Truth or consequences

Pretty much nothing of John Locke's political theory - involving a fantasy contract built around a fantasy of rights and justice - is true.

But its historical influence has been mostly positive.

Much, though by no means all, of what Marx taught was true.

But his historical influence has been much more devastating than the worst plagues and natural disasters of all time, taken together with Atilla the Hun, Genghis Khan, and Adolph Hitler.

Some time in the 70s , looking back at the Vietnam War era, a liberal friend pointed out the venality and corruption of Ky, Thieu, and Sihanouk, as though that settled the whole thing.

I pointed out that a government can do much, much worse to its people than rob them, and that communist governments always did.

And then there was Pol Pot, in case Mao or Stalin were not enough to illustrate the point.

I opposed the Vietnam war, but not because I was squeamish about the governments we supported or the methods we - or they - used.

Better a puppet kleptocratic dictatorship, I thought, than an honest and indigenous revolutionary totalitarianism.

Better for the Vietnamese.

Or the Cambodians, come to that.

Communist governments were by no means all equally awful.

And the Cambodians, of course, were vastly better off after the Vietnamese reds rescued them from the Khmer Rouge.

Nobody else was going to save them.

Certainly not that unspeakable bastard, Kissinger.

So it was a lucky break for them when the Vietnamese knocked off the Khmer Rouge to please the Russians, to annoy the Chinese.

Has any religion ever been as devastating for mankind as communism has been, I wonder.

I am guessing not.

As Nazism, yes.

As all forms of fascism, yes.

As communism?

I think not.

Whose Black Book could ever equal The Black Book of Communism, which I still have, in paper, in the original French?