I’ve seen several political attack ads this year in which the Republican candidate tries to paint their Democratic opponent as a “communist.”
That’s a word that carried a lot of weight sixty or seventy years ago. It supposedly meant you sided with the Soviet Union during the Cold War and wanted the USA to follow its lead. Sadly, a lot of good people lost their jobs and careers when idiots like Joseph McCarthy in the Senate and equally small-minded conservatives on the House Un-American Activities Committee charged US citizens with preferring communism over capitalism. People were made to name acquaintances they’d met at a party or worked with, and even the claim of a fringe association was enough to drive too many Americans to suicide.
Fortunately, such hate-filled (and often anti-Semitic) claims faded away in the 1960s and then virtually disappeared by 1989, before the Iron Curtain fell. That year, six months before the Berlin Wall came down, I was fortunate to do my morning radio show live via satellite to listeners in Washington, DC from a studio in the heart of Moscow (I wrote about the experience here). No one then or since accused me of being a communist sympathizer.
Ironically, today’s Republican Party is led by a maniac who is a fan of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The latter seems to be channelling Stalin more than Lenin by invading Ukraine and using hacking and other technical methods to interfere in free elections in the US (and probably elsewhere).
But even Russia isn’t classified a communist nation any longer. According to Brittanica:
At one time about one-third of the world’s population lived under communist governments, most notably in the republics of the Soviet Union. Today communism is the official form of government in only five countries: China, North Korea, Laos, Cuba, and Vietnam. However, none of these meet the true definition of communism. Instead, they can be said to be in a transitional stage between the end of capitalism and the establishment of communism. Such a phase was outlined by Karl Marx, and it came to include the creation of a dictatorship of the proletariat. While all five countries have authoritarian governments, their commitment to abolishing capitalism is debatable.
Take a look at the first and last countries on that list of five — China and Vietnam. That’s where a lot of your clothing, kids’ toys, and MAGA hats are made. It’s where your smartphone was assembled. It’s where American corporations export (and import) an enormous amount of stuff.
You can also travel to both of them (and Laos) very easily. It’s a bit more of a hassle to vacation in Cuba because of the ex-pats in south Florida who still roil with hatred for all things Castro and control a lot of votes in that state.
As for North Korea, you don’t want to go there anyway (to understand why, listen to my 2016 interview with Wendy Simmons, author of “My Holiday In North Korea: The Funniest/Worst Place On Earth”). However, if you insist on going, remember that Trump is also a fan of dictator Kim Jong-Un.
And yet, MAGA Morons keep using “communist” like an epithet. The only demographic of voters I can imagine would care must be residents of The Villages. For everyone else, it’s as irrelevant as saying “The other guy won’t even let you put leaded gasoline in your Corvair!”