How can communism still be seen as cool?

It sent millions of people to their deaths, yet its young subscribers wear the ideology with pride

The cool crowd can’t contain their excitement. For a week now, chic radicals have been salivating over Ash Sarkar, a Corbynite blogger and lecturer, who came to public attention when she told Piers Morgan, “I’m literally a communist!”

How thrilling! How far removed from Marx’s theory of labour and the CPGB’s procedural motions! How unimaginably distant from grimy queues and gulags and torture chambers and the knock in the night.

Here was a young, attractive, eloquent, ethnic-minority, fashionconscious communist! Literally a communist! A fawning interview in Teen Vogue was followed by one of those video chats with the likeable but wrong-headed Owen Jones, in which he excitedly declared, “Communism is back, baby!”

Left-wing Twitterers for once stopped being grumpy and became ecstatic about how their new pin-up had “owned Piers Morgan”. The magazine Elle breathlessly declared Sarkar its hero of the day (“literally a communist and literally our hero!”).

T-shirts bearing Sarkar’s depressing words went on sale – an example, perhaps, of Lenin’s bon mot about capitalists selling the rope with which they would be hanged.

Sarkar’s achievement was not that she got the better of Piers Morgan. Plenty of people do that, because the presenter is setting out to make entertaining television rather than to deploy sound arguments. No, her achievement, in the eyes of her new admirers, is to have wiped away a century of abominations and made Marxism seem modish.

At this stage in the article, the columnist traditionally says, “Just imagine if she had declared that she was ‘literally a fascist’”. But you can’t imagine it, can you? Even the politicians who might plausibly be called heirs to the fascist tradition – Marine Le Pen, say, who was roughly as sassy, edgy and pretty as Sarkar when she started out – would never publicly accept such a label.

A curious double-standard applies whereby the most tenuous ideological link to fascism bars people from polite society, whereas those who were active communists during the Cold War are welcome as Labour MPs, European Commissioners and BBC presenters. Why don’t we treat the two ideologies alike? Both were lethal, though communism has the edge, having murdered 100 million people to the Nazis’ 17 million. Both were illiberal, elevating the state over the individual. Both were anti-democratic, believing that their goals were too important to entrust to public opinion. Both thought it worth cracking a few eggs to make an omelette – though, when we push our way through the heaps of broken egg-shells and broken bodies, we never actually find the omelette.

Above all, both categorised people collectively rather than individually. The Nazis used racial criteria, the Communists economic ones, but the essential wickedness of the two doctrines was the same. If you were in the “wrong” group, whether you were a gypsy or a businessman, you were doomed, regardless of your behaviour. Many European Jews fell into both camps, condemned by the Nazis for their heritage and by the Marxists for their enterprise.

Perhaps our asymmetric outrage is a historical anomaly; a consequence of the West’s accidental alliance with the Soviet Union after 1941. If so, it is based on a bizarre amnesia about the Second World War, which began when Hitler and Stalin joined forces. For fully a third of the conflict, the two dictators collaborated against what they called “capitalist Albion”. That the NaziSoviet Pact now seems so strange to us is a comment on how one-sidedly our generation judges the two movements.

The day after it was revealed, The Times remarked in an editorial that the only people who would be surprised were those who had refused to see the similarity of the two systems’ domestic authoritarianism and aggressive foreign policies. As Guy Crouchback, the disillusioned hero of Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy puts it, “The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms.”

No one, then or now, would argue that Hitler and Mussolini were aberrations, and that “real fascism” had never been tried. Yet many persist in imagining that there is some sort of Platonic Communism, unrelated to the actions of every self-described communist in history. The fact that Marxism always – always – ends in labour camps and firing squads is overlooked. So is the fact that every new manifestation – Russia, Yugoslavia, Cuba, etc – is initially hailed by Western Leftists before being denounced, when the collapse comes, as not having been real communism at all. We recognise that coercion is an intrinsic part of fascism. But we mulishly refuse to accept the same of communism. (Even Sarkar, who seems clever and amiable, defends the use of political violence.) We persist in believing, against all the evidence, that communists are in no way responsible for the real-world implementation of their doctrines; that it’s all somehow OK because they care about poor people and ethnic minorities and so on.

But where would you rather be poor – South Korea or North Korea? Where would you rather be black – Miami or Havana? Where, come to that, would you rather be agitating to overthrow the system, as Sarkar is – London or Laos? You might argue that Elle, Teen Vogue and the rest are guilty of nothing more than ignorance.

But such ignorance – such tasteless, wilful, self-righteous ignorance in the face of a century of atrocities – is a form of moral idiocy.

‘The fact that Marxism always – always – ends in labour camps and firing squads is overlooked’