This is embarrassing. I'm going through old letters and diaries, and I came across this entry, written the day after Romanian president Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife were overthrown and executed. The details of the brutality of that regime shocked the world – from the thuggish secret police who spied on the entire population, assassination and medical assault on dissenters, and the banning of contraception and close monitoring of women of child-bearing age in order to boost the sagging population (pro tip: maybe cut down on the political assassinations), to the horrifying treatment of orphaned children, the infamous infection of hundreds of babies with AIDS, and the economic deprivation that characterises all communist regimes.
Given all of the misery and downright sadistic cruelty that had been exposed, the naive 1989 me thought this had to be the final blow for communism. It simply went without saying (to naive 1989 me) that university professors and other intellectuals would no longer be able to present communist ideology as something warm and cuddly that didn't necessarily require brutal authoritarianism.
Here's what I wrote:
"There's nothing to say!! Finally! There's just nothing left to say. Except that maybe now you'll be able to go to university in America and not just learn how to make elaborate excuses for totalitarian oppression."
I know. I'm laughing at naive 1989 me too. Or maybe crying. I'm not sure. All I know is that, nearly thirty years ago, as the Soviet Union was crumbling, and as people in China and Hong Kong were still reeling from the violent crackdown on dissent that summer (29 years ago yesterday), the nature of communism should have been as clear as daylight to everyone. Honestly, it should have been clear as daylight much, much, earlier, when Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek laid out in painstaking detail the reasons why central planning could only lead to economic disaster.
Of course, it was as clear as daylight then, just as it is as clear as daylight today, for anyone who is paying attention. Which I guess is why university professors have to sell their tired and morally bankrupt ideas to those who weren't paying attention 30 years ago.
Naive 1989 me should have known better.
