Little known fact: as a young teenager I was a fan of the idea of communism. Then I realized that every attempt at communism, except possibly the kibbutz movement in Israel, has ended in horrible famines, genocides and general horror.
So today say with everyone else:
Let's not try that experiment again. Even my ex-colleague who is an actual communist admitted that he had mixed feelings about it: "enthusiastic believers like me are typically the first to get killed" he said.
That's not the best argument, given that the Marxist school of history (as exemplified by Eric Hobsbawm, who was respected by historians on all sides) is quite popular among professional historians.
> I don't understand how this is supposed to change anything?
Your argument was that those who are ignorant of history are in favor of Communism. This is cast into doubt by the fact that there are respected Marxist historians.
Alain Badiou has some good arguments for "trying" Communism given its history; in particular, he has the example of Fermat's Last Theorem, which for hundreds of years had many attempts at solutions, each of which ending in failure (sometimes disastrous), though many of which opened new areas of mathematics. He argues that previous attempts at creating Communist society likewise have given rise to key insights and questions, which we are in a more prepared position to answer - he names two in particular: the Paris Commune and the Shanghai Commune (two examples you may have forgotten about) which raise such questions.
Many people, communists or not, do not want to suffer under capitalism, and they don't want their friends to do so either.
Little known fact: as a young teenager I was a fan of the idea of communism. Then I realized that every attempt at communism, except possibly the kibbutz movement in Israel, has ended in horrible famines, genocides and general horror.
So today say with everyone else:
Let's not try that experiment again. Even my ex-colleague who is an actual communist admitted that he had mixed feelings about it: "enthusiastic believers like me are typically the first to get killed" he said.