Are they really victims of communism?
(Some of the seven million victims of the famine resulting from the collectivization of farms in Ukraine, 1930s)
I suspect the biggest obstacle that the Victims of Communism Memorial faces is the sympathy for communism that is so startlingly common in the United States. Terrified of being labeled a “McCarthyite,” many people refuse to acknowledge the fact that there is a great deal of lingering support for communism in America’s universities, among the media, and among our politicians. For these people, it is much more comfortable to blame particular dictators, or circumstances, for the horrors of communism, and particularly to claim that Stalinism was a betrayal of “real” communism, and thus that communism has been slandered. If only we tried “real” communism, it’s said, why then we’d see that there would be no violence and death and oppression. You’ll find this view represented here, for example.
That this myth survives in spite of being so obviously untrue is testament, I think, to the lack of education that Americans have with regard to communism’s actual teachings and record. In fact, such coercion is absolutely essential if a communist country isn’t to crumble under its own flaws an inconsistencies; coercion is of the essence to communism.
As Mises showed, a communist “economy” is unable to calculate how to allocate its resources. Since the government owns all resources (including human labor) it has no reason to economize, and no way to calculate efficient ways to produce. The only alternative to efficient economies is coercion. Mises’ “price problem” is inescapable—even though many students of political economy even today have never heard of it. Suppose there is a demand for, say, wheat. In a capitalist country, the price for wheat would rise, and industries would put their money into wheat production, to benefit from the higher payout. But this can’t be done in a communist society. How, then, shall wheat production be increased? By commanding the farmers to produce more. Productivity can only be accomplished through the carrot and stick method, and communism eliminates the carrot, because that would be exploitation. Thus the stick is employed more and more.
Another primary link between the “equality” rhetoric of communism and the brutality it produces is the abolition of private property. Property rights are the primary guarantors of the freedom of dissent. Property rights provide security against retaliation and the ability of even politically unpopular groups to make themselves heard—and to receive economic feedback regarding the popularity of their message. The only alternative to this is government regulation of speech, where some committee determines whether your message is worthy of being heard, and then funds it by taking from those who disagree with you. Such a scheme is the very opposite of dissent. Communism, by abolishing the barriers that protect people from politics, destroys their chance to dissent along with everything else. (I might also add that, in its attack on property, communism destroyed the incentives to creativity which have enabled the free west to create life-saving medicines and farming methods and other things which have prolonged our lives and made them so much more comfortable and happy. To suggest that a “mere economic system doesn’t kill people” is to absurdly divorce economics from the things that provide and sustain and improve our lives. By merely removing innovation, leaders of communist countries have condemned their people to an invisible form of suffering. Remember the scene in Moscow on The Hudson in which Robin Williams is flabbergasted by the selections at the supermarket?)
But, most fundamentally, the reason communism kills is its hostility to individualism. A system which teaches that the individual exists to serve the proletariat, to serve the state, to serve his “brothers,” has little patience for the right of one man to stand up alone against his “brothers,” and to assert his own dreams, his own vision, or his own right to live for his own sake. Communism’s primary evil is in its gospel that people live for the sake of others. Once embrace that principle, and no evil is beyond imagining—except the “evil” of daring to demand your right to the pursuit of your own happiness.
As historian Martin Malia concludes
[T]he unfolding of the Soviet tragedy…was by no means a “betrayal.” Rather, it was the fulfillment of the perverse logic of an impossible utopia. For throughout the entire quest there never existed any “third way” that would lead to integral socialism as noncapitalism and yet would be democratic. At each point in the escalation of the drama, the only alternative road was to abandon the Marxist fantasy and settle for a welfare state that “capitalism” could produce less painfully and more efficiently. Thus the awful truth of the experiment is that the integral Marxist program could be realized only by Leninist means, and the Leninist means could reach their socialist objective only by Stalinist methods.
Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991 at 503-04 (1994).
The popular sympathy for communism is real, even among those who are far from communists themselves. Imagine for a moment if someone were to say “Oh, the Holocaust wasn’t real Nazism. Real Nazism was about racial pride and preserving traditions, and we should try real Nazism.” The discomfort that would be felt at the cocktail party where such a comment were uttered is not felt at the countless cocktail parties where people make the Stalinism-wasn’t-real-communism claim. Yet they are of equal intellectual validity. And it seems to be generally assumed that in polite company, a person who says things against communism is far more dangerous and far less intellectually respectable than a person who mourns the “good old cause.” Notice the lack of movies about the Red Holocaust. Or the relative quiet among historians about the fall of the Soviet Empire. Notice the public (and entirely right) worship of resistors to Nazism, in films like Schindler’s List, and the paucity of films about Soviet sufferers.
