Seth at CCK has responded to my pieces on Communist Chic. Seth enjoys exploding in righteous offense. I enjoy offending Seth. Both of us are apparently good at what we enjoy. Consider it one of nature's symbiotic relationships.
Seth opens his screed with this:
Let's get a few things straight. To say that liberals in America are somehow unoffended by the literally millions of lives taken during the Soviet regime is absurd even for you. You have made a completely irresponsible argument with that and you should apologize.
Seth ignores the evidence I presented, as well as the much more ample evidence provided by Jeff Jacoby. Allow me to suggest that the folk who cloth their babes in Che Guevara infant wear are not conservatives, and if the Harvard luminaries who instructed their alumni on how to kowtow to the murderous dictator Kim Il Sung felt indignation at the "literally millions of lives" he snuffed out, well, they managed to suppress it.
I would point out the stream of movies produced by Hollywood leftist and liberals (not the same thing) that make heroes out of communists. In Reds, Warren Beatty turns Jack Reed into Jesus. In Julia, Jane Fonda gives us a heroic Lillian Hellman. Both Reed and Hellman were Stalinists. A few years ago we got Il Postino, a very good movie that left one feeling good about Pablo Neruda, a Stalinist poet. More recently we have movies like The Bicycle Diaries, a subtle and sensitive portrait of Che, who, after putting aside his scout, would be in charge of executing political opponents of the Castro regime. Do Hollywood leftists applaud mass murder? No. They just seem inordinately fond of people who did applaud mass murderers. I humbly suggest that if a conservative director (assuming such a creature exists) produced a subtle and sensitive portrait of an American Nazi, Seth would find something wrong with that. He would probably think that it said something important about the conservative movement.
Seth has more to say:
Second, it was not so much communism--which is purely a system for economic order--that killed millions of people as it was the suspension of civil rights, the repression of a free press and a brutal and heartless leader that killed people. Again, so equate that with American liberals is something that would be irresponsible for a high school debater to do, and is unacceptable for a person supposedly educated in political thought.
This is flamboyantly ignorant. "Communism" was much more than an "economic order" or doctrine. It was a systematic means of seizing power and holding power in order to achieve an end proposed by theory. Everywhere communists achieved power, they did the same horrific things. The toll was not "literally millions of lives," it was literally hundreds of millions of lives.
I do not "equate American liberals" with communist tyranny. I say explicitly that "the modern left is largely free from communism." I would point out that many of the most fervent anti-communists were liberals in good standing. It remains the case that many of the left have a romantic view of American communists. I think this is an embarrassment for the left.
Both liberals and conservatives have their flaws. Its the job of those on each side to point out flaws on the other. Sometimes the best strategy is not righteous indignation, but acknowledgment. For example, in the eighties liberals favored sanctions against South Africa, while conservatives mostly opposed them. Conservatives like myself did so not because of any sympathy for apartheid. We did so because we thought that the alternative to the South African government was a communist regime. The liberals were right, and we were wrong. Sanctions in fact forced the South African government to finally end its reprehensible regime. For that we have Nelson Mandela to thank. Now imagine that contemporary American conservatives were clothing their infants with jumpsuits adorned with images of the founders of apartheid. What would Seth make of that?
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