The Better Bad Guys

The American author Thomas Wolfe coined the phrase "radical chic". There are many examples of this tendency to commodify (or make chic) images and ideas that reject the very premise of commodification (because they are too radical).

The best example of radical chic is the cottage capitalist industry of selling commodifications of the image of Che Guevara. One wonders what Guevara might have thought of the specter of American college students wearing his face as a consumer product totally divorced from the man's actual ideas.

The t-shirt shown above is another example of this trend. But there's something deeper and more insidious about the hammer-and-sickle t-shirt. Ask yourself this: what would your reaction be if the t-shirt above showed the swastika? The shirt would transform from a piece of kitsch to a symbol of hatred.

But why should this be? The idea represented on the t-shirt shown above led by any measure to far more death and deprivation than the Nazis caused, yet it is not considered scandalous or even distasteful to wear this symbol.

The two most prodigious destroyers of human beings in history were both communists. Stalin and Mao. They accounted for far more death than Hitler, yet they and their ideas are not the intellectual and moral outcasts that the Nazis are.

How can we account for this? How is it that these bad guys (the Communists) are better than the ultimate bad guys (the Nazis) to the point where it is fashionable to literally wear their symbol on one's sleeve?

One direct answer would be that the Communist Soviet Union destroyed the Nazis. While they were helped in this task by capitalist countries, the USSR paid the huge majority of the blood debt to history in the crushing of Naziism.

And, since history is written by the victors, the Communists clearly benefit from this service to mankind. The Soviets' crushing of the Nazis has obscured two facts. First, that the Communists were quantitatively far more murderous than even that Nazis. Second, that the Nazis were only able to conquer so much of Europe because of their alliance with the Communists in the early years of the war.

But there is more than just that. The other reason that Communism is seen with less contempt than Naziism is that, for all its crimes, its ideology was still morally superior to that of the Nazis. Communism was at least rhetorically based on a more inclusive and constructive worldview than Naziism.

Nazi ideology was dominated by what it was against; it was primarily destructive. Communist ideology was dominated by Utopian images of progress and inclusion. Naziism explicitly could not be relevant to the huge majority of the world's people, while Communism implicitly claimed to be all inclusive.

Naziism was entirely based on racism; Communism could only work if racism were utterly rejected. Naziism rejected the premise that there was any such thing as equality, whereas Communism was based on the premise that the equality of all people was obvious.

This difference, as important as it is, still does not complete the explanation of the dynamic. What is needed to complete the picture is people. We know now that Communism failed to fulfill its promises, but this is obviously a hindsight that the people of the time did not have.

Therefore, we must ask ourselves this: what kind of person would be attracted to each ideology in, say, the 1930's, before they knew how each ideology would actually be manifested?

It strikes me that any person who ever became a Nazi must have, by definition, been a racist. People that became Communist, however, could have been guided by the better angels of our nature, even if we cast them as naive in retrospect.

Put simply, there could never have been any "good" Nazis, while there could have been literally millions of "good" communists, people who were motivated by love rather than hate. Nazism was an evil ideology which did evil; Communism was a good ideology that did evil.

Put another way, Naziism was evil because it succeeded in being exactly what it claimed to be. Communism, in contrast, was evil because it failed to be what it claimed. And perhaps being changed into a consumer commodity is the best evidence of all of Communism's failure.

We are left to wonder, then, how much better the world would be if the tables were turned. What if Communism had been true to its word and Naziism had not been? The world would be a much better place.

Communism failed because people failed to implement such an ambitious agenda without crushing all dissent. Naziism succeeded because, evidently and unfortunately, it spoke more directly to what people are, rather than to what they wish they could be.