Communism was the most perfect tyranny ever achieved by humans

The answer is simple

Admittedly it was not his topic and he was writing to make the point – I am not kidding – that the Republicans are “basically clinically insane.”

That’s the quality of his writing, these days.

The second comment says it’s his best post this year, too, so I suppose you could defend him with the claim he’s been duped by his fans.

Anyway, the B-man wrote in his first paragraph this brief summation of what was wrong with communism.

In the past, the right surely exaggerated the threat of communism, but who would honestly want to live in a communist country? 

It might sound good on paper, but it never worked well in practice. 

So, even if the right did convince itself that there were fifth column communists hiding under every desk, they had a point about the lack of freedom and opportunity in communist systems.

Really?

Which part sounded good on paper?

The stupider-than-religion anarchist utopia at the end of history’s rainbow?

The horrifically destructive planned economies, forced collectivizations, massive resort to slave labor, and slaughter of tens of millions of one’s own people?

The megadeaths from famine?

The constant mass rule of state terrorism?

“Never worked well in practice”?

And you have to love that grudging concession at the end that those crackpot right-wingers with their absurd fears of espionage, agents of influence, and subversion did have a little point, there, about “lack of freedom and opportunity in communist systems.”

After about thirty years of totally wrecking his country with repeated radical insanities and slaughters, Mao died like Tiberius of old age and sexual exhaustion, in bed, smiling, the most successful and thoroughgoing of modern tyrants.

That was communism.

The right did indeed exaggerate the threat of communism to the people of the United States and even the world as a whole.

So did Truman.

So did Kennedy.

So did Johnson.

Our post-WW2 globalism would have been both unnecessary and foolish without communism in the world, and it was just as much unnecessary and foolish even given communism.

But nobody exaggerated its evil.

Most especially not Reagan, whose public declaration that the Soviet Union was an evil empire was greeted with stupid and even vicious guffaws and scoffing from pretty much all across the left.

And it is absolutely true that, even to this day, the left grossly understates - and under-recognizes - the horrors of Marxism.

It is possible this is at least partly because the left today continues, even essentially, a dupe of the moral faith, on which see posts labeled "amoralism."

And in this connection the left is, in particular, permanently beset with guilty rejection of the acts/omissions distinction - or at any rate is wholly unwilling to accept its bearing on crucial questions of politics.

Equally, we could say their problem is disbelieving both that morality is fundamentally a matter of side-constraints on action and that justice is concerned with procedures rather than outcomes.

Or we could say they find utilitarianism far more persuasive than deontological approaches to morals.

In any case we can say they themselves often make clear that, for them, there is little or no moral difference between killing and letting die.

So every preventable death, for example, that is not prevented in capitalist society because medical care is only for those who can pay counts against market capitalism just as much as a peasant killed resisting forced collectivization of agriculture counts against communism.

If indeed it is admitted that the dead peasant, being a counter-revolutionary criminal, counts against communism, at all.