I was going to remark the irony that they plan to light the Empire State Building in red and yellow to commemorate 60 years of communism in China, but my friend the Wine Commonsewer has said much of what I would have said and perhaps more eloquently. Sixty years of mass murder and near-genocide? At least 48 million people killed to establish utopia? If that’s worth celebrating . . .

The other irony, of course, is that China is becoming more capitalistic even as the U.S. has been going in the opposite direction, and China may have more of a free-market system than the U.S. does. But those gerontocrats, now only interested in hanging onto political power and seeing a CP monopoly on power as the best way to do so, still claim to be communist. We should deny — as is realistic given history — that communism has anything to do with idealism and more to do with slaughtering people to hang onto power, thus taking a step toward denying them whatever shred of legitimacy they get by being associated with something once erroneously viewed as idealistic.