32% of young Americans hold a positive view of Karl Marx (perhaps because less than a fifth are aware of the number who died under the ideology he gave to the world)
(perhaps because less than a fifth are aware of the number who died under the ideology he gave to the world)
by Amanda Whiting and Tim Montgomerie, Unherd:
Over the last fortnight UnHerd has ran a series of features on ‘communism’s forgotten victims’: why is the West’s collective memory so short when it comes to the horrors perpetrated by Mao, Pol Pot, and Stalin? How has it happened that the swastika is rightly anathema to the modern world, but the hammer-and-sickle is the stuff of Vetements catwalks?
It would be a wild stretch to say we were the first to wonder this aloud. Our deep dive into the fascist implementation of liberal ideologies is indebted to the organisations around the world who take this question as their animating purpose.
One of them is the Washington-based Victims of Communism, founded more than twenty years ago.
Last month it published the results of a second annual survey it has conducted with YouGov on attitudes of US citizens to communism and socialism. You can see the full results for yourself here. VoC seem more interested in definitions of capitalism vs socialism vs communism than we are. From the perspective of UnHerd’s project, the poll most usefully underlined our concern that knowledge of communism’s crimes is being lost with time, as the generations that lived under communism and through the Cold War age and pass away…
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