and The Last Man," celebrating the triumph of Western democracy and the fall of communism. It was "the end-point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."
If only it had been so.
Homer writes of Odysseus's overwhelming desire to hear the song of the Sirens as his ship passed their enchanted island. He knew that upon hearing the songs, he and his crew would go mad and steer the ship into the rocks.
He was so determined to hear the Sirens' song that he ordered his crew to lash him to the mast. He also ordered every crew member to cram beeswax into their ears so they couldn't hear the song or Odysseus's pleas to be set free.
When Odysseus heard the song, he went mad with the desire to be freed. As ordered, his crew ignored him, and his ship sailed past the Sirens' island without incident.
It may be a simple analogy, using Odysseus and the Sirens to highlight the attraction of communism, but it fits. After the wall fell, one would have thought that the spectacular failures of communism would have become self-evident, that its regimes failure to deliver on even the most basic of its promises would have permanently discredited forced collectivism as an ideology and as the basis for governing.
It hasn't. History didn't end when the wall and communism fell. Marxism got up, dusted itself off, put on some new clothes, and stepped back into the fray.
The reason communism lives is because it's an ideology that thrives on playing into the delusions of those who experience the very human desire to have as much or more than their neighbor. And because they don't have as much, they look for reasons why. Those reasons are, if you're a communist, easy to see. Someone is taking what's rightfully yours and keeping it for themselves.
"Capitalism is theft," claims New York City's probable next mayor, Zohran Mamdani. His logic is impeccably fluid, if not based on totally false assumptions. Gary Saul Morson, a humanities professor at Northwestern University, quotes Sean McMeekin, author of "To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism," in his article in The Free Press regarding the continued fascination with the mass murderer Che Guevara.
How can it be that, however many times Marx’s predictions fail and Bolshevik horrors come to light, Marxism continues to enthrall intellectuals? Why was Che Guevara widely regarded as a hero, McMeekin wonders, long after Stalin’s purges and gulags were well-known? What explains how Alberto Korda’s iconic image of him, entitled Heroic Guerrilla Fighter, inspired a cult of this murderer lasting for generations? “It is curious that his death was mourned by more people in Washington, D.C. (50,000), than in Moscow (200),” McMeekin observes. “Che was the single most admired celebrity among American college students in a 1968 poll, and he has never since lost his mojo,” as we see from the widely circulated image of Barack Obama based on Korda’s Che.
"McMeekin refers," says The Free Press, "to 'the surprising non-death of Communism,' whose story 'is far from over.'" The Hillsdale College historian says, "Americans need to know the history of communism, because they are facing a new version of it."
Indeed, the COVID protocols were mostly copied from the measures taken by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). As we learned, there's no scientific basis for "social distancing," but it was implemented by the CCP and copied widely in the West.
So too, the concept of lockdowns. There was no history in the West of lockdowns, even during the Black Death, McMeekin explains. Even during the Black Death of the 14th century, “sick people might have been quarantined against their will, but never the entire healthy population.” For whatever reason, the West used the same tactics used by communist regimes.
I'm one of the few writers who have resisted referring to socialists as communists. But since the definition of a word is based on usage, not the static dictionary explanations, if the large majority of people are going to conflate socialism and communism, who am I to disagree?
At this point, with Zohran Mamdani moving to take power in the nerve center of American capitalism, definitions don't matter much. What matters is that the educational system has been deficient in explaining why communism and socialism are bad for individual liberty and the well-being of American citizens. Best we start now, because you can bet that other openly socialist/communist candidates will seek to emulate Mamdani's success and normalize an ideology that has a history of mass murder.
