Who aided and abetted the Holodomor? Mao’s murder by indifference of 50-60 million Chinese? Who actively worked to make it possible for the Khmer Rouge to murder a third of Cambodia?
Some of these people–certainly their intellectual heirs–are still alive. Noam Chomsky is still alive. Bill Ayers is still alive.
No one anywhere in my family tree ever lived in the South during the time of slavery. Like most whites in this country, it only takes a couple generations to get back to Europe. And not only am I OBVIOUSLY not guilty of crimes committed by other people, but they appall me too.
In contrast, the crimes of the Communists do not appall their fellow travelers in the least. What is worse: 1) asking, say, 10 million blacks to live in slavery, and killing several thousand of them to keep them under control, while restricting their rights to vote, to own guns, to intact families, and to work of their own; or 2) doing the same for a billion people, and murdering millions of them to keep them under control, while restricting their rights to vote, to own guns, to have intact families, and to choose their own work?
Is a Laogai really that different from a plantation which cannot even offer the justification of being run for profit (although of course in China they likely do profit financially from the labor of their political prisoners)? On plantations, men were whipped for insubordination. In a Laogai, they are whipped because somebody felt like. They are already all criminals, or they would not be there. There are levels of conscious and systematic denigration and dehumanization in “Reeducation Camps” never dreamed of by white slave-owners. A slave owner might take your name and your wife. A Chinese commisar wants those, too, but he also wants your capacity for rational thought, your sense of self, every shred of your dignity, and every last shred of misery he can extract from you. Only when you are a wreck and a shell MIGHT you be sent out to be a wreck and a shell somewhere else.
Personally, if I had to choose between slave labor in the Antebellum South, and slave labor in modern China under Dictator Xi, I would choose the former.
But, to my point, Leftists are utterly incapable of this rudimentary perceptual process and the logic accompanying it. It truly is a Personality Disorder.
Perhaps it should be added to the next DSM: Political authoritarian Personality Disorder.