{"id":146839,"date":"2026-07-27T08:55:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-27T12:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=146839"},"modified":"2026-07-27T14:14:15","modified_gmt":"2026-07-27T18:14:15","slug":"fp-gary-saul-morson-communism-the-return-of-the-god-that-failed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=146839","title":{"rendered":"(FP) \u00a0Gary Saul Morson: Communism–The Return of the God That Failed"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A zombie is haunting America, the zombie of communism. Pronounced dead and discredited after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is back. Former Senate candidate Graham Platner and influencer Hasan Piker did not lose, and probably gained, adherents by having called themselves communists. Meanwhile, as Stu Smith recently wrote in<\/a> The Free Press,<\/em> a majority of the Democratic Socialists of America governing board \u201copenly identifies with communist ideology.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a Russian specialist, I cannot help wondering: How is this possible? Do these people really have no problem with the history of the ideology they\u2019re claiming? With Joseph Stalin\u2019s Gulag that took the lives of millions, his artificially induced famine that deliberately starved several million peasants, and the secret police\u2019s form of interrogation that routinely included torture? Do they actually want to revive Mao Zedong\u2019s Cultural Revolution and the Khmer Rouge\u2019s reign of terror that claimed the lives of a quarter of Cambodia\u2019s population?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Three quarters of a century ago, questions like these led to one of the most important volumes to emerge during the Cold War. Now largely forgotten, The God That Failed<\/a><\/em> (1949) was once so widely read that the volume\u2019s title became a catchphrase for any movement that attracted intellectuals to a quasi-religious ideology claiming infallibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The God That Failed <\/em>brought together several prominent European and American writers who had once either been members of the Communist Party or sympathetic to the Soviet Union, but had eventually grown disillusioned. Each writer explained what initially attracted him to, and what eventually repelled him from, communism. The star-studded cast included Arthur Koestler, an Hungarian-born British writer now best known for his brilliant novel about communism, Darkness at Noon<\/a><\/em>; French novelist Andr\u00e9 Gide; the Italian Ignazio Silone, author of Bread and Wine<\/a><\/em>; British poet Stephen Spender; and two Americans, journalist and author Louis Fischer, and African American writer Richard Wright.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read it all<\/a>.<\/p>

The Return of the God That Failed https:\/\/t.co\/Z9aUNSWmTy<\/a><\/p>— Collin Hansen (@collinhansen) July 27, 2026<\/a><\/blockquote>