Communism’s Lingering Grip on Soul and Society: ‘Generations of Devastation’
Near Atlanta, on a spring day in 1990, I was outside, underneath a large tent with dozens of others seated at tables, each facing a telephone.
I was six years old and when the call connected to a boy on the other end of the phone who sounded like he was my age.
I had no other concept of who he was. I wasn't sure what to ask him, but knew something important was happening because my parents were very excited.
I learned the boy on the other side of the phone was from East Berlin. He spoke English with an accent, yet I could understand him clearly.
Perhaps with some coaching, I asked him, "What's different now where you live?"
"We can visit our family on the other side of the city," he answered.
This legitimate focus on deaths means we neglect the smaller yet compounding consequences of the state's command and control over every detail of life, which affect generations in ways we'll never fully understand.
In the 1950s in Poland, my grandfather, a bridle maker, was interrogated with a bright light in his face for the crime of buying a piece of leather from a nearby town. My grandmother had to hitchhike to the prison to retrieve him, after which they began planning to leave the only home they had known to start a better life in the United States. There was no way for them to live a peaceful and fulfilling life in Poland without joining the Communist Party they despised.
But the devil is in the details. Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto explained clearly how this would be achieved: "The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property."
Communism, however, is so much more repressive than the government merely stealing a person's property.
To accomplish their aims, communist states must break the natural ways that people think and behave, then attempt to retrofit anti-social behaviors in their place.
Among these goals and tactics are forced association—for example, by limiting access to cars to only those who join the Communist Party, or by outlawing competing social institutions such as the Church.
Not only was private property outlawed, but, as my grandfather discovered, so was trade at even the smallest scale.
As economist Ronald Coase differentiated importantly, "The law of property determines who owns something, but the market determines how it will be used."
Free people who are brought under communist rule reject these new government mandates, often paying for their insubordination with their lives. For the generations who come afterward, however, force, surveillance, and privation become facts of life.
Even when individual residents of communist countries were spared physical force, such pervasive control erodes free thought and individuality. Enforcing a drastically unrealistic conformity, it compels people to surrender their property and children to the state, destroying not only life, but also happiness.
Communism doesn't liberate—it controls. In every communist regime, the state either bans or mandates what each person can do, disregarding their personal knowledge of what's best for themselves and their families.
The victims of communism aren't only those who paid with their lives, but every sort of "nonconformist," such as members of any racial, religious, political, economic, academic, or sexual minority.
Under the auspices of establishing a utopian society, communist states exploited historical prejudices and superstitions.
In the eyes of the rulers of the communist state, any quality that makes an individual unique is a threat to social cohesion and one-party rule and is therefore something to be destroyed. The individual is merely a pawn to be played for the greater good without regard for his humanity or individuality, which becomes more restrained with each passing day of repression.
The Czech poet and political prisoner (and former president of the Czech Republic) Václav Havel described the slow yet certain erosion of humanity under communism:
"The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less."
The tragic legacy of this failed ideology didn't collapse with the Berlin Wall in 1989. Communism and its authoritarian siblings linger, subtly twisting our souls and our societies, and misshaping our world today in ways both subtle and profound.
Views expressed in this are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
