I have pet peeves.

One of them involves Communism. A few months ago the LA Times wrote a front page article about a retirement home for old communists; it was a glowing piece. I wrote them a nasty letter that they actually published. Today, I got the new issue of the National Geographic (August, 2005) and at the end, they did a piece on a commune called East Wind in Missouri. They wrote the following:

"We thought we were going to change the world," says Deborah, 56, one of the group of friends who left Boston in 1973 to create East Wind. Back then it was still possible to believe a socialist revolution was sweeping the globe. "The east wind is prevailing over the west wind," said Mao Zedong in 1957, when he was chairman of the People's Republic of China. His vision of socialism blowing away capitalism gave East Wind its name and helped inspire its mission...

Such things puzzle me immensely. It is unlikely they’d publish a similar article about a neo-Nazi group in Idaho, calling them say “fascists” or “old rightists,” or speak nicely about their being inspired by Hitler’s Mein Kampf while waxing nostalgic over their lost causes. Why is it that murderous thugs on the far left evoke such feelings of warmth that they can’t even call them what they are: communists? What makes dictators and those who worked for their evil and unworkable cause worthy of such fawning? It is, frankly, disgusting. Marxism is as bad as Nazism and deserving of equal opprobrium. Mao is responsible for slaughtering at least 50 million of his citizens while oppressing the rest, sending millions to slave labor camps, and depriving all of them of basic freedoms. The Soviet Union slaughtered nearly as many, oppressed a dozen other countries, and sent millions to the Gulag. And yet if people walk around in a T-shirt with a picture of Mao or Che, that's okay for a lot of people. Personally, such an idea should feel as offensive as walking around wearing a T-shirt with Hitler or Goering on it.