Okay, so, can I come at this from a completely different direction? I actually grew up in a country of the former Soviet Bloc, and I had this history teacher who spent his whole life under the communist regime, and he had stories. Like, yeah, he did his time in the food queues that went around the block just for a bottle of cooking oil, he'd been interviewed by the secret police, he'd seen some shit. He was kind of a colorful character, he was really old, almost past the age of retirement, he was kind of politically incorrect in a way that was wildly inappropriate but appealed to us because we were all edgy teens at the time, but he was the best history teacher in the school, by everyone's admission.
And he had mixed feelings whenever we reached the 'recent history' portion of the curriculum, because to him that was lived experience and he believed history needed at least 50 years to decant before any measure of objectivity could be reached, but he said, you know what, okay. I'm going to teach you about that period. I'm going to teach you everything you need to know.
And one of the first things he drilled into our head was that what made that period bad wasn't 'communism', it was that it was a totalitarian dictatorship. He made us repeat that phrase until it flowed off the tongue without a stutter. The second thing he drilled into us was to never refer to that period as 'under communism', but always say 'under the communist regime'. Because yes, the communist party was ostensibly in charge (it was, in fact, the *only* party), so it was absolutely correct to call it the communist regime as a result, but it wasn't literal 'communism'. They had just cribbed the name because when the party was first getting formed, the concept of communism was incredibly popular and aspirational. The thing he wanted us to understand was that the party could have called itself anything.
It could have been called the Happy Puppy Rainbow Party, and the regime would still have been awful, because it was (repeat this phrase) a totalitarian dictatorship. That was the heart of it. It was a totalitarian dictatorship. He warned us before tests, if we talked about that period and used the phrase 'under communism' instead of 'under the communist regime', he would dock us 10% of our total score each time we did it. Atrocities happened under the communist regime. Under the regime. The totalitarian regime. Totalitarian dictatorship. Totalitarian dictatorship.
And to this day, I still have that phrase drilled in my head. The communist regime.
Because you can call your country the Democratic Land of the Free or whatever pompous, pleasant idealistic title you want, but pretty names don't actually make any difference if you pull back the pretty curtain and the man you find behind that curtain is
totalitarian dictatorship.
What a group does will always be more relevant than what a group calls itself.
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