Communist Chic

This unequal treatment has bothered me for years. Why haven't all the atrocities of communism been told? Why do the "beautiful people" in Hollywood romanticize it? Jeff Jacoby, via RCP:

What can explain such ''communist chic?" How can people who wouldn't dream of drinking in a pub called Gestapo cheerfully hang out at the KGB Bar? If the swastika is an undisputed symbol of unspeakable evil, can the hammer-and-sickle and other emblems of communism be anything less?

Between 1933 and 1945, Adolf Hitler's Nazis slaughtered some 21 million people, but the communist nightmare has lasted far longer and its death toll is far, far higher. Since 1917, communist regimes have sent more than 100 million victims to their graves -- and in places like North Korea, the deaths continue to this day. The historian R.J. Rummel, an expert on genocide and government mass murder, estimates that the Soviet Union alone annihilated nearly 62 million people: ''Old and young, healthy and sick, men and women, even infants and the infirm, were killed in cold blood. They were not combatants in civil war or rebellions; they were not criminals. Indeed, nearly all were guilty of . . . nothing."

Yet communism rarely evokes the instinctive loathing that Nazism does. Prince Harry's swastika was way over the line, but Tim Vincent's hammer-and-sickle was kitschy and cool. Why?

I suppose they think of communists as rebels, and they like to view themselves as "anti-establishment", creative types. Jacoby cites some of these reasons, but goes on to say:

But perhaps the strongest explanation is the simplest: visibility. Ever since the end of World War II, when photographers entered the death camps and recorded what they found, the world has had indelible images of the Nazi crimes. But no army ever liberated the Soviet Gulag or halted the Maoist massacres. If there are photos or films of those atrocities, few of us have ever seen them. The victims of communism have tended to be invisible -- and suffering that isn't seen is suffering most people don't think about.

And there still isn't an end to it. It is still going on in China, Cuba and North Korea. Russia may be headed back.

Even with the death camp pictures there are still Holocaust deniers. It is even easier to ignore the victims of communism. Perhaps it is because they are still ongoing, unlike the Nazi regime. Some have escaped and live here now in freedom. But there are others, who have lived here, who perhaps didn't believe communism could be so cruel, and they are new political prisoners in China. Maybe they did know though, and tried to let the world know.

Then there's this. And if you don't know about it, "The Black Book of Communism". Published by.....Harvard University Press.

UPDATE: Oops, how could I forget this, so close to home---New Trier High School's Young Communist Club. New Trier News article here (scroll down), also mention here in Sun Times. Here is the affiliate communist organization of New Trier's group. And earlier related post here.