The tours were rehearsed. The visitors were greeted with flowers, wine, dancing and singing, banquets, and smiling young children and officials. Then they were taken to see people hard at work, able to talk freely and as equals; students studying hard; and lovely weddings.
What they didn’t get to see were the show trials, mass sentencings, mob lynchings, struggle sessions, kidnappings, brainwashing, solitary confinement, forced labor camps, massacres, theft of land and property, famines, shortages of public services, lack of privacy, eavesdropping, surveillance, monitoring by neighbors and informants everywhere, brutal political struggles in the leadership, and extravagant luxuries of the elite.
They especially weren’t able to see the suffering of ordinary people.
The visitors mistook what had been staged for them as the norm in a communist country. They then promoted communism in the West through books, articles, and speeches, and many of them didn’t know they had been taken in. A small number did see cracks in the edifice, but many of them then fell into another trap: They saw themselves as “fellow travelers” and adopted the Chinese attitude of “not airing dirty laundry in front of outsiders.” The slaughter, famine, and suppression of communist countries, they reasoned, were simply part of the cost of transitioning to communism. They were confident that while the path to communism was crooked, the future was bright. They refused to tell the truth, because that would be blackening the name of the “socialist project.” Lacking the courage to tell the truth, they chose a shameful silence.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/how-the-specter-of-communism-is-ruling-our-world-introduction_2547882.html
