When Communism Fails

Well, that would be every time:

Communism is a dangerous thing for anyone who is willing to justify means with ends. It is difficult to conceive of what might count as a cost too high for a person dedicated to an ideology that promises to eradicate injustice. A terrible thing about Communism is the way in which all other realities, even human beings themselves, are subordinated to its ends. And a terrible thing about Communists is the absoluteness of their faith in Communism’s ends — a faith that leads them to sanction all sorts of atrocities.

A lesson to be learned from Communism, apart from what is wrong with the ideology itself, concerns the more general danger of placing one’s faith so absolutely in a political system’s ability to solve the problems of human existence. If a study of disillusioned Communists is interesting, it is because of the insights it offers into what moves a human being to commit himself to a political ideology in such a way. It is the disillusioned who reflect on why they allowed themselves to fall prey to illusions in the first place, and why they resisted disillusionment; so a study of the disillusioned is helpful in understanding the remarkable ability of Communist believers not to accept that their idealism has been sorely misplaced.

There's a lesson here for statist liberals, too.