I was watching an interview with Piers Morgan were a young lady told him “I’m literally a communist you idiot”. She was a writer for the magazine Teen Vogue. Since then I was looking at some of the articles criticizing them before the interview as trying to rationalize or put a smiley face on Communism.
Anyways after the interview the twitosphere was ecstatic on how the young lady stuck it to Morgan by claiming she was a Communist. There even running with their 5 minutes of fame on Teen Vogue with shirts that say “I’m literally a communist”. Now if the young lady would have said “I’m literally a fascist you idiot” what would have been the response? There would not have been high fives and T-shirts being made or people saying well fascism can work it just needs to be done a different way.
There would have been a strong condemnation from both the left and right because we all know from even those with a rudimentary understanding of History that fascism is bad. But even though communism claimed more lives the left seems to get leeway on not denouncing communism as hard as we all denounce fascism.
We all know when the right can go to far, no one wants that and its universally condemned outside of a fringe group the rest of us remember reading our history of fascism and of what happened in WW2 and the pictures of the starved people being hurdled into the cattle cars. But for some reason communism doesn’t have the same menacing image to the west and people don’t immediately put the images of the darkened skulls of Cambodia, or the millions dead from the Soviet Union to Mao’s China in their mind as they fascism.
If you think I am overrating just read this piece by Teen Vogue a national magazine aimed at western youth. Here is a snippet of the lady talking about the joys of Communism.
(((Or — and this is the fun communism bit — you say, ‘OK, technology, which Marx calls fixed capital in The Fragment on the Machine, has a contradictory element because on the one hand it makes you more precarious as a worker. On the other hand, it shows what you can be when liberated from work because you’ve got all this extra time. You can imagine different ways of living.
You can pursue your passions. You can live a happy life.’ Why don’t we just bring that technology into common ownership? Ownership of the people, not the capitalist class, and distribute the abundance generated by that fixed capital equitably. And there are different ways of distributing that more equitably. That’s possible under social democracy through taxation or universal basic income. It’s possible under socialism. But communism
is the only thing which says all things should be brought into the hands of commons to benefit all people. In the past, you’d call that communism.I think in the future, we’ll have to call that common sense.)))
She just goes on and on about how wonderful communism is with no retort, if you wrote and article about the joys of fascism you would be soundly blasted, lose your job, and ostracized from society. Not work at Teen Vogue getting praise for saying “I’m literally a Communist”.
he equated them in this very op.
