I was recently reading Matthew Modine’s “Full Metal Jacket Diary“, and came across this quote:
I’m so happy that Cari and I have been invited to travel here [East Berlin] and have the opportunity to meet communist soldiers. Except for the uniforms and the language, they are just like the soldiers in my family.
We share cigarettes and the soldiers give us pins from their uniforms. Interesting, communists seem to have the same desires as we do. To live peacefully and provide for our families. Duh.
Growing up in Utah, I’d been taught that the Russians were horrible monsters, “Better dead than Red.” “The evil empire.” All propaganda …
This strikes me as wrong-headed in two important respects.
Evil
First of all, the Eastern Bloc governments really were nasty pieces of work, and it is historically false to deny this. (To get a quick idea of life in East Germany, you might try watching the movie “The Lives of Others“. “Fiction!” you might declare. Okay; try listening to the commentary track.) The Soviets really did kill millions of their own. While generic “communists” living in these states might not have wanted this, the actual “communists” running their governments did it, and soldiers just like the ones Modine found so chummy made it all happen.
Desire
The most careless line in Modine’s quote is that “[C]ommunists seem to have the same desires as we do. To live peacefully and provide for our families.” This simply isn’t true for non-communists, and I think I can explain why.
There’s a saying to the effect that, in an organization, “you can have power over others, or freedom from others, but not both”. This is the essential conflict between the worldviews of the communist left and the right. The leftist is prepared to accept the meddling of the state in his own life, so long as he is allowed to meddle in his neighbor’s life, while the right-libertarian will accept that he must allow his neighbor to do as he wishes, so long as he is left in peace. These two worldviews aren’t remotely compatible, and when those of one mind seek to impose their preferred type of government on those of another, there will inevitably be trouble. To lose sight of this in a fit of “we’re-all-the-same-ism” is to miss something very important indeed.
