Obligatory reminder: Commies Ain’t Cool. But they ARE vile.

If you are anything like me, you probably want to read this blistering column by Jonah Goldberg on some Lefty pundits and academics’ not-really-curious myopia when it comes to Soviet Communism:

What to say of the gormless press-agent twaddle conjured up to describe the Soviet Union? In its opening video for the Olympic Games, NBC’s producers drained the thesaurus of flattering terms devoid of moral content: “The empire that ascended to affirm a colossal footprint; the revolution that birthed one of modern history’s pivotal experiments. But if politics has long shaped our sense of who they are, it’s passion that endures.”

To parse this infomercial treacle is to miss the point, for the whole idea is to luge by the truth on the frictionless skids of euphemism.

…but for the really good stuff, read his G-File today. A taste:

I remember when the Soviet Union started to crumble. I repeated something stupid I’d heard on Crossfire about how conservatives would be bummed at the loss of anti-Communism as a political issue. Or something like that. My father was visibly disgusted. As patiently as he could he explained the moral vacuity of the idea. It was like saying an abolitionist would regret the ending of slavery or a pro-lifer would regret the end of Roe v. Wade (those weren’t his exact words, but it was the gist). You see, real anti-Communists were really anti-Communist. Hatred of Communism wasn’t simply a position, or a foreign-policy necessity, or a cultural pose: It was a moral obligation.

This wasn’t a Republican thing, by the way.  I learned to hate and despise Communism on my father’s knee (the language that he would use to describe them could blister paint); and he, of course, was a union president, Truman Democrat.   Watching the Soviet Union collapse, slowly and painfully, was nothing but joyous. And even when *I* was a Democrat I would have agreed with Jonah’s next paragraph:

When I see hipsters wearing Mao hats or Lenin T-shirts, I’m grateful. It’s like truth-in-labeling. For now I know you are: Woefully ignorant, morally stunted, purposively asinine, or all three.

Basically, it comes down to this: Marxism is evil.  It kills the people who have to live under it. The people it doesn’t kill, it maims them in the head.  There is no excuse to not know this. There is also no legitimate reason to claim that the next time it’s tried, it will work.  That well is dry.  I mean: just how many times does somebody have to get stabbed in the kidney before people will admit that doing so isn’t really a good idea?