Fighting communism after the Cold War

Communism didn’t win the Cold War, but it’s doing surprisingly well in the 21st century, including in America.

Elsewhere, especially in East Asia, communism is the tyrannical creed of a ruling class that stays in power by jailing its opponents – or rolling tanks over them.

Here, especially on college campuses, communism is a status marker and a way to make murder seem cool.

Fascism isn’t the totalitarian ideology having a moment in America right now.

It’s communism whose chief theoretical work – or Bible, really – has just been published in a new translation by Princeton University Press.

Karl Marx’s “Capital” still confers prestige on students and professors who aspire to be revolutionaries without risking their lives.

Campus communism offers an easy way to appear edgy yet intellectual, and if communism outside the Ivory Tower bears responsibility for the deaths of some 100 million people in the 20th century (most in the developing world), well, that just proves how truly “serious” its ideas are.

The Marxist-Leninists of old knew you couldn’t make an omelet without breaking the eggs, and class enemies deserve to die anyway.

That’s exactly the attitude of the self-described socialists in higher ed (and elsewhere) who celebrate the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

Julia Alekseyeva, a blue-haired assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania who goes by the social media handle “@TheSoviette,” had to insist that she didn’t really mean her posts seeming to cheer Thompson’s slaying after they stirred a maelstrom of controversy for her Ivy League employer.

Maybe she was just being flippant or ironic – but then, is the picture of Leon Trotsky that adorns the top of her personal website, along with cartoons of BLM activism and protest politics, also ironic?

It’s hard to support Trotsky, a revolutionary later famous for massacring the Soviet Union’s own rebellious sailors, if you do not, in fact, “condone violence” – it would be a bit like pretending Hitler was just a painter.

Twenty-first-century communism in this country is a smart aleck’s way to feel clever about holding stupid and morally bankrupt views.

But because they are anti-Western and anti-capitalist views – and because the realities of communism are so little known to most Americans – they carry little stigma.

(How little stigma? Barack Obama’s CIA director John Brennan actually voted for the Communist Party USA candidate for president in 1976 – not exactly a time when Soviet atrocities were unknown.)

Luigi Mangione’s fans aren’t about to touch off a Bolshevik Revolution; most are too busy trying to get tenure.

But the Ivory Tower communism of today does promote hatred and violence – and relentlessly argues for using government power against political enemies, who are always labeled “fascists.”

Higher ed’s attitudinal communism corrupts education in general, concealing the crimes of socialist regimes while demonizing the West as uniquely imperialist.

It’s as if Beijing or Pyongyang were dictating what Americans ought to know about communism and how its morality compares with ours.

Lee Edwards thought Americans, and the world, should see and hear the truth instead.

He was the son of a Chicago (later relocated to D.C.) newspaperman, a stalwart of the conservative movement who had been Barry Goldwater’s press man on the historic 1964 campaign and later became the all-but-official historian of conservatism’s institutions and leaders from the 1950s onwards, producing biographies of Goldwater, William F. Buckley Jr. and many more.

Lee, a friend and inspiration to me, was the conscience and memory of the conservative movement in Washington when he died last week at age 92.

But his greatest professional legacy, as Lee himself would insist, was the work he undertook right after the Cold War to ensure our nation and the world didn’t forget what had happened in that twilight struggle – and what was still happening in Communist China, North Korea, Cuba and elsewhere.

If communism weren’t remembered correctly, its evil would grow in new forms.

So Lee founded the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, and – after a protracted struggle with planning commissioners – in 2022 opened the Victims of Communism Museum in Washington, D.C.

A museum and a foundation aren’t enough to correct the record by themselves.

But Lee Edwards didn’t think they would be:

What they are is a reminder, something to compel us not to forget.

In this case, not to forget to fight for the truth about an evil that hasn’t disappeared, only changed.

For the people of China, Vietnam and North Korea, and even in our own hemisphere Cuba, the communist era never ended.

In the West, it never began – yet the political heirs of the people who wanted it to are still at it, as reactions to Brian Thompson’s murder show.

Remember where their ideas lead, and where they led in the last century, so America can say “no” to them every single time.