Apr 1, 2018 04:32 PM
https://aeon.co/essays/the-merits-of-tak...ism-stance
EXCERPT: . . . A 2009 poll in eight east European countries asked if the economic situation for ordinary people was ‘better, worse or about the same as it was under communism’. The results stunned observers: 72 per cent of Hungarians, and 62 per cent of both Ukrainians and Bulgarians believed that most people were worse off after 1989. In no country did more than 47 per cent of those surveyed agree that their lives improved after the advent of free markets. Subsequent polls and qualitative research across Russia and eastern Europe confirm the persistence of these sentiments as popular discontent with the failed promises of free-market prosperity has grown, especially among older people.
In response, east European conservative and Right-wing governments have created museums, memorials and days of commemoration to honour the victims of communism. In 2008, conservative politicians signed the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism to increase educational efforts about the crimes of communism, followed by the 2011 creation of the Platform of European Memory and Conscience, a consortium of organisations striving to promote their view of the 20th century in European history textbooks: a view that equates communism with Nazism, as one of two totalitarianisms.
In Poland and Ukraine, democratic governments have banned communist symbols, slogans and songs, and the Ukrainian government forced name changes on villages and towns with nomenclature that sounded too communist. In the most extreme case, the Ukrainians have legislated an official history about a recent past through which many present-day citizens have lived. If a journalist tries to discuss any positive aspects of life between 1917 and 1991, the law allows the government to shut down the newspaper, magazine or blog, and carries a potential prison sentence of five to 10 years. Free-market capitalism has not brought freedom of the press.
In October 2016, the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation opened a new front in the battle for the public memory of communism when they mounted seven billboards in the heart of New York City. On his Twitter feed, the executive director Marion Smith wrote: ‘Our ads exposing the horrendous record of communist crimes just went up in Times Square.’ These billboards informed passers-by: ‘100 years, 100 million killed’; ‘Communism kills’; and ‘Today, 1 in 5 people live under a communist regime’.
About a year later, Bret Stephens’s op-ed ‘Communism Through Rose-Coloured Glasses’ in The New York Times attacked the insistence of the ‘progressive intelligentsia’ on distinguishing between Nazism and communism, and tarred the US senator Bernie Sanders and the UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn with the memory of Soviet atrocities.
Next, President Donald Trump declared that 7 November would be a National Day for the Victims of Communism. The official White House statement explained:
Over the past century, communist totalitarian regimes around the world have killed more than 100 million people and subjected countless more to exploitation, violence, and untold devastation. These movements, under the false pretence of liberation, systematically robbed innocent people of their God-given rights of free worship, freedom of association, and countless other rights we hold sacrosanct.
That there were real horrors is without doubt. But why the urgency to insist that the history of 20th-century communism is one of ‘untold devastation’? Are these belated responses to the global financial crisis, or delayed reactions to the electoral successes of Sanders and Corbyn? Or is it something else?
MORE: https://aeon.co/essays/the-merits-of-tak...ism-stance
EXCERPT: . . . A 2009 poll in eight east European countries asked if the economic situation for ordinary people was ‘better, worse or about the same as it was under communism’. The results stunned observers: 72 per cent of Hungarians, and 62 per cent of both Ukrainians and Bulgarians believed that most people were worse off after 1989. In no country did more than 47 per cent of those surveyed agree that their lives improved after the advent of free markets. Subsequent polls and qualitative research across Russia and eastern Europe confirm the persistence of these sentiments as popular discontent with the failed promises of free-market prosperity has grown, especially among older people.
In response, east European conservative and Right-wing governments have created museums, memorials and days of commemoration to honour the victims of communism. In 2008, conservative politicians signed the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism to increase educational efforts about the crimes of communism, followed by the 2011 creation of the Platform of European Memory and Conscience, a consortium of organisations striving to promote their view of the 20th century in European history textbooks: a view that equates communism with Nazism, as one of two totalitarianisms.
In Poland and Ukraine, democratic governments have banned communist symbols, slogans and songs, and the Ukrainian government forced name changes on villages and towns with nomenclature that sounded too communist. In the most extreme case, the Ukrainians have legislated an official history about a recent past through which many present-day citizens have lived. If a journalist tries to discuss any positive aspects of life between 1917 and 1991, the law allows the government to shut down the newspaper, magazine or blog, and carries a potential prison sentence of five to 10 years. Free-market capitalism has not brought freedom of the press.
In October 2016, the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation opened a new front in the battle for the public memory of communism when they mounted seven billboards in the heart of New York City. On his Twitter feed, the executive director Marion Smith wrote: ‘Our ads exposing the horrendous record of communist crimes just went up in Times Square.’ These billboards informed passers-by: ‘100 years, 100 million killed’; ‘Communism kills’; and ‘Today, 1 in 5 people live under a communist regime’.
About a year later, Bret Stephens’s op-ed ‘Communism Through Rose-Coloured Glasses’ in The New York Times attacked the insistence of the ‘progressive intelligentsia’ on distinguishing between Nazism and communism, and tarred the US senator Bernie Sanders and the UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn with the memory of Soviet atrocities.
Next, President Donald Trump declared that 7 November would be a National Day for the Victims of Communism. The official White House statement explained:
Over the past century, communist totalitarian regimes around the world have killed more than 100 million people and subjected countless more to exploitation, violence, and untold devastation. These movements, under the false pretence of liberation, systematically robbed innocent people of their God-given rights of free worship, freedom of association, and countless other rights we hold sacrosanct.
That there were real horrors is without doubt. But why the urgency to insist that the history of 20th-century communism is one of ‘untold devastation’? Are these belated responses to the global financial crisis, or delayed reactions to the electoral successes of Sanders and Corbyn? Or is it something else?
MORE: https://aeon.co/essays/the-merits-of-tak...ism-stance