Communism is evil - how come its apologists get so much time, attention and space to promote this murderous, coercive faith?

"The second memorial lecture was given in January by the American political theorist Jodi Dean, who is keen to rescue the word 'communist' from its negative - and, she insists, historically inaccurate - associations..."

This is the world we're in - this quotation doesn't come from some obscure spartist website or even from communism's house journal, The Morning Star, but from the London Review of Books. From the lead article in the latest issue of this august journal.

Imagine just for a minute that the LRB's main article was from an avowed fascist arguing that Gentile's actualism and the policies of 1920s Italy were powerful, change-making forces for good and that Fascism is misunderstood and perceived negatively. No, you can't imagine it because you know it would never happen - the repainting of Fascism in bright 21st century colours is simply not something we could countenance. Not so with communism.

Time and time again - on the TV, in magazines, in film and in theatre - the evils of communism are given a different set of teeth, a new smile, a smart set of modern clothes. The millions of dead bodies on which today's communism perches get brushed aside as a detail, explained away as some sort of tragic error or, worst, seen as a necessary collateral in the pursuit of the New Man and true communism.

I understand how people who've arrived at a left-wing - even socialist - perspective might be troubled by the discovery that people who proclaimed the same faith were responsible for genocide, rape, murder, incarceration, torture and oppression. Aren't these the sins of the 'right' - the things the left opposes? So we get revisionism - I remember a bizarre seminar at university where we discussed the bewildering manner in which the number of dead bodies in Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge was parsed according to the ideological position of the calculator. My lecturer took the Noam Chomsky position - there weren't as many dead as claimed and, anyway, it was down to individual actions by bad soldiers and Pol Pot didn't know about what was going on (I paraphrase but this summarises the then academically popular apologia for one of the worst genocides of the 20th century). Portraying this - the consequence of communism in power - as somehow an historical aberration, not real communism, is precisely what Jodi Dean and her fellow travellers want to do. Just so they can carry on promoting a faith that demands coercion and oppression as well as producing, in so many tragic cases, violence, death and starvation.

Communism should not be savable through some sort of historical revisionism, it should be confined to the same place as Nazism and Fascism and its proponents treated with the same opprobrium. So long as elite journals like the LRB can lead with unchallenged communist apologia, we are a long way from seeing the murderous ideas of communism properly confined to the madder corners of obscure websites and batty college pamphleteers.

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