Machan's Musings - Communism Was No Bogeyman
by Tibor R. Machan
Forgive me for my memory but I remember clearly that communism wasn’t a bogeyman, not in the sense that of an imaginary evil demon parents invoke to scare kids into doing the right thing. Yet that is what some folks want us to think about communism and the Soviet Union, the massive state that promoted it. By viewing communism as a bogeyman, they can then divert attention from its bona fide evil and focus their gaze on the far less vicious excesses of some anti-communists, like Joe McCarthy and his pals. This is just what critics of the late Sidney Hook tried to do and what some defenders of the recently deceased playwright Arthur Miller’s selective scolding of anti-communism peddle.
Look, there is no doubt that one can fight an evil in ways that are themselves wrong. If someone insults me, I can respond in several ways and some of these will be wrong. Even if someone attacks me physically, I can respond badly, by, say, attacking his child or friends in turn. So, yes, some of the ways people tried to repel communism were not admirable.
But they weren’t addressing some bogeyman either, and to say so reveals a moral blindness. It is akin to calling slavery a bogeyman with which people tried to cope, against which they deployed various strategies, some better than others. Or racism or other forms of injustice. But to justify the worst ways of dealing with injustice it is quite wrong to dismiss the injustice itself as some kind of bogeyman.
Now there is a related approach one can take to belittling the concerns some of us have with evil. This is the post-modernist tactic of claiming that there are multiple perspectives for viewing the world, some of which will construe certain things as evil, but others will see them differently. You know, "Your freedom fighters are someone else’s terrorists." This is the idea of "multiple narratives"—varied ways of telling a story about something. So, there is the ante-bellum narrative about slavery, the white supremacists' narrative, or the who cares about black-and-white morality (pragmatic) narrative. By peddling the idea that any narrative is as good as any other, one can then pretend that one’s own dismissing of slavery as evil is just an equally valid narrative.
The very same technique can be deployed for discrediting those who saw communism as a vile system of politics, or those who saw the Nazis as racist totalitarians. Post-modernism has provided us with these approaches to dealing with our adversaries. We do not need to argue with anyone about the rights and wrongs—the blacks versus the whites, as some people put the matter—of communism, slavery, Nazism, racism, and the like. No, we can just say, well it all depends upon your point of view.
Of course, this backfires rather immediately. What about the black versus white of dealing in black and whites? Is it all black—that is to say, is it wrong?—to invoke firm standards about what is right politically or morally or is it all a matter of shades of gray? And how do we tell what the proper shade is that we should focus upon, if there are no blacks and whites?
Truth is, those who denounce black vs. white thinking—those who consider all political or ethical value judgments a matter of creating bogeymen by which to scare children—are themselves quite wedded to certain blacks and whites, only they don’t wish to discuss these, to defend their own standards but merely hurl ad hominems at others to try to discredit their version of black vs. white.
This ploy will perhaps work in the effort to secure oneself a reputation of erudition, of being above the fray, of not fitting into a category—liberal, conservative, libertarian, communist, fascist, and so forth. But only for a bit.
After just a little more thought it becomes clear that such folks have their own categories they fit quite well, namely, the category of people who lack forthrightness and wish to win by rhetorical savvy rather than by means of sound reasoning—obscurantists.
Communism is bad and those who saw it as such were right, even if not all ways of dealing with it were sound, proper. Let’s admit that some ways of organizing society are bad, very bad, and this is not something to be obscured with post-modernist mumbo jumbo.
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