"There is no "good" communist," writes Jeff Jacoby.
A simple truth that just doesn't seem to penetrate into the popular culture. It's nice to hear it so plainly spoken:
Continuing,
How rare that is to hear, and how sad how few realize its truth. Well said, Mr. Jacoby.
A simple truth that just doesn't seem to penetrate into the popular culture. It's nice to hear it so plainly spoken:
IF JOSÉ Saramago, the Portuguese writer who died on Friday at 87, had been an unrepentant Nazi for the last four decades, he would never have won international acclaim or received the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature. Leading publishers would never have brought out his books, his works would not have been translated into more than 20 languages, and the head of Portugal’s government would never have said on his death — as Prime Minister José Sócrates did say last week — that he was “one of our great cultural figures and his disappearance has left our culture poorer.’’
But Saramago wasn’t a Nazi, he was a communist.
Continuing,
But the idea that good people can be devoted communists is grotesque. The two categories are mutually exclusive. There was a time, perhaps, when dedication to communism could be absolved as misplaced idealism or naiveté, but that day is long past. After Auschwitz and Babi Yar, only a moral cripple could be a committed Nazi. By the same token, there are no good and decent communists — not after the Gulag Archipelago and the Cambodian killing fields and Mao’s “Great Leap Forward.’’ Not after the testimonies of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Armando Valladares and Dith Pran...Bolding is mine.
...Anyone who imagines that the horrors of communist rule is a thing of the past ought to spend a few minutes with, say, the State Department’s latest human rights report on North Korea. (Sample passage: “Methods of torture . . . included severe beatings, electric shock, prolonged periods of exposure to the elements, humiliations such as public nakedness, confinement for up to several weeks in small ‘punishment cells’ in which prisoners were unable to stand upright or lie down... and forcing mothers recently repatriated from China to watch the infanticide of their newborn infants.") Communism is not, as its champions like to claim, an appealing doctrine that has been perverted by monstrous regimes. It is a monstrous doctrine that hides behind appealing rhetoric. It is mass crime embodied in government. Nothing devised by human beings has caused more misery or proven more brutal.
Saramago may have been a fine writer, but he was no exemplar of goodness. Good people do not embrace communism, and communists are not good.
How rare that is to hear, and how sad how few realize its truth. Well said, Mr. Jacoby.
