Because they never learned

I had a very interesting conversation with a young gentleman in the meat section of the grocery store last night; he made a wisecrack about "Soviet era" technology (old meat scales) being used there.  OK, it was nowhere near 1980s era technology--no red LEDs, etc..--but it was a fun opportunity to tell him what real Soviet era technology looked like.  I mentioned the Trabant (1955 Fiat with two cycle engine, body made of used clothes), East German chocolate, and the like--and he was shocked.

And as I watched him, I realized why the younger generation is willing to vote for "Democratic Socialists".  They simply have never learned about Communism.  They don't know about waiting a decade or more for a car or TV set, about long lines for bread, meat, and clothes, and they especially don't know about the gulags.

Now part of this is that, in the public schools, you never get to the end of the history book.  My senior level history class in 1986-7 hardly touched the Vietnam War, which ended of course (for us) in 1973.  But that said, that's only 14 years--and the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.   Shouldn't history teachers be covering things 37 years back?

And perhaps they are, but I think the reality is that since teachers are by and large paid by the state, and thus they have little incentive to share what happens when the state oversteps its bounds.  In my high school experience, for example, our teachers (in a very conservative town no less) really didn't admit that economic "panics" tended to last only 1-2 years until Hoover and FDR tried to "help". 

So why don't people know about the horrors of Communism?  They've never been taught.  I would suggest that some of the same weakness might have a lot to do with the rise in anti-semitism today.  People have simply forgotten the Holocaust.

One final note is that when I was starting my career, I had the privilege of working with a number of Jews who had fled the USSR.  I asked why, and the response was that one's passport--which in the USSR enabled internal travel as well as international--clearly noted if a person was Jewish, which enabled every wannabe Cossack in the security services to initiate their own personal pogrom at any time.  How soon we forget!