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No good deed goes unpunished

Lenin's Twitching Corpse

Let subtle schoolmen teach these friends to fight,
More studious to divide than to unite;
And Grace and Virtue, Sense and Reason split,
With all the rash dexterity of wit.
Wits, just like Fools, at war about a name,
Have full as oft no meaning, or the same.

--Alexander Pope, Essay on Man

A talk radio personality recently warned a caller against using the word "communism." Only conspiracy theorists use this word, he explained, and you wouldn't want anyone to get the wrong idea. Even more egregious, the word "communism" suggests Cold War thinking; it posits a bloc of heavily armed countries determined to take over the world, or conspiring to tear down Western Civilization.

Obviously, a sane person would never use a word like "communism." You might visit Beijing and meet the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party; but only a fool would call them "Red Chinese." And for that matter, who thinks of Fidel Castro as a communist? He's really just a social democrat with a beard. And if you bothered to visit North Korea you'd quickly see that the place is too horrible to be communist. Besides, everyone knows North Korea is a "rogue state" led by a personable madman. Zimbabwe, Vietnam, Cambodia and Angola are generally ignored in everyday discourse, so we needn't refer to them as communist states -- whatever they might happen to be in reality. As for Colombia's FARC guerrillas -- they are left wing insurgents, cocaine exporters, populists and (if you whisper very softly) you might admit they are Marxists. You might even use the term "Marxist-Leninist" because it's good for a blank stare. 

When talking about Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, you must remember to call him a "populist" or a "Bolivarian." Even though he calls himself a communist in private, you'd be an idiot to repeat this in mixed company. People would think you were behind the times. You see, there aren't any communists. Communism is dead. And just because a former KGB officer is president of Russia doesn't mean communism is staging a comeback in the old Soviet stomping ground. After all, Putin was born under Khrushchev, raised under Brezhnev, sworn to uphold the Soviet Union under Andropov, worked as a spy against the West, served the Communist Party and now he is arresting Russia's leading capitalists.

I mean, imagine how idiotic it would be to call  former president of South Africa, Nelson Mandela, a "communist."  Just because he was a terrorist who plotted to blow up buildings and kill hundreds of people, and just because he wrote an essay on "how to be a good communist," doesn't mean he was one. Okay, so most leading officials of the ruling African National Congress ( ANC) once belonged to the South Africa Communist Party. Big deal. One shouldn't use the word "communist" to describe anyone under any conditions, not even while describing those who are deconstructing private property, farm by farm, company by company -- effectively employing socialist methods to reduce an otherwise rich country to penury. Really, you must not use the word "communism." It's old hat, used up, shopworn, dead. Every idiot knows that life-long true-believing Marxists don't believe in communism any longer. 

You see, when communism died all the communists, all at once, were raptured (like Christians during the "end times"). All those professors at your local university who once talked glowingly of Karl Marx, Uncle Ho and Fidel, were caught up in the clouds and carried off. All that left wing agitation against war and imperialism, all those peace protestors, the Green Party, the politically correct crowd -- none of their ideas have anything in common with communist ideas. And that's why they were "left behind." It's only a coincidence that they hate capitalism, yearn for the collective ownership of the means of production and love the underprivileged. Just because these people subscribe to all the major communist ideas of the past, it doesn't mean they're communists.

Please remember your history. The world's communists were caught up in the twinkling of an eye, on Christmas Day 1991, and nobody has seen hide nor hair of them since. So when you read that President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva has brought an army of Marxists into the Brazilian government, that he is aligned with Fidel Castro and Colombia's FARC guerrillas, that he wants closer relations with China, there is no occasion for alarm. So what if Brazil unites with the Western Hemisphere's leading terrorist front? Brazil is only the largest, most important country in Latin America.

And should we worry about Mexico City's mayor? It is no big deal if he loves Castro, if he admires Karl Marx. There is no reason to worry if he runs for Mexico's presidency and wins. Communism is something out of the age of dinosaurs. It's extinct. If the Mexicans dug up Karl Marx and elected him in a landslide, it wouldn't be a victory for communism. And if you want to talk about rotting old corpses, one shouldn't make too much of the fact that the Russians haven't buried Lenin. The Russian's simply like having him around for sentimental reasons. (He reminds them of the "good old days," when the Bolshevik firing squads were continuously occupied.)

In central and eastern Europe we have a prime example of communism's death. And clearly, Germany's new anti-Americanism has nothing to do with the percolating, festering, inwardly hidden communist leanings of the 60s and 70s radicals who now run the German government. The fact that Poland's president is and was a communist, that the Czech Republic is run by handpicked stooges of the communist secret police shouldn't concern us. So what if Europe is in the grip of the Russian mafia (which includes the extended mafias of the KGB's "sister services")? Big deal! Do you want a perfect world? 

There are no communists on this planet and we shouldn't use the word "communist." It's self-discrediting, it's shameful and it's rude. What do you want to do, ruin a good thing?

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