But as newer, 21st century avatars of communism have proved, that death never arrived. The author adds that as long as “social justice” ambitions linger, “some version of Communism will retain broad popular appeal, enticing young idealists … to champion its cause.” Ambitious older politicians, even if unmoved by such idealism, will exercise and relish the control it gives them over such idealistic people. In the bargain, communism only seems to die.
Communism’s Abuses
No, communism isn’t given a free pass. “Chinese human rights abuses have been accorded greater publicity. Those who have been targeted include religious groups, such as Falun Gong; the Uighur population; and, more recently, dissidents in Hong Kong, who have been CCP subjects since 1997.” But left-leaning circles are now more in awe of Chinese industrial or military might in the 21st century than they were of Soviet might in the 20th. In leveraging that might for global influence, “the CCP has been more successful than the Soviets ever were.”
How? Increasingly, many Western governments are aping Chinese governance styles.
Global health agencies meekly adopted the CCP’s “social distancing” protocols, earlier used in China alone, “reversing decades of progressively more humane—and scientifically sound—policies on mitigating disease outbreaks. ‘Lockdown’ had absolutely no basis in the Western tradition.”
Praise-Punish Protocols
McMeekin worries that thought-police who now flood decision-making tiers in the public and private sector may soon apply CCP-style praise-punish protocols more widely to those who challenge the status quo on a range of themes: climate, immigration, race, sexual orientation, or gender identification. Ideological bullying may include social media bans, seizure of funds obtained via online crowdfunding platforms, cancellation of passports, or the revocation of visas.
It’s true that cruder, more arbitrary communist-style arrests or Gulag-type torture may be some way off, but in the social and intellectual sphere, newer mechanisms may be more insidious. “[M]any victims deprived of their jobs, funds, reputations, or basic civil rights may not even know who their accusers are. Far from dead, Communism as a governing template seems only to be getting started.”
On triggers for the rise and fall of communism, McMeekin is clear. First, no communist regime has been democratically elected to power; only violence and force allow leaders to seize, sustain, and spread control. Second, only imploding power structures, political or military, enable the collapse of communist regimes; popular uprisings aren’t as pivotal as they’re perceived to be.
But McMeekin ignores exceptions that prove his rule.
The world’s first democratically elected communist government emerged in 1945 in San Marino, Europe. Communists won elections in India too: 1957 in Kerala, 1977 in West Bengal, 1993 in Tripura. Kerala’s voters have re-elected communists every few years for decades, West Bengal’s voters allowed uninterrupted communist rule for nearly 35 years; Tripura’s voters allowed uninterrupted communist rule first for 10 years, then later for another 25 years.
Yet, for the most part, McMeekin is right: Democracies almost never vote communists to power. Thankfully, such governments in South Asia bear little in common with regimes in North Korea or Cuba or elsewhere that are marked by the same totalitarian traits worldwide: single-party dictatorship with no legal opposition parties, stiflingly controlled political-economy, all-encompassing regulation, and surveillance governing public life.
India’s red parties can hardly be said to be communist, except in name and avowed beliefs. Their leaders observe so little of those beliefs in public. Their relatively benign style of governance makes them indistinguishable from dozens of democratic parties, with whom they peacefully compete or collaborate.
Atheism
Like it or not, this book isn’t only, as McMeekin claims, a dispassionate tale of what happened. In tone and tenor, every page is also a passionate telling of what shouldn’t have happened. It’s a considered critique of communism.One hopes that McMeekin, or a historian of similar caliber, will in the future expand on a major gap: communism’s relationship with religion. McMeekin alludes to this, but too fleetingly. Witness his reference to Iranian Muslim religious leader, Ayatollah Khomeini’s wariness of the Soviet Union’s abiding atheism.
True, Marx drew heavily on German thinkers Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach. But Hegel was an Orthodox Lutheran Christian who believed that religion bestowed “moral dignity” on humans.
Feuerbach? He was the father of modern atheism. As McMeekin confirms, Marx denounced the market economy only after he’d first denounced religion. His call to foment class struggle channeled Feuerbach, not Hegel. Yet McMeekin refers to Feuerbach only once, Hegel, dozens of times.
New Forms
Over two decades ago other writers had already surveyed communism’s history and the havoc it has wrought, in books such as “Communism: A History” and “The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression.” So, McMeekin might have justifiably shaped at least a few of his chapters on contemporary forms of communism.This is where our medical analogy assumes added significance. Usually, pathologists adopt a zero-tolerance approach when testing for cancer’s recurrence. All that a relapse requires is for a lingering or returning cancer to corrupt one cell, or a handful, for it to then attack healthy bone, tissue, and muscle all over again.
It’s in this vein that McMeekin’s book is a much-needed education and cautionary tale that warns democracies to be alert. At the slightest suggestion that communism is spreading, they must, as it were, see red. And act.
