A few days ago I posted about Ilya Somin's post proposing a "holiday" called "Victims of Communism Day." The post self-referentially called itself, in addition to Ilya's post, idiotic. While this is surely true, Ilya's remarks did rub me the wrong way, and it may be worth expressly and seriously making the point that I may or may not have impliedly made previously.
That is: Ilya's remarks are not about remembering or honoring the fallen victims of murderous regimes. They are about ideology.
There are a couple of noteworthy comments on my post. Dean, one of my co-bloggers, writes, "Yes, let's count corpses and call it a holiday." And "confused" asks, "We can have a debate on how much government should regulate the economy but is there any doubt that Communism killed more people than Nazism?" These comments raise a couple of interesting issues. First, counting corpses is indeed morbid and (ought to be) anti-celebratory.
Second, an -ism can't kill people. You might be able to argue "Nazism" because it is inextricably tied to a particular German collectivity. That is, it's not an ideology at all but merely a group of actors. But "communism" does not kill people -- at least not in this way. Again, you might be able to argue that "Communism" killed people, if by that you mean that certain political parties and state actors, but in that case it would be worth noting that Ilya's post spells "communism" with a small c, thus referring not to certain people or collective fictions who were communists, but to the idea of communism.
Indeed, a call for a holiday to commemorate the victims of the atrocities caused by certain communist regimes fails to make sense (even allowing Ilya's post to refer instead to big C Communists) unless the point is to refer to the ideology itself. The idea of massive wealth redistribution, and government control of production designed to equalize socioeconomic status, surely has never killed anyone in the way either Ilya or our anonymous "confused" commentator would suggest. (It is quite possible that if communism in fact does not work, it might reduce wealth to the point where more people will die as a result of, say, malnutrition or inadequate health care. This is also quite beside the point.) When Ilya suggests that "Victims of Communism Day be made an official holiday similar to Holocaust Memorial Day," he proposes a political act -- to demonize a particular set of evildoers: the Communists.
He even explains that "[i]n addition to honoring the victims of communism, the proposal can also serve as a much-needed reminder of the dangers of allowing the state to seize control of the economy and civil society - just as Holocaust Memorial Day serves as a useful reminder of the dangers of racism and anti-semitism." This is an overt reference, not to the atrocities committed by Stalin, Pol Pot, and others, but to an aspect of communist ideology that Ilya finds troublingly discordant with his own conservative/libertarian ideology -- and which, conveniently, shares some obvious similarities with the beliefs of present-day liberals/progressives, beliefs with which Ilya strongly disagrees and surely had in mind when proposing this "holiday."
So as I suggested originally, Ilya's suggestion seems not to be about honoring victims, but rather about "tarring" (his word) certain ideas by association with certain bad actors.
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