Communism died in 1991 . . . if only
The Soviet Union, founded a century ago at the end of 1922, died, it seems, at the very end of 1991. It seems. The Soviet Union did not die. It just carried on under a new name: China. Communism is stronger than ever.
It comes in two forms: oppression and danger. Oppression of the people it claims to elevate, and danger to any country that does not ally with it. These two words collapse into one word: control. Total control of its citizens and potential control of everyone else.
We recount the stages of Soviet oppression and danger lest we forget; alas, we need not look only to the past to see the warning signs.
Stages, as in, who was more evil, Lenin or Stalin? As in, who killed more people?
Stages, as in, which Soviet mass murder was worse, against the Jews (during the Bolshevik revolution) or against the Ukrainians (in the 1930s)?
Stages, as in kangaroo trials, which dispatched some one million innocent people (most, ironically, communists).
Stages, as in absurdity, as in Khruschchev’s boast to America, “We will bury you.”
Stages, as in anti-Semitism, the radical extirpation of every single Jewish ritual, down to matzah, and every single Jewish book, leaving millions of Jews with no affirmative identity; knowing they were Jews only because, ironically, the Soviets stamped it on their identity cards.
Stages, as in heroism during WW II that, under Soviet logic, the Soviets transmogrified into utter suppression of freedom in the very territories they liberated from the Nazis.
Stages, as in recklessness incarnate, at the meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in 1986; ironically, turning an iconic name in Russian Jewish spiritual history into an icon of disaster and destruction.
Stages, as in indifference to freedom, represented by other icons, the Berlin Wall, the suppression of Hungarian independence in 1956 and of Czechoslovakian independence in 1968.
Stages . . . endless stages of evil, masses of dead virtually uncountable, masses of living not really living, all in the name of a well meaning but extremely poorly thought out political philosophy, a version of Marxism.
A philosophy picked up in China, yielding similar stages — parallel warning signs in living color. The Jewish people were swept up into the Soviet oppression and are at risk, like everyone else, from China.
“Everyone else” includes, first and foremost, the Chinese themselves. The total control exercised by the Chinese Communist Party could not possibly be more visible than it has been during the past months. China locked down hundreds of millions of people, confining 25 million people to their homes in Shanghai alone, due to COVID. Boom! In a day, China ended all COVID restrictions. Result? Rapid spread of the disease; inadequate health facilities to care for all, or even most, of the ill. Why? Because China would not admit the superior vaccines produced in the West, and had never built up sufficient health facilities throughout the country to administer vaccines to all of their people, even if they had them.
Neither this total lockdown nor its sudden cancellation stemmed from concern for the welfare of the Chinese people. No, it is the power of the party that governs its health policy. The total control of the party was weakened due to the days and months of total lockdown. People rebelled. The policy was not politically sustainable. So, unprepared in the public health sphere, the party reversed course anyway, making it clear that the original, massive lockdown really wasn’t due to concern for the citizenry, but so as not to expose the radically deficient pubic health system.
There you have it: the stages in the Soviet system and the stages in the Chinese system varied in practice but not in effect: the oppression of its people (Chinese, Tibetan, Uighur, Catholic, et. al.), the danger to the world.
What better evidence of the essential identity of the two systems than Ukraine and Taiwan? Radically separated geographically, linguistically and culturally, these two areas share a powerful unity: their freedom denied by a totalitarian system. Call it Soviet. Call it Chinese. It doesn’t matter. It seeks to enslave wherever it can and is viscerally challenged by, more than anything else, the thirst for freedom.
The totalitarian system expresses itself best in the irrationality of its language. Only if Ukraine is destroyed will it be, in the Soviet dictionary, free. Same for Taiwan, in the Chinese dictionary.
Yes, the century mark of the Soviet system must be remembered. We pretend it is strictly of the past at our peril.
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