Meaningless insults/communism
The words "communist", "communism", and "commie" are often used as insults by those on the political far Right, especially in the United States. Those who use it this way seem to believe that "communism" is more or less synonymous with "evil", that anyone who advocates it is therefore correspondingly evil, and even that it accurately describes liberal views (i.e. anyone who expresses liberal views is a communist, and liberal ideology ultimately advocates or leads to communism in some way).
"Communism" actually refers to "a socioeconomic system structured upon common ownership of the means of production and characterized by the absence of social classes, money, and the state." [W]
The unexamined belief that communism is somehow evil is probably based on one of two things:
- the notorious example of the Soviet Union, a ruthless dictatorship based on Marxism-Leninism [W] which in turn claimed to be a form of communism but actually betrayed all the values communism was designed to support: individual liberty, a classless society, absence of poverty and want.
- plutocratic propaganda, especially prevalent during the 1950s, designed to discredit such goals and anyone who advocated them -- the anti-communist witch-hunts spearheaded by Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy being a prime example
Anyone who uses "communism" as an insult is, knowingly or unknowingly, associating themselves with a deeply shameful time in American political history when the lives and careers of innocent Americans could be ruined just by tarring them with a single word -- a word referring to nothing more than a utopian ideal that has been tragically misappropriated by others for their own gain.