A Guest Post on Liberal Historians' Attitudes to Communism and Socialism

From my friend, Jack Seney, some trenchant observations on how communists and socialists are often 'given a pass' by 'liberal' historians.

For some reason, certain Communists and Socialists are given carte blanche by liberal historians as "good guys" who "weren't anything like" Stalin or the Chinese Communists who killed millions of people.

Josip Broz "Tito" of Yugoslavia was one who is praised by liberals as an "independent" communist who rejected the Soviet Union and "held his country together" as a "good man" who was "loved by his people."

My best friend is of Croatian ancestry and himself has long had an admitted "soft spot" for Tito which he is even willing to admit is not terribly rational, but it's there nonetheless. The fact that his parents found it necessary to emigrate from Yugoslavia to America and that he would have been born in Yugoslavia if Tito were so wonderful never seems to fully occur to him!

One might want to pray and ask St. Bishop Stepinac about Tito. A great Catholic leader who criticized the Croatian Nazi puppet state's treatment of minorities and then stood up to the Communists, Stepinac paid the price by spending nearly two decades in jail and under house arrest. Stepinac was endlessly persecuted by Tito for the "crime" of being a Catholic leader who would not bow to the Communist state.

Tito, a manipulator who knew that he needed the support of Catholics in the population beneath him, was not so stupid as to be TOO brutal with Stepinac, but made life oppressive for him anyway. Many others were not as "lucky" and were subjected to Titoist prisons and privations for the "crime" of not agreeing with him. Milovan Djilas for one later wrote extensively of his persecution under Tito for daring to question how the "great man" conducted his totalitarian regime. And Djilas was a committed fellow commie at the time, so imagine how Tito treated anyone who refused to espouse socialist babble. On top of everything else, Tito introduced legal abortion in Yugoslavia so that babies could be murdered with the support of the government, a mass evil shared by many countries including capitalist America.

Historically, Tito was a failure by any honest measure. No sooner had he died and state control been loosened than Yugoslavia began to implode and fight with itself and erupt into the bloody ethnic civil wars of the 1990s that assigned "Yugoslavia" to the garbage can of history.

Had Tito been a truly good leader the nationalist tensions could have been worked out throughout his long dictatorship. Instead they were just suppressed, and people went around mouthing communist baloney about "Yugoslav brotherhood" which came to an end the moment Tito croaked. So some like my friend still think they have a "warm place in their heart" for Tito's "Communism Lite." But I note that these same people have not had to live under it.