In democratizing countries emerging from tyranny, where tremendous injustice has occurred, there is usually some effort to call the past into account. South Africa is a good example, where truth commissions have forged national reconciliation, and Germany after World War II is another, where Naziism was totally repudiated and renounced, and large compensation payments were made to Israel in its infancy. Chile and Argentina since their Dirty Wars, making efforts to restitute victims, return orphans, and jail oppressors is of the same piece. Even the U.S., with its efforts to compensate Japanese victims of internment camps in the U.S. is in this category.

In countries where less of that went on, like Japan since World War II, or today’s China, which is trying to tiptoe around the legacy of Mao Tse Tung, there are more faultlines due to the existing injustice.

But nowhere is the need to correct and atone more absent than with the crimes of communism. The mighty Berlin Wall went down and there was no move to confront the monstrous legacy of this evil ideology and all its boneyards full of millions of dead. None.

The crimes of communism exceed any anywhere in the world, and there were never any good communisms. All brought economic ruin, soul-corroding corruption, a tremendous loss of human capital, monstrous economic underdevelopment, spiritual starvation, desolate ethics, tyranny, and evil.

Which is why so many fled or lost their lives trying to – from the boat people of Vietnam to the balseros of the shark-infested Florida strait, to those who tried to scale the Berlin Wall.

In part, this inevitable effect of communism was because human beings were purely soulless matter in the atheistic philosophy of communism and its master; it is the first tenet of Lenin. (This is not a criticism of atheists who are a diverse group – Ayn Rand was one too, and did a lot of damage to communism.) When human beings are looked on as commodities, there is no such thing as potential, no such thing as wealth creation, no such thing as creativity, only static numbers. Hence, to give to one is to take from another. There is no expanding pie, only redistribution. Which means no private property can exist.

The result was the immorality and inhumanity of communism. Communism was never even good as an idealism, because it’s so bitterly opposed to human nature. Anyone who permits it will next meet a tyrant, a monstrous tyrant if he lives. As William Buckley once said: Communism is the worst curse ever to ever befall mankind.

He is right.

Today the Council of Europe passed its first resolution, 15 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, to condemn the crimes of communism. Via Lucianne, the item is here. It was a watered down resolution due to the lingering romanticism of the leftist parties who continue to refuse to see.