On calling Communists “conservatives”

Tim W. writes:

In addition to being a fan of pre-1965 American cinema, I enjoy Asian films. So I frequently browse the reviews of these films at YesAsia, Amazon, or other such sites. Lou Ye’s 2006 film “Summer Palace” deals in part with the Tiananmen Square violence perpetrated by the Chinese government. It has been banned in China because of it. The Amazon DVD review refers to the “complex historical plot that explains how innocent students could be considered threats to conservative political regimes.”

It’s always interesting how communist regimes are recast by our media as “conservative” when convenient. In the latter days of the Soviet Union, the Western media began calling the remaining Russian communists “conservatives” and the anti-communists “liberal reformers.” I guess the neo-Maoists who ordered the massacre at Tiananmen are now conservative as well.

When Castro finally dies, look for CNN to tell us that his was a conservative regime all along.

LA replies:

Of course. Liberals have no enemy to the left. Once the media began to favor the end of Soviet Communism after the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago, the people trying to preserve Communism were now the bad guys in the liberal script, and to call them Communists would put Communism in a bad light, which liberals cannot do. It’s in the liberal DNA NEVER to criticize Communism as such (just as it is in the liberal DNA never to criticize Islam as such), as that would put the liberals on the same side as the conservatives and anti-Communists, who fantasize enemies and are militaristic and super patriotic. Since, as Alan Roebuck has pointed out, liberalism denies the God of the Bible and objective moral truth, liberalism must also deny the existence of evil and enemies and condemn as “absolutists” and “authoritarians” people who do believe in the existence of evil and enemies. So, having always belittled and opposed anti-Communism, the liberals could not now refer to the newly minted bad guys, Gorbachev’s hard-line opponents, as “Communists.” So they turned on an Orwellian dime and began calling the hard-line Communists “conservatives.” The bad guys in the story were now conservatives, not Communists—thus restoring and preserving the liberal terminology as it had existed through the entire Cold War. .

However, along with the strangeness of calling Communists “conservatives,” I am also concerned about the way everyone today calls Communists “communists.” Communism has always been capitalized. It is a proper name, the name of a political party or group of political parties. People are called Communists because they are members of that party, just as people are called Republicans because they belong to the Republican Party. I find it disturbing that the entire world, as if on cue, has switched to spelling the word “communist.”

It seems to be that the spelling change is implicitly of the same nature as calling Communists “conservatives.” Now that Communism is no longer in favor, the fact that it was once an enormous threat—or rather that it was seen that way by anti-Communists—must be erased, its importance downgraded. To spell it upper case would remind people that Communism was once a great power that America and its allies—or rather the anti-Communists in those societies—struggled to oppose and contain for 40 years. So it’s spelled lower case, changing it into a vague, general, non-harmful tendency, thus erasing the historic reality of Soviet Communism, international Communism, and the Cold War that was waged against them, and thus removing any implication that the writer is or would have been an anti-Communist.

I’m not saying that people are doing this consciously, but when a word that was always capitalized by everyone is suddenly spelled lower case by everyone, that calls out for an explanation. I think the liberals made the spelling change for the reasons I’ve given, and then conservatives followed along without realizing the implications of what they were doing. Or, alternatively, perhaps conservatives share the liberal desire to forget about Communism and the Cold War.

Tim W. writes:

You’re right about the capitalization. I suppose I was thinking in terms of Communism being an ideology or system (such as socialism, liberalism, etc.) and I would only capitalize it when referring to the Communist Party specifically. An analogy would be when we say someone is a conservative in the ideological sense as opposed to being a member of the Conservative Party. Joe is a conservative (a person who holds conservative views on politics and life). Joe is a Conservative (a member of the Conservative Party).

You are clearly correct regarding my original email, though, because all of the regimes I mentioned are/were ruled by the Communist Party, so the rulers being described would be Communist Party members.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 15, 2009 08:06 AM | Send