Far-left political influencer Hasan Piker was recently grilled on a satirical internet show—and the clips it generated were gold.
“Now, Karl Marx said, ‘to each according to his needs.’ You live in a $2.7 million house,” the host said. “Why are your needs more important than 90% of other Californians?”
Piker appeared uncomfortable as he answered–and it wasn’t because he was fully decked out in a Mao suit.
To put it simply, proudly sporting the uniform of a regime that took the lives of an estimated 80 million people, all while enjoying the prosperity of a $2.7 million house and invitations to Oscar parties isn’t a good look.
But of the socialist states Piker views favorably, former Yugoslavia arguably ranks among the highest. He once published a video titled “Yugoslavia Was Awesome!” in which he praised aspects of the former socialist country, including its living standards.
That idea might seem laughable to survivors like Slavenka Drakulic—literally.
In 1992, she published her book, “How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed,” which recounts the stories of daily life under communism in Eastern Europe. While Piker may shrug off the textbook figures on communism’s death tolls, he may be less familiar with one of its nearly invisible effects: the subtle erosion of human dignity, hope, and personal responsibility.
Drakulic’s book brings a magnifying glass to these stories, starting with an account of the life of her friend Tanja. After the death of her lover and the destruction of her journalistic reputation for mildly criticizing nationalization, Tanja committed suicide.
For those under socialist rule, a lack of faith in the future was a characteristic feature of life. Everyone around Drakulic seemed to assume the permanence of the communist state.
“What communism instilled in us was precisely this immobility,” she wrote. “The absence of a future, the absence of a dream, of the possibility of imagining our lives differently.”
For Tanja, that loss of hope proved fatal.
Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl wrote about a similar effect in his well-known book, “Man’s Search for Meaning.”
Drawing from his experience in a concentration camp, Frankl concluded that the individuals who were able to persevere held on to a crucial ingredient for life: hope. Even in barbaric conditions, hope allowed prisoners to maintain their dignity and will to live.
Ordinary lives—not just political dissidents—were crushed under the weight of socialist regimes.
“Not big heroes, political prisoners, or dissidents,” Drakulic wrote, “but people who just could not stand it anymore.”
In a society with concentrated state power, citizens increasingly lose the sense that they have a stake in molding the future–and that has a devastating effect not only on hope, but individual responsibility.
Litter was therefore pervasive. Drakulic wrote that citizens, having lost a sense of their agency, behaved as if “the public belonged to nobody.”
She continued, “if you can’t destroy the system, you can certainly destroy a telephone booth, ticket machine, or flowers in a park. In this silent war, the losers are our cities.”
Frustration with the system found expression in small acts of neglect. The physical decay of the urban landscape is a mirror image of a population hollowed out from within.
Communism is economically unsustainable–that much is gleaned by the failure of the USSR and its satellite states. But even deeper is its spiritual cost. Forcing humans to live in impoverished conditions, fearful of the all-seeing eye of the state, degrades trust, freedom, and creativity; it degrades the human soul. We must heed Drakulic’s warning of the spiritual rather than merely economic, cost of collectivism.
As she stated in the 1990s, “We may have survived communism, but we have not outlived it.” That is because communism is so much more than an economic ideology—it seeps into the very mind and soul of individuals forced to live under its reign.
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[ H/T The Daily Signal ]
