While growing up May 1st was always a special day for me. It was my mother's birthday, an important event for a young child. Later I learned that it was a day freighted with other significance, which seemed particularly unfortunate to me given its personal import. So, in recent years I have enjoyed the annual May Day celebration at The Distributed Republic, even if it's a rerun this year.

Every year for the past five, we have taken time on May 1st to remember the victims of communism. Because of our busy personal lives, we did not have the time to put together any original articles this year. For that, I apologize. Instead, I will link to a few of our articles from previous years. We hope to bring it back next year bigger than ever.

The Red Plague by Professor R. J. Rummel
The Road To Hell Was Paved With Bad Intentions by Bryan Caplan
Cambodian Year Zero by Jonathan Wilde
Torture and Tyranny: The Real Che by Randall McElroy
Hoeryong: Peering Inside a Death Camp by Rainbough Phillips
Trofim Lysenko: Ideology, Power, and the Destruction of Science by Matt McIntosh
Ecocide: The Murder of the Aral Sea by Brian Doss
Remembrance by Jonathan Wilde

We hope you remember the victims of communism in your own way today on your own blogs.

I've long been partial to an old Bernard DeVoto essay: The Ex-Communists.

A stanza from a currently unfashionable poet ends, "The way is all so very plain / That we may lose the way." Several stanzas farther along the phrasing changes a little: "So very simple is the road / That we may stray from it." The poem happens to have a religious theme but what it says holds true for some crucial acts of the intelligence.

A number of intellectuals who were communists have lately been explaining why they no longer are: discussing the reasons that led to their conversion and those that have produced their apostasy. The theological terms apply, for it is apparent, and indeed was apparent all along, that the phenomena are primarily religious. The typical ex-communist American intellectual in fact has experienced two conversions; whereas evangelical doctrine holds that to be saved you must be born a second time, salvation has required him to be born a third time. Such an experience puts the greatest possible strain on the personality. There can be only compassion for the agony he has felt, the double disillusionment, the necessity of twice rebuilding his shattered personal world. And his careful analysis of his experience can be valuable and useful.

Embracing communism, like religious conversion, is an act of the total personality. It is packed with private and even unconscious as well as rational and objective reasons, with emotion as well as intelligence. What the apostates have been saying shows that frequently intelligence played only a small part in it. Yet it played some part and they are eager to show that it was decisive in their apostasy, their repudiation of communism. I propose to discuss only their intelligence. We will agree that the American intellectual who became a Communist was, typically, a generous, warmhearted man, an idealist deeply disturbed by the catastrophe of the modern world and deeply concerned for the betterment of mankind. But how good was his thinking? . . .

Communism made its American converts not as a system of thought but as an eschatology, a millennial faith. . .

The communist formula said that reform was impossible: the non-communist pronounced the formula defective.

What followed was the most fundamental, the most widespread, and the most thoroughgoing reform in American history. To call it the New Deal obscures the fact that it was a sweeping revolution which had already begun to gather momentum when Roosevelt took office and some fundamental parts of which were unrelated to the movement he headed. All that need be said of it here is that it worked. It demonstrated that the generality of our intellectuals had correctly analyzed the situation, and the generality of them had some part of it.

I wonder if in future we will be able to look back on this year and identify some set of changes that are presently obscured by movement politicians. The difference between enlightened progress and descent into despotism is small in the beginning though it grows immense over time. Are we improving society to make it more appropriate to our current stage of development, or are we following a latter day road to perdition paved by an eschatology and millennial faith of muddled thinkers?