“Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
― Animal Farm
News that I missed, courtesy of The Babylon Bee:
ARGENTINA—Communist dictators such as Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong have grown increasingly jealous of the attention Adolf Hitler is getting even though he’s killed so few people.
“Six million jews?! That’s nothing,” commented Mao with the aid of an interpreter. “Yes, yes, [unintelligible] I know he killed gypsies too, but they don’t count. I kill in my sleep like a man. I blink and a million more are gone!” (Note: Mao was stoic as he spoke, but the interpreter waved her arms wildly to add further emphasis.)
“You know,” said Stalin thoughtfully. “I don’t think he’s even killed anyone himself. He just yells a lot like a total boomer.”
“You don’t deserve the notoriety he gets unless you shoot someone for mispronouncing your name.” Stalin smiled. “I’m famous for that.”
Emperor Hirohito of Japan agreed that Hitler was super lame, but he didn’t feel too concerned about it because only Communists are whiners. He failed to provide an on-the-record comment, however, because he was too busy playing Dragon Quest XI.
Go here to read the rest. As political systems communism and fascism have more in common than what separates them. Communism, which killed more people in the bloody last century going away than Fascism, however receives infinitely better treatment in academia and entertainment. Leaving aside the morons who actually believe in Communism, why is that the case? Largely I think because contemporary Leftism has features that make Communism seem like an error with its heart in the right place. From demonization of free enterprise, to a longing for Big State solutions, to an enthusiasm for curbs on free speech, it is all too easy for Leftists to view Communism as a forgivable excess, while Fascism with its nationalism and its racism are to be condemned out of hand. Actually, of course, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union under Stalin were quite similar regimes, say by 1944: both intensely nationalistic, both one party dictatorships, both making idols of state power, both intensely militaristic and both treating minorities like dirt, although Stalin never quite reached Hitler’s level of evil with the Jews, although his campaigns against Kulaks, so called “rich” farmers, and Ukrainians in the thirties came an exceedingly close second. The two philosophies are opposite sides of the same odious coin.
About 0.1% of the adult population of the United States had taken out Communist Party membership in 1947. Included among them were 3 of 20 members of the MIT mathematics faculty.
This historian Wm. O’Neill estimated the number of ‘fellow travelers’ and ‘progressives’ associated with or allied with the Communist Party was roughly 400,000 at that time.
More than a generation ago, RWB Lewis offered a brief reminiscence of his time working in the publishing business in New York in 1945. Those 500,000 included enough people in gatekeeper positions in publishing houses to prevent works antagonistic to Communist forces from being published. Ronald Reagan’s alienation from the left began around that time, when he and Melvin Douglas and others were working to prevent a similar situation from coming to pass in the motion picture business. (IIRC, screenwriters were ground zero for that sort of infiltration).
People drawn from that 500,000 controlled 12 labor unions.
And people drawn from that 500,000 formed a spy network in the federal government. There were, as of about 15 years ago, 150 or so cryptonyms in the Venona cables whose identities have not yet been established. Among those who have been identified were four subcabinet officers of the Roosevelt Administration.
Now look to what was going on in higher education and Congress and the magazine press from 1967 to 1975, or look in those same venues during the last dozen years of the Cold War. It’s shooting fish in a barrel to identify public intellectuals who favored the enemy during the Cold War. They had their counterparts in academe and at least a scatter of those in Congress (conjoined to a much larger number of feckless boobs in electoral politics and in journalism, who in their relentless attitudinizing advocated things which would injure this country and its allies).
Keep in mind that the Silver Shirts and the German-American Bund came and went over a short run of years (legally suppressed IIRC). Keep in mind also that the 2d incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan was inconsequential after 1930 and a retrospective embarrassment to people who had taken out memberships in its heyday (Hugo Black among them). The 3d incarnation never amounted to much except in a few localities in Mississippi and Alabama.