ALAN CHARLES KORS

To end the appeal of communism in this or that form, one would have to eliminate envy, coercion and political ambition from our affairs.

Socialism, wherever it actually had the means to plan a society, to abolish private property and to assail economic inequality and the allocation of capital and goods by free markets, culminated in the crushing of individual, economic, religious, associational and political liberty. Its collectivization of agriculture alone led to untold suffering, scarcity and injustice. … Socialism in power produce scarcity, murderous inefficiency, arbitrary inequality, cronyism, enslavement, concentration camps, torture, terror, the destruction of civil society in ecological disaster, brutal secret police and systemic tyranny everywhere it ruled. … We must acknowledge and bear witness to those things until socialism is confronted with its lived Communist reality the greatest atrocities of all recorded human life.

Socialism is easily understood by any child. It is taking other people's stuff.

We rightly rehearse the crimes of Nazism almost daily. We teach them to our children as ultimate historical and moral lessons. And we bear witness to every victim. We are almost silent on the crimes of Communism. So the bodies lie among us unnoticed everywhere. We insisted upon denazification and we excoriated those who tempered it in the name of new or emerging political realities. There never was nor will be a similar decommunization, though the slaughter of innocents was exponentially greater, though those who signed the orders and ran the camps remain. In the case of Nazism, we hunt down 90 year old prison guards because the bones cry out for justice, rightly so. In the case of Communism, however, we insisted on, “no witch hunts” as the New York Times editorially demanded when Lithuania thought about accountability in 1990.

It was no accident of time or place that the concentration of power over all human life in a centrally planned society attracted and rewarded the aggressive, unscrupulous, and demagogic who would attract around them the simultaneously submissive and ruthless. Central planning would bring forth leaders who took power not as a necessary evil, but as an end in itself.

The pathology of Western intellectuals has committed them to an adversarial relationship with to the very culture that has produced both the greatest liberation from want, ignorance and superstition and the greatest increase of bounty and opportunity in human history. No one has explained the origin and development of that intellectual pathology adequately. Though it constitutes one of the deepest flaws and and tragedies of our society. It is a pathology that with each passing decade becomes ever coarser, more crude and more detached from any principle of reality. That pathology allows Western intellectuals to step around the Everest of bodies of the victims of communism with without a tear, an act of contrition or a reevaluation of self, soul and mind.

Socialism is easily understood by any child. It is taking other people's stuff.

To end the appeal of communism in this or that form, one would have to eliminate envy, coercion and political ambition from our affairs.

It was no accident of time or place that the concentration of power over all human life in a centrally planned society attracted and rewarded the aggressive, unscrupulous, and demagogic who would attract around them the simultaneously submissive and ruthless. Central planning would bring forth leaders who took power not as a necessary evil, but as an end in itself.

We rightly rehearse the crimes of Nazism almost daily. We teach them to our children as ultimate historical and moral lessons. And we bear witness to every victim. We are almost silent on the crimes of Communism. So the bodies lie among us unnoticed everywhere. We insisted upon denazification and we excoriated those who tempered it in the name of new or emerging political realities. There never was nor will be a similar decommunization, though the slaughter of innocents was exponentially greater, though those who signed the orders and ran the camps remain. In the case of Nazism, we hunt down 90 year old prison guards because the bones cry out for justice, rightly so. In the case of Communism, however, we insisted on, “no witch hunts” as the New York Times editorially demanded when Lithuania thought about accountability in 1990.

Socialism, wherever it actually had the means to plan a society, to abolish private property and to assail economic inequality and the allocation of capital and goods by free markets, culminated in the crushing of individual, economic, religious, associational and political liberty. Its collectivization of agriculture alone led to untold suffering, scarcity and injustice. … Socialism in power produce scarcity, murderous inefficiency, arbitrary inequality, cronyism, enslavement, concentration camps, torture, terror, the destruction of civil society in ecological disaster, brutal secret police and systemic tyranny everywhere it ruled. … We must acknowledge and bear witness to those things until socialism is confronted with its lived Communist reality the greatest atrocities of all recorded human life.

The pathology of Western intellectuals has committed them to an adversarial relationship with to the very culture that has produced both the greatest liberation from want, ignorance and superstition and the greatest increase of bounty and opportunity in human history. No one has explained the origin and development of that intellectual pathology adequately. Though it constitutes one of the deepest flaws and and tragedies of our society. It is a pathology that with each passing decade becomes ever coarser, more crude and more detached from any principle of reality. That pathology allows Western intellectuals to step around the Everest of bodies of the victims of communism with without a tear, an act of contrition or a reevaluation of self, soul and mind.