Soviet Union Rewind: Why Are We Praising Communism Again? by Paul Kengor

COMMENTARY: In 2020, the United States, the longtime home of free markets, watches millions of its citizens embrace socialism and even communism, the scourge of the 20th century.

By Paul Kengor, National Catholic Register, 2/19/20

Paul Kengor is professor of political science at Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania. His books include A Pope and a President and The Divine Plan and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Communism.

Thirty years ago this month, something critical happened in Moscow signaling the end not only of the Cold War, but of the Soviet Union itself.

On Feb. 7, 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev succeeded in banishing the Communist Party’s guarantee as the USSR’s sole political party. He backed a proposal by free-market reformers to repudiate Article 6 of the Soviet Constitution, which had ensured the more-than-70-year communist stranglehold on power. The communist monopoly was officially ended.

This historic shift was greeted by a top-of-the-fold headline across The New York Times. I still remember where I was when I saw that headline. I was walking down Fifth Avenue of the Oakland section of Pittsburgh, en route to my job at Children’s Hospital and Presbyterian University Hospital, where I was a pre-med student working for the organ-transplant team. The headline hit me like a Soviet SS-20 missile and was a key factor redirecting my path ahead, eventually taking me toward a different field of study, one in which I would go on to spend the next three decades of my life explaining why the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics collapsed and, equally important, why no rational human being should ever choose the destructive road of communism and socialism. As evidence of the political system’s history of human-rights violations, conservative estimates of the death toll under communist/socialist regimes in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Cuba and elsewhere number in the tens of millions. ….

Read more here  https://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/soviet-union-rewind-why-are-we-praising-communism-again