I enjoyed this article. It was a clear-sighted review of what sounds like a clear-sighted history of Communism.

I think many people in the West were attracted to the idea of communism because it was not capitalism. The inequities and raw consumerism of Western capitalism repelled some people and they saw in communism another, less avaricious way of living.

It also meant, of course, they turned a blind eye to communism's failures, and it wasn't until the fall of the Berlin Wall that Communism as an ideology became almost universally discredited.

and the extreme left and right attract the same types: people who think they know the best way for others to live and are not reluctant to take whatever steps are necessary to see that they do! That's why religious right-wingers are the closest thing in this country to Soviet communists (a point that was slyly suggested in the 1962 film "The Manchurian Candidate"): they have a complete plan for your earthly existence whether you want it or not. Capitalism is a product of the Enlightenment. Marx gets a bad rap in this area because he is not an architect of twentieth-century authoritarian states but an analyst of nineteenth-century political economy and its recurrent crises: he actually has plenty of praise for capitalism especially regarding its contribution to destroying feudalism and harnessing human ingenuity. His major work is titled "Capital" not "Capitalismus" and a more accurate translation might be "The Bosses" or even "The Power Elite" (but that title's already taken). Bad people can hijack a good concept!

Just as a clarification. Hitler considered the US especially America's segregation policy and internment of Native Americans as models for Nazis Germany. It's not that the US modeled itself after Nazis Germany, but the reverse. Remember Hearst was poisoning the minds of people long before Goebbels.

is the belief that one day Americans will get what they deserve for their evil actions. Look at the history of Native Americans. As Americans claimed more and more of their lands, the fear of "Indian attack" and repressive response increased. The extreme measures against slaves in the antebellum South was purely driven by fear of slave revolt. The unparalleled violence against unions, anarchists and communism was again due to the full conscious knowledge of the exploitation of workers. America's fear of the other is really a fear of someone stronger holding the US accountable for their actions. Today America's conscious knowledge that we exploited the Middle East for oil and our mindless support of Israel has manifested itself in the fear of "Arab" Terrorism.

An excellent point. Consider also the overwhelming (and fateful) role that Henry Ford played in the ideological climate of post-WWI Europe. Ford was the very symbol of success, the Bill Gates of his time. He was also a rabid anti-Semite, and Hitler read his "International Jew" in prison. Ford is the only American he praises in his subsequent "Mein Kampf." Hitler kept a portrait of Ford on his office wall in Munich and Goering later awarded the American capitalist and visionary, whose factories contributed so greatly to the German war effort, the coveted Grand Cross of the German Eagle. Moreover, the top-down structure of the classic American corporation served as the model for the Nazis' autocratic "Führer principle." Recall too that "Fordism" was the model against which Stalin would measure the success of Soviet Communism.

Today, of course, Ford's once-celebrated Model T embodies nostalgia for a simpler age and Ford's rigid mass production ideology has long since given way to more flexible and imaginative systems. This makes it hard for us to remember a time when Ford appeared to have a patent on the future. No wonder that the Hitlers and Stalins wanted in on the action.

FTFY.

The American right didn't rail against just Communism, it was always Godless Communism. So no matter what accomplishments that there might be, such as Sputnik, they could always be discounted because it was the work of atheists. Even if the Russians of the 60's and 70's were better off than all those people living in South America, the Right just knew that those Russians lives had to be empty because of a lack of a religious dimension to their existence. At least the SA peasants living under harsh dictatorships had the comfort of believing that they would go to heaven.

Communism as a method of social organization can be very sucessful as 1500 years of life in monastaries has shown. It doesn't work very well when applied to large communities. Or when there is no overarching principle beyond self interest as shown by the failure of all those hippie commununes of the 60's.

Henry Ford believed in paying his workers a livable wage. He believed in paying his workers enough to afford the products that they were producing.

Henry Ford was against the idea of GMAC - he believed that people should be able to pay for their cars in cash, and used "lay-a-way" as a way to finance people. Henry Ford believed that purchasing a car by going into debt was bad for the purchaser, and bad for the nation.

Henry Ford sounds pretty anti-Semitic to me.

For the anti-Semites of Stalinist Russia, research the origins of the NKVD. Research the massacre of the Romanovs.

Putin is public enemy number one in many circles because he has exiled and jailed the Russian-Jewish mafia who dismantled and looted the entire Soviet state after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Where do you think all those rich Israeli and London Russian socialites came from? Where do you think they got their money?

If you've done so, I'd be interested in hearing your findings.

That's why Marx thought it was an unlikely candidate for enlightened social reorganization and probably why it replaced one form of enslavement with another. Marx always thought only the adavanced capitalist societies had the self-knowledge and will to move beyond various forms of human exploitation and servitude and let the state "wither away".

For Brown, a Communist system had three pairs of identifying characteristics, all of which have their origins in Lenin's ideology and philosophy. In the political realm, a monopoly of power was held by one party, with most of the power concentrated at the top, and that party operated through the process Lenin called "democratic centralism."

Communism in practice died by 1921, although that gets lost in the rhetorical attacks of the West on the regime. The Bolsheviks were threatened by small c communism, rightly saw it as a threat to their power, and they killed it, created a formal Communism in the form of Marxist-Leninism, aka, Bolshevism. From that point, communism died in Russia -- communism is dead, long live Communism. The anarchist revolutionaries saw that and spoke out against it, but they were among the first victims of the Soviet regime.

The three core pillars Brown cites reveal just how off the mark Communism was from actual communism (or, the ultimate goal, the classless, stateless society of anarchism).

I sometimes think of parallels in our own country's past, with the clash between the Federalists and Anti-Federalists, and how the Founding Fathers particularly chose to avoid true federalism and democracy in favor of state centralism and centralized power -- the Constitution served admirably to create a strong central state, softened a bit by the Bill of Rights (no doubt the Anti-Federalists' greatest contribution to our country's history).

But we see a situation where a false-communist Communist regime butted heads against a false-democratic West (formally democratic, sure, but with hallmarks of a wealthy political elite running the show, and the majority of citizens reduced to a spectator role).

The constant, East or West, is centered on Brown's pillars -- centralized power in the hands of an elite few who get to make the decisions, with the majority finding a lack of representation at the top -- a situation far from communism and democracy, both.