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[http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2014/08/09/george-jonas-how-the-communists-killed-communism/&ei=0UvmU9zmMIzhsQeKmYGQCw
How the communists killed communism
George Jonas | August 9, 2014 | Last Updated: Aug 9 6:45 AM ET
The conversation at the dinner party turned to communism. Someone remarked that it was amazing for a political movement on the leading edge of human affairs for a period of more than 160 years - the Communist Manifesto was published in 1848 - to have all but evaporated in a couple of decades.
“Where is the legacy?” the dinner guest wanted to know.
“Have communists contributed nothing to history? I mean, other than 90 million dead bodies, if the French scholars estimate the global total correctly.”
“Of course they have,” I reply as soon as the conversation is reported to me. I rarely go to dinner parties these days but miss little, thanks to people who do.
“The communists made an absolutely essential contribution to history in the 20th century. They defeated communism.”
Not everybody is taken aback when they hear this. To their credit, some people nod and declare that, though they wouldn’t have said it themselves, they know exactly what I’m talking about.
A great many people, however, are flabbergasted.
“Do you think it was the communists who did away with communism?” they ask. “For your information, we did, the free world, by winning the Cold War.“
The Cold War was an expensive proposition. We were rich and could afford the arms race; the Commies were poor and couldn’t. We bankrupted them.”
All of this is true but it’s not why communism collapsed.
Communists could cope with bankruptcy; they had never been anything but bankrupt, beginning with Karl Marx himself. The founder of the economic faith that spread misery more reliably than any before or since couldn’t balance his household finances. He would have gone hungry with his family if his friend and collaborator, Friedrich Engels, hadn’t bailed him out from time to time.
Since the guinea pigs and white mice of Marxism’s economic experiments had no Uncle Engels to come to the rescue, they did starve by the hundreds of thousands from Ukraine to China.
But this murderous, inefficient system that would have been comical if it hadn’t been so brutally inhumane, could also inspire heroic feats of loyalty and self-sacrifice. In the case of Russia, and later China, it turned two great basket-cases into two ambulatory psychiatric patients as dangerous to themselves as to their neighbours - an improvement of sorts, I suppose.
The communists revealed their inner contradiction immediately after the war, just by the way they greeted each other in my native country.
They would raise their hand in a clenched fist salute and utter the word “Liberty!” It was incongruous.
One Budapest shopkeeper would raise his clenched fist in return and say to his communist customer: “Pineapple!”
“Why pineapple?” asked the customer, taken aback.
“Well, you said ‘Liberty’. I thought the exercise was to list items in short supply,” the shopkeeper replied.
Yes, communists did everything they did in order to deceive, but often with themselves as their first target. Ignazio Silone, a fine writer and founder of the Italian Communist Party, meant every word when he defined liberty as “the possibility of doubting, the possibility of making a mistake, the possibility of searching and experimenting, the possibility of saying No to any authority - literary, artistic, philosophic, religious, social and even political.
”Hear this? “Even political!”
What was the party again a man who believed this founded in Italy? The Communist Party? Talk about incompatibles. This cannot have a happy ending.And so it didn’t.
By 1950 Silone became one of the authors of The God that Failed, explaining to the world with the likes of Arthur Koestler (author of Darkness at Noon) why communism won’t cut it. So it takes the world another 41 years to hear it. So what?
The Soviet Empire imploded in 1950, when Silone and Koestler and other people of the left said the game was up.It would be hard to conceive of communism, or should we call it applied Marxism, having simply melted away. It hasn’t. Why melt when you can relabel?
Communist becomes socialist in Hungary, liberal in the West, All-Russian in Russia and Cherry Blossom in China.
It’s not just a matter of communist bosses, officials, “cadres” or card-carrying Party members in former communist countries. It’s Marxism itself: not the movement but the academic discipline with its graduate schools, endowed chairs, tenure tracks, and veritable flocks, swarms, packs and prides of graduate and undergraduate students. Where are Marxist art, Marxist women’s studies, Marxist math, Marxist medicine?
By now we’ve had several generations of trained, ambitious, competitive high-achievers wander about in what Tom (“The Right Stuff”) Wolfe once called a quasi-Marxist fog - and this is in the free West, where communism never actually came to power. Imagine what it must be like in former Soviet countries or in China.
Cold War? Star Wars? Sure, they played a part. But “The final conflict will be between the Communists and ex-Communists,” Silone wrote, and that’s what happened.Just wanted to get it off my chest.
 World Fact Book (CIA))]
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