Jonathan Tobin talks to professor Jonathan Brent. Why is communism on the march again? In western countries? By young people? Why?
I remember when the Berlin Wall went up. I was a kid in Germany at the time, my dad in the Australian Embassy, Bonn. He came home that day of August 1961 and said: "guess what happened today? The Russians started building a wall through Berlin". He was clearly rattled.
28 years later, and the Wall came down. I was in China at the time, watching the students in Tiananmen Square calling for democracy in China, for which they were about to be crushed.
One side of the world: Wall down, Democracy on the march. The other side of the world, Democracy crushed.
What was happening in Berlin was the division of one ideology from another. A perfect petri-dish of a social-political experiment. Which works better, Capitalism or Socialism? The capitalist-market economy of the west; or the socialist-communist economy of the east?
The answer was easy. You could see it. The vibrant, open, rich, happy West. The downtrodden, dreary, dark, oppressive East.
The mass of people moving was in one direction only: from the east to the west. During the time of the Wall they were willing to risk their lives, those East Berliners, to storm to Wall and get to the west.
I thought at the time, well that's it. That's the end of socialism. The nail in the coffin of communism. Never mind what was happening in China. That was something else. The rest of the world was changing.
I was in Moscow in 1990, in the last year of the Soviet Union. One year later and socialism there, communism tried in it clearest form, was about to fall.
And yet. And yet... we now have people in the West, in thrall to socialism, in hock to communism.
What's going on?
It's the Marxists of the west. Of Europe. The post-modernists. The likes of Darida, of Gramsci, of Foucault, of the Frankfurt School, who have never given up their delusions of communism. Who convince the youth of the west that "Socialism has never been tried properly". And those of us who say "Oh, yes, it has, and it's failed everwhere", are simply discounted as old fogeys, as bigots.
