An old lefty, repentant this time around

The individual conscience can speak only when it is ready, not when the herd is demanding that it do so.


As a leftist from high school onward (I worshiped Eugene Debs, took a college course in Chinese Communism under Mao, volunteered at a radical bookstore in Boston, and finally traveled to and lived in the P.R.C.), it took me more than 25 years later to acknowledge the tragic mistakes committed under the name of "socialism" and "communism" by the regimes in the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China.  And Cuba.

It took many years for a generation of American radicals and idealists such as John Reed and Emma Goldman to see what was happening in the Soviet Union and then belated acknowledge those things.

The party is not same as the (founding) principle.

* * * * *

Leftists, such as myself, can change and grow.

Hopefully, where there needs to be correction, before it's too late.