If you like Communism so much, why not move to a Communist country?
A quick note explaining that your country isn’t a restaurant
If I were offered citizenship and a full time job as an engineer in Cuba I would not accept. Even though I like Cuba’s government (and weather) much more than Canada’s, even though I speak Spanish fluently and have Latin American roots (on my mother’s side) I don’t think I could be enticed. If I were retired and had no family ties to Canada that might be a different story, but even in that hypothetical case I might still choose to remain in Canada. Does it follow that I secretly believe Canada's government to be better than Cuba’s? Absolutely not.
Life is not easy in Cuba, despite its remarkable achievements in health and education, but I can only imagine how miserable life would be in Canada if it had to deal with sixty years of economic sabotage by the US.
Incidentally, I could not be easily enticed to move anywhere else in Canada even though I certainly don’t think I live in the best city. The ties that bind us to the place we were born and raised are often deep and varied. Then there is the whole issue of democratic responsibility.
If a restaurant serves me bad food I simply don't return to it. I feel no obligation to try to get involved in the management of the restaurant to make it better. But we should feel obliged, very obliged actually, to change the things that are wrong with our government, not just go somewhere else (which is seldom an easy thing to do). And our assessment of a government cannot ignore how it treats others. That’s a basic moral truism. Do you judge an aristocracy by what it does for aristocrats alone?
The son of Mafia Don might have a comfortable life. That doesn’t make his Mafia Don father a decent guy, or absolve the son of the responsibility to shun a life of crime, and to turn against his father.
My paternal grandmother was Austrian. She supported Hitler, especially after receiving a polite, apologetic letter from a Nazi official about a mistake in some benefit she was supposed to receive. [1] I can imagine how dismissive she’d have been of allegations that the Nazis were evil when they treated a poor village woman like her respectfully.
I am less harsh towards my Nazi-supporting grandmother - a barely literate and very isolated woman in 1930s rural Austria [2] - than I am of Canadians who support Nazi Israel even though they can easily witness the horrors of genocide on their iphones every day since October 7.
All Canada’s major political parties have been united in the premise that Palestinian armed resistance to genocide must be vilified. They have all parroted Nazi Israel’s thoroughly debunked take on the Palestinian military operation of October 7. They have all slandered anti-genocide protesters. And not long before October 7, the Canadian parliament gave a standing ovation to a 98-year-old Nazi veteran. Why? Because countless Nazis not only found safe haven in Canada after World War II, but went on to become quite rich and politically influential.
We are responsible for acquiring historical literacy and applying it as best we can to change our own governments today. The Nazis were western imperialists, not one-time freaks who appeared out of nowhere, and certainly not “socialists”. They were as fanatically anti-marxist as they were antisemitic. And Nazi antisemitism was only part of their deep-seated belief in white supremacy which they shared with countless western leaders then and now.
We must spread understanding of the death toll from capitalism, and the reasons for considerable concessions that were made by capitalists so that it could survive.
I want Canada to become communist. That’s another way of saying I want Canada to de-Nazify itself. The more of us stay here, the more likely that is to happen one day.
NOTE
[1] My communist dad told me this story. I never met his mother, who died in Austria when I was five or six years old. My dad was fifteen when World War II ended and was put through some basic Nazi army training in his village. A swastika armband was his uniform.
[2] I visited Austria for the first time in my life in 2023. I did not get to see Bad Hall, where my dad grew up. It is a town of only 5000 people today. Nobody I asked about it in Innsbruck had ever heard of it.
Very well made points. It's exactly right.