I’ve been reading some books filled with accounts of the Vietnam War from the North Vietnamese/Vietcong perspective, and a very common theme is that the revolution was “betrayed”. Somehow the revolution for which they gave so much wound up in the hands of incompetent bureaucrats. Somehow the People were forgotten.
Ignoring the obvious naivete which this betrays, one can with justice understand some people who follow the Communist way as motivated by what they view as sincere motives. These people exist. Yet, the fact is that such people are tools, pawns, nothing more, and their responsibility is to realize this.
Communism is a system which concentrates power in the hands of an elite. This is purportedly to keep power out of the hands of “Capitalists”, but the reality–to offer one very real example–is that Party members don’t have to pay membership dues at exclusive golf resorts in Vietnam. They get preferred seating in restaurants. They can and do demand kick-backs to authorize legitimate business activity, and work out all sorts of sweetheart deals for themselves and their friends and family.
It amounts, quite literally, to putting the Mafia in charge of the government, and expecting something good to happen.
To be clear, the system is one in which the people at the top are those who have proven the most adept at political in-fighting, which is to say those who are the most aggressive, amoral, skilled in deception, and opportunistic.
If you combine these facts–rule by the few, and a system which selects through the law of the jungle who these people will be–no positive outcome is POSSIBLE. Ho Chi Minh had hundreds of opponents executed outright. He had hundreds more jailed and exiled. So have all the eventual Communist dictators.
One will from time to time see primitive Christianity offered as a type of Communism. This argument is not wrong: but look who their leader was.
Socialism is possible. Communism is possible. But only for a fundamentally moral people who CHOOSE to live that way. And nobody flying the Communist banner in public or deep in the depths of their souls wants the average person they want to rule to have ANY choice in the matter.