What Mark Newgent Said About Che Guevara Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

Today seems to be the day for grudging praise. My only disagreement with Mark Newgent's approach is that he didn't take down more targets than Ernesto Guevara when he had the opportunity in his post. I am no cheerleader for Red Maryland after the last election but Newgent hit this one right. The entirety of hammer-and-sickle kitsch is hideous, not just the one with the Castro's pal's face on it.

Not all communist governments have been the same historically of course. Vietnam was a far less vicious place than neighboring Cambodia. Yugoslavia managed to avoid the wholesale persecution of religion (and some of the worst inefficiencies of top-down economic inefficiency) that characterized neighboring states such as Albania and Romania. The Indian state of Kerala has repeatedly elected a Communist party over many years, and through its policies has achieved the longest life expectancies and literacy levels in all of India (though at considerable costs in other economic indicators.) Of course, residents of Kerala are free to leave Kerala and to leave India and to criticize the government loudly and publicly without state sanction, unlike residents of Soviet-bloc or other unfree societies have been or, in the case of Belarus, still are.

But let's face the facts: there is (extremely appropriately) a memorial museum in Washington for the many millions of murders of the Holocaust, but none for the victims of reckless and intentional killing by communists either by bullets, by death in prison or by starvation through famines inflicted with either depraved indifference or specific intent. Stalin's liquidation of private farm land and command economics on food inflicted a hideous death toll on Ukraine, long known as the "breadbasket of Europe" for its fertile soil and fairly favorable weather for wheat and livestock raising. The murders during the Cultural Revolution in China, Ceaucescu's torture chambers and secret police, the killing fields of Cambodia under Pol Pot, the communist efforts to destroy local cultures in favor of granite and concrete Communist temples, shrines and "iconography" - these outrages have no memorial monument in DC. Not one.

Stalin's policies killed perhaps 3 million in Ukraine in the 1930's; it is speculated that Stalin inflicted this famine as a tool against Ukrainian nationalism, under the theory that dead and starving people cannot easily rebel. There's not even an outhouse or fire hydrant in DC dedicated to these victims, nor to those who survived. We think that the Great Depression was bad here, and it was in many ways, but outright starvation was rare. Kansas didn't starve, didn't lose 25% of its people in between 1929 and 1933 as large sections of central Ukraine's breadbasket did from starvation and the effort to escape that starvation. And this is only one facet of one atrocity; there are many, many more.

Yet these hideously ignorant or indifferent children even today, decades after the Soviet Union has fallen and most of Eastern Europe is economically and politically free, wear gear with red stars and hammer-and-sickle logos to look "cool." They may as well wear swastikas as well and give all of the totalitarian murderers equal time. I dare them to wear that garbage on the streets of Tallinn or Riga after dark; if they do, they should bring friends built like bricklayers, not scrawny-assed coffee-shop effetes.