Why is communism rising again?

Why hasn't Communism gone away?

Today, the Thread before the Gardening Thread also becomes prep for tomorrow's Book Thread. An ambitious book has just been published which attempts to address some perplexing questions about the persistence of communist thought, given the terrible record of communism in the last century (in particular).

The author of this book is already familiar to some people in The Horde:

From the Sunday Morning Book Thread, November 13, 2022:

I just finished Sean McMeekin's Russian Revolution and it was well-written and fast-paced. But depressing--because there were so many points between 1905 and 1920 when the Bolsheviks were on the verge of being wiped from history, only to be saved-at every point--by the venality, stupidity and conniving of their enemies, from the aristocrats to Kerentsky to the SDs to the Whites to the Western Allies. What an awful bunch.

Posted by: JoeF. at November 06, 2022 11:25 AM (mR6Gs)

Comment: What if the Russian Revolution had never happened? Or was stopped in its tracks? Of course, we live the really real world and the Russian Revolution happened, causing incomprehensible suffering, misery, and death for the next 100+ years. It's still going strong in some form or another...Based on the results of this past Tuesday's election, I have to wonder - - Did Communism win? Is humanity doomed to make the same mistakes over and over and over again? How many more people have to die before this insidious ideology is refuted for all time?

Some of "Perfessor" Squirrel's questions are pertinent to Sean McMeekin's new book:

I have to wonder - - Did Communism win? Is humanity doomed to make the same mistakes over and over and over again? How many more people have to die before this insidious ideology is refuted for all time?

I think that this is one reason that the book under discussion here was written. I'm not sure that this question has been answered.

Scott Johnson at Powerline invited the author to write a column concerning the book and he posted it twice:

In the current issue of the New Criterion, Gary Saul Morson assesses it “the best short history of communism I know.” It may be the book of the year. I invited Professor McMeekin to write something for us to bring it to the attention of our readers. Professor McMeekin writes:

My new book is To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism. As implied in the subtitle, one of the claims I make in the book is that Communism did not really die off with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 or the collapse of the USSR in 1991, and not only in the literal sense that avowedly Communist governments still exist in China, North Korea, Vietnam, and Laos, and only slightly less avowedly one-party Communist regimes in Cambodia and Cuba. Rather, I argue that certain practices common to Communist regimes have endured, thrived, and spread to many once-free countries in the West, above all in the realms of government surveillance, CCP-style “social credit” systems, “cancel culture,” and forms of public and private (or semi-private) censorship which grow more blatant all the time.

The Covid-19 lockdowns, from forcible government shutdowns of business to censorship of Youtube videos and the shutdown of government-critical Twitter accounts, to travel and work restrictions on the “unvaccinated,” were the most obvious example of this, but lately one can hardly miss the tsunami of news headlines about threats to shut down Twitter (now X), arrest or silence Elon Musk, or the sentencing of UK citizens for offensive social media posts. Indeed, since I finished drafting this book in spring 2023, the warning about creeping threats to freedom of speech in the US and western countries in my epilogue has proven, if anything, to have undershot the mark.

Nonetheless, I understand that drawing these historical comparisons can be unsettling. . .

There have been objections to his approach.

Like all historians, I am writing at a particular moment in time. If I were writing the history of Communism in the 1970s, when the Soviet Union was surging ahead in geopolitical competition with the USA, winning new client states in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and American allies like Britain were descending into quasi-socialist stagnation owing to excessive state intervention in the economy, I likely would have focused more heavily on the woeful economic performance of Communist regimes, as many people – including, famously, CIA analysts – were then under the impression that fully state-planned economies could produce better growth and performance than freer ones, and it would have been necessary work to interrogate their claims against the historical evidence.

For a western historian today, what really stands out from the history of Communism are the eerie echoes in contemporary practices of the hysterical moral-terror panics of the Stalinist Great Terror or China’s Cultural Revolution, the bright red “denunciation boxes” the CCP provided citizens to denounce class enemies and wrongthinkers, or the “unofficial collaborators” the East German Stasi relied on to snitch out neighbors and even family members. . .

Of course, few of us today can imagine suffering the worst forms of Communist repression. . . But we should still be aware of relevant historical parallels.

How many of us expected in the early days of the World Wide Web that the range of acceptable opinion would radically narrow rather than expand on the Internet, or that a speech platform like Facebook (as Mark Zuckerberg just confessed) or Twitter/X (until Elon Musk bought it and restored transparency) would cooperate with the U.S. government in censoring speech? Freedom of speech and assembly, once bedrock principles of American public life, seem to be hanging by a very thin thread. I have written my history of Communism with this in mind, and I hope readers will approach it in the same spirit of curiosity – and urgency.

Rachel Lu has a review and some general commentary of her own at Law & Liberty:

The verdict is in: freedom is clearly better. So why is communism making a comeback?

This question frames Sean McMeekin’s impressive new book, To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism. It’s a wonderful read by an engaging writer with a deep knowledge of the relevant history. The 462 pages fly by. Readers may feel a certain dissatisfaction at the end, however, reflecting that they understand the first rise of communism considerably better than the second. This is understandable; like everyone else, McMeekin may still be reeling a bit from the geopolitical twists and turns of the last two decades. Who does understand this with confidence? What McMeekin can offer is a re-examination of communism’s history, with an eye to spying those genetic elements that have given it such unexpected longevity. It’s something.

There is an extended excerpt from the book at Quillette: Where Virtue Meets Terror: A Brief History of Proto-Communism

In a new book on the history of communism, Sean McMeekin traces the movement's roots to egalitarian creeds embraced throughout history by prophets, philosophers, utopians, and serfs.

Here, McMeekin has some observations on how philosophies or creeds stressing egalitarianism can go awry. It covers lots of territory. This account of an Anabaptist leader is quite disturbing:

Given the chance to reorganise society in Munster, one Anabaptist sect, led by a former baker of Dutch origin named Jan Matthys, began by cleansing Catholics and Lutherans, then seized all the gold and silver in the town, looted Catholic monasteries of their wealth, abolished money, and declared food stocks common property. The radical new social order was enforced by terror, with public executions of critics, and by the edict that all houses keep their front doors open, so as to ensure that no private space be allowed for dissent.

In this frenzied atmosphere of enforced social conformity, all books other than the Old and New Testaments were banned, and then collected and burned in great public bonfires. Matthys’s ever-more-radical Anabaptist commune lasted about six weeks, until the tyrant of this theocratic utopia was cut down in battle and dismembered in early April—on Easter Sunday—with his head erected on a pole above the town to discourage future radical experiments.

The accounts of impressions of Columbus concerning his first encounters with inhabitants of the New World are interesting.

You may want to read the entire excerpt.

What do you think?

For some reason, the guy Tim Walz chose to design Minnesota's Ethnic Studies program for its school system keeps coming to my mind.

Music

Scott Johnson also posted some songs about autumn on Sunday. Here's Sarah Vaughn:

Hope you have something nice planned for this weekend.

This is the Thread before the Gardening Thread.

Last week's thread, September 21, J.D. Vance in a journalistic freeze-frame

Comments are closed so you won't ban yourself by trying to comment on a week-old thread. But don't try it anyway.

posted by K.T. at 11:19 AM

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