Much is being made of the term “Communism” these days. I am old enough to have lived through the
so called “Red Scare” in the 50s and 60s. In fact the reason my father moved us to Wisconsin was to
get away from its nonsense in Illinois. As an immigrant with a foreign accent he was frequently
targeted as some kind of threat. A concentration camp survivor, he worked hard to earn entry into this
country because he saw what it did to rebuild Europe after the war. He saw the United States as a
moral pillar of good and wanted to be part of it. What I learned from all that was that terms like
Communism and Fascism are tossed around much too easily without really understanding what they
meant.
Having lived in what was then Poland and now western Ukraine he lived for a time under both Hitler
and Stalin who, if we are to believe the rhetoric, are allegedly the polar opposites of each other. Not
hardly. Both sought only power and control and used lies and cruelty to achieve it. So much so that
author George Orwell noticed this and coined the term “Nationalism” and used it as a wide net to
describe a pattern of behavior of all manner of political and religious groups that use the same methods
to control their members saying that the syndrome went beyond geographical nations.
He said “ Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self deception. Every nationalist is capable of the
flagrant dishonesty…” No matter the movement the symptoms are always the same. “Obsession,
Instability and Indifference to Reality […] tormented by innumerable delusions and hatreds”.
If any of this sounds familiar it should. Tossing around labels of century old notions no longer serves
any purpose. Orwell struggled to give it a name. In the end it isn’t the name, its about the methods.
My father understood this. So should we all.