Blog Post

AEIdeas

…. is from Northwestern University professor of arts and humanities Gary Saul Morson, writing in the New Criterion (“The house is on fire!“):

Western public opinion has never come to terms with the crimes of Communism. Every school child knows about the Holocaust, Apartheid, and American slavery, as they should. But Pol Pot’s murder of a quarter of Cambodia’s population has not dimmed academic enthusiasm for the Marxism his henchmen studied in Paris. Neither the Chinese Cultural Revolution nor the Great Purges seem to have cast a shadow on the leftists who apologized for them. Quite the contrary, university classes typically blame the Cold War on American “paranoia” about communism and still picture Bolsheviks as idealists in too great a hurry. Being leftwing means never having to say you’re sorry.

MP: Later in the article, Professor Morson documents one estimate of the number for deaths from communism — 100 million (see chart above for countries where a majority of those deaths took place) — which is perhaps on the conservative side, with some estimates of communist deaths being closer to 200 million.