The one hundred million victims of communism are proof enough that life in the people's republics, run by the Communist Party, was quite unsafe; especially if you did not know who belonged to the Party. Survival often depended on understanding the code, which classified the Party members into tomatoes, radishes and watermelons. Tomatoes, red inside and outside, were a danger, but known. Radishes, who were only red on outside were harmless. Watermelons, however, were deadly. These simple terms safely and precisely defined the Red Spectrum.
Membership in the Communist Party was not easy to come by and rarely covered more than three percent of adult population. It was a simple reason of economics; there were not enough goodies to spread around the ruling class. Nevertheless, considering that the communist states in Eastern Europe alone controlled about half a billion people, there were several ten-million former card-carrying die-hard communists around, longing for the good old days after the collapse of Berlin Wall.
Around 1990, communism disappeared almost overnight. But not the communists. They have disappeared into the Red Spectrum under such respectable names as Social Democrats, Liberal Democrats etc. Today, the Red Spectrum has become considerably wider and more confusing. We now have ex-communists, former communists, post-communists, re-founded communists, unreconstructed Leninists, Liberals, neo-Liberals, etc. Then there is also the Infra Red Spectrum, made of people who never experienced communism: Marxist professors permeating universities in the West, left leaning artists, Hollywood true-believers, and others.
Communism has been discredited on all fronts of value to humanity: ethics, ecology, technology, health, and standard of living. While communism failed, the communists succeeded. Why? Because, to be precise, the Reagan doctrine, to defeat the Evil Empire, succeeded; but Presidents Bush and Clinton, each moving further to the Left relaxed pressure to discredit the Evil Ideology - communism. Thus, while the disappearance of the Berlin Wall was followed by the disappearance of one communist government after another, the communists remained.
Very few Reds now want to be called communists. Partly due to the "kinder, gentler" left-leaning policy of the United States and several West European governments, communists are often still in power, albeit under a different name, such as in Serbia, Byelorussia, Slovenia, to say nothing about the in-your-face tyrannies such as Cuba and China. The result is less "kinder and gentler" world. In all cases, however, the rulers have retained the property they plundered as communists under the pretext of people's government. These are the repainted Reds which are now referred to in many new terms, often in such a way that we forget how dangerous they still are.
The indisputable fact is that communism has failed. Its balance sheet contains over one hundred million dead, more people than killed by any other regime in history. Communism polluted air, water and land, worse than the rest of the World combined. Communism contributed just about nil to civilization.
The bottom line is that the former communists who are responsible for this debacle now own all the important property, worth several trillion dollars, stolen under the communist flag. The score is clear: communists won. In the Old World Order, just like in fairy tales, the Evil eventually was punished and the Good prevailed. Now, we have a New World Order and a new ending. Neither Attila the Hun, nor Hitler can match the communists' results. For neither the Huns of the Middle ages nor the Huns of the Third Reich were able to "keep the goodies for themselves". Most did not even stay alive.
Not so with the communists. Using the Marxist revolutions in Russia, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Slovenia, Croatia, Yugoslavia, Albania, Bulgaria, China, Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, etc., communists accomplished the biggest theft and armed robbery in history.
Not only did the civilized world allow the Red Spectrum to keep the goodies; Harvard professor Jeffrey Sachs actually advised them to keep the stolen goods. If American professors say so, what else could the Reds do but to repaint themselves and become the respectable Rich on the Riviera, Manhattan and other high rent places. Now they want to live among us, buy our best products with stolen money, breathe our cleanest air and drink our purest water.
Disrespect for the property rights is about to become the New World Order and the model likely to be followed by the future "mother of all monsters". Whether it is one's only pair of shoes or the fleet of Rolls Royces, the fear of losing property makes most humans submissible to tyranny. The endorsement of this blatant property grab, now coming from the very same civilized world that defeated the Evil Empire at enormous cost of life and wealth, simply validates that property rights are no longer important.
Here goes the cornerstone of our civilization.