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Yes, another top level comment about The Origins of Woke from me, in the same thread on the same week. But this is about something else. I had an epiphany while reading the book.
I've wondered for many years why Marxism is more socially acceptable than racism when it's responsible for even more deaths than the Holocaust. It's because companies are (de facto) legally required to fire racists, but they're not required to fire Marxists. In fact, firing a Marxist for merely being Marxist would be illegal in California.
California has a state law against firing people for their political beliefs, but it didn't protect James Damore, who was fired in compliance with the law against creating a hostile work environment for protected groups.
It all adds up.
I think part of it was the success of Communism for a time. They had Eastern Europe and China and Vietnam and so on. These weren’t great places to live, but they were more or less functioning, modern societies with electricity and running water and trains.
By contrast, the only nation that could be argued to be a specifically racist state (fascist Germany) collapsed completely in less than ten years. The entire country was reduced to rubble, the people occupied by two competing empires (USA/USSR) to the point that a giant wall was built through the country.
What strikes me is two things.
First, since communism, whether betrayed or not, didn’t collapse immediately it has an apology built in. The collapse might be mismanagement, or betrayal, or external meddling, or space aliens or whatever, but you can point to initial success as proof of concept. By contrast, the fascist states collapsed pretty quickly so there’s less of a veneer of respectability or plausibility to that social structure. There’s no single thing that a person can point to and say “see, if only this hadn’t gone wrong, the Nazis would have won and fascism would have worked.” So there’s no built in apology for fascism as there is for communism.
Second, because there was a viable set of states, the rest of the world had to be diplomatic around them. We had to have state visits with various heads of communist states, we had to seat Russia on the security council, we had to deal with them as peers. And because there were legitimate communist states with their own diplomatic interests in promoting and protecting communist movements in the West much as we’d promote and protect democratic and capitalist movements in the East. This makes overt moves a bit more difficult. A successful purge of Hollywood and academia would have obviously been opposed by the eastern bloc. They’d have propaganda showing up as hypocritical, they’d complain to the UN, they’d offer asylum to affected artists and academics. This makes it much more difficult to purge the heresy and make public expressions of that heresy anathema.
Nazi Germany was not the only “specifically racist state.” At minimum, you need to add Rhodesia and South Africa, which both had successful white minority rule until international pressure forced them to change.
Rhodesia didn't have any racial requirements for the franchise, and didn't create special elected representative slots for blacks until the British demanded it as part of the path to independence (or at least so Ian Smith said in his memoirs, the British were very careful to not make any of their promises of independence and any attendant requirements public).
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