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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (40634)	8/28/2002 7:31:53 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Thus, Amis notes that at a 1999 public event in London, Hitchens's joking remark about his Communist past was received with affectionate laughter; a similar casual reference to one's past as a Nazi sympathizer would be unthinkable. The way the sentence is structured, what Amis is saying is that it would have been unthinkable for Hitchens to have made a joking remark about his Nazi past, if he had had one, but it was OK to have had a Communist past.

To: Ilaine who wrote (40634)	8/28/2002 8:04:12 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Sorry Cobalt, I misread your post. Let me try again. Hitchens, a Brit, has no complicity in Stalin's monstrosities, despite the fact that he was a Communist. However, a Brit, who has no complicity in Hitler's monstrosities, who says he was a Nazi in his youth, would not be greeted with laughter. The communist ideology isn't what killed people. The Communist ideology, used as the basis for a state, has always ended up being run by thugs who killed people. Lots of perfectly nice, even good, people believed in communism. Lots of perfectly nice, even good, people believed in Fascism in the '30s here in this country. They keep very quiet about it now. The people in this country who believed in Communism, joined the Communist party, and defended or tolerated the Communists in Russia are producing plays and Movies about how persecuted they were, and how wonderful their "struggle" was. (The "Blacklist," for instance.) As the article says, >>>"Why the double standard? Unlike Nazism, Communism claimed to champion the noble ideals of equality, fairness, and brotherhood. To many well-meaning liberals and progressives, it was an expression of the enduring human hope for a good and just society; a nostalgic fondness for that hope, Amis argues, endures to this day.....