Never forget the evils of socialism and communism
So much for staying away from the PC: I just have to link to my friend Adriana Cronin-Lukas’s post about her upbringing in the former Czechoslovakia, a moving and poignant piece brought about by - of all things - the smell of overripe bananas.
All this I have forgotten, or thought I had. I have spend the last decade or so trying to get away from it all, not by forgetting the limited and unfree world I was born into, but by building a better one of my own. The tiny joys found in the previous life, despite its twisted nature, were never enough to outweigh the damage done to people’s lives. And this should never be forgotten.
One of the reasons I find so hard visiting my native country is that I resent the fact that people back there carry on as if nothing happened. I bear a grudge against the easy forgiveness (or forgetfullness?), with which those who lived there in the past 50 years seem to treat the past…What I cannot come to terms with is how those who suffered a death of thousand daily betrayals can go on living and working with the same people who spied and reported on them to their communist masters.
…I speak as someone who studied international relations at a Western university and had to deal with the revisionist and ‘progressive’ theories. It was good to be forced to translate the suffering and evil I knew into the fuel for arguments against the various breeds of socialism, communism and Marxism that still permeate the Western academia. And I barely scratched the surface.
The comments which follow Adriana’s post are also worth reading. I simply must chime in with agreement for what our friend Perry de Havilland says in response to another commenter’s questions:
“Bring the wicked to justice? How?”
Via a process not unlike de-Nazification in Germany after WWII. Forgiveness only comes *after* repentance.
“Take revenge? How?”
The usual ways: social opprobrium, jail, hanging. Sic semper tyrannis.
You start with calling things their right name, making sure the world knows the true extent of what happened in Russia and Eastern Europe and the words communism, socialism and Marxism are pronounced with the same unequivocal horror and disgust as nazism and fascism.
…Perhaps eastern europe does not have its equivalent of concentration camps footage but it certainly has more dead… and that should never be forgotten.
Word.
Filed under: Education, Friends, Life, Survival, The State Is Not Your Friend