The Times is celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution with a series of op-eds under the rubric "Red Century." It's hard to articulate precisely how tone-deaf this is; imagine marking the 100th anniversary of Hitler's rise with a series of elegiac articles headlined "Brown Century." For a flavor, check out this piece headlined "The Unexpected Afterlife of American Communism":
The party inspired loyalty for reasons beyond simply an affinity for Marxist ideas. It was the campaigns Communists ran against police brutality, the practice of lynching and the Jim Crow laws that made their politics relevant to the lives of ordinary people. In the North as well as the South, on soapboxes on the streets of Harlem as well as on plots of sharecropped land in Alabama, Communist organizing addressed the bread-and-butter concerns of black people....She was one of many victims of the Red Scare that crushed American Communism and spurred purges, blacklists, deportations and a few high-profile executions.
Whipped-up fear of foreign terror around outsider Communists like Ms. Jones finds an echo today in the rhetoric of criminal immigrants and the scaremongering about "radical Islamic terror." The techniques of McCarthyism have resurfaced, this time to evoke the threat of terrorism rather than Communism...What American Communists, at their best, pioneered was to show how effectively grass-roots movements can challenge the racism, state violence and economic exploitation that people face in their daily lives, and connect those fights to a broader vision of a just world.
This is just so much nonsense. It wasn't the "Red Scare" that crushed American Communism. It was the fact that communism doesn't work and was disclosed to be, in the Soviet Union, a system for brutally oppressing and murdering tens of millions of people. Concern about "radical Islamic terror" isn't "whipped up fear" or "scaremongering" but genuine, as anyone who had friends or relatives killed or injured on September 11, 2001, on Pan Am Flight 103, in the bombings of Israeli buses and cafes, or at the Boston Marathon could tell you.The American Civil Rights movement wasn't led by Communists. Rather, the Communists were trying to infiltrate, exploit, and glom on to it for their own nefarious purposes. The past century wasn't a "Red Century" but an American century in which the achievements of freedom, democracy, and capitalism decisively defeated Communism everywhere except in the imagination of the editors of the New York Times op-ed page. The whole article — the whole Times series — is a misguided exercise in pro-Communist nostalgia, retrospectively and reprehensibly airbrushing a murderous ideology.