Led by popular anarchist scholars such as Noam Chomsky and Murray Bookchin, who can be perceived as comparatively harmless by the ruling class having foregone organized power to dismantle organized capitalism left anticommunists, Parenti says, have reduced revolution to a protracted academic discussion that embraces a fundamentally infantile analysis. The achievements of Communism from public ownership of productive forces, priority placed on human services, the elevated status of women, support of national liberation struggles, rapid industrialization, reduction of economic inequalities, and the role a socialist alternative played in our own civil rights movement were ignored by the anticommunist left, and still are. The historical evidence would suggest that it was not. The comfortable American left, especially among those who have experienced neither prison nor war, often has no stomach for such reflections. Objective realities are not beholden to comfortable moralities.
Truth is hard.
Emotional evaluation becomes particularly hypnotic, Parenti indicates, with regard to personalities. Any personality, like the Dalai Lama today, regardless of how reactionary his or her true histories are, that can be fobbed off on a credulous public as a symbol of freedom receives accolades from members of an uncritical left. A perfect example is the first post-Communist leader of Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel. Formerly Communist Czechoslovakia today is in economic shambles. Public assets were sold off at garage sale prices.