Bryan Caplan ends an interesting post with this odd observation:

Which reminds me: The oddest thing I’ve noticed about conservative anti-Communism is how rarely conservatives mention any of the Marxist-Leninists’ most horrible crimes — the collectivization famines, dekulakization, the slave labor camps, the mass deportations. It’s puzzling. If you were blissfully unaware of these horrors, what exactly would motivate you to become a fervent anti-Communist?

Bryan Caplan is an extremely smart and knowledgeable fellow, but I can only conclude from this statement that he doesn’t read many conservative anti-Communist writers or publications. Of course, it’s not a growing genre these days, given the end of the Cold War, but Caplan seems to be speaking of conservative anti-Communism generally. And if that’s the case, I really have no idea how he could say this. There were probably years, if not decades, when some reference to Katyn or the Gulag or the victims of Yalta or some other Communist horror appeared in every issue of National Review. The Black Book of Communism got massive attention on the Right. Alexander Solzhenitsyn was a contributor to NR. Reader’s Digest, back when it was a great magazine, dedicated itself to exposing the horrors of Communism. No less than Susan Sontag admitted as much in 1982:

In a passage eliminated from The Nation version, Miss Sontag also criticized liberal publications. ‘’Imagine, if you will, someone who read only the Reader’s Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone in the same period who read only The Nation or The New Statesman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of Communism? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?’’

Regardless, it seems to me that the only people who spend any time whatsoever trying to keep that memory alive and make those points are, well, contemporary conservatives at magazines like National Review, The Weekly Standard, Commentary, and the like. With very few exceptions, liberals don’t much care about the subject and even seem to think conservatives are kooks when we bring it up. When Bush even touched the liberal version of Yalta, the liberal establishment went batty. When Glenn Beck came out with his documentary The Revolutionary Holocaust, the knee-jerk response from most quarters was plain mockery. Libertarians are better, but not a lot better. With the notable exception of Michael Moynihan and Matt Welch, I can’t think of too many contemporary libertarians who care much about the subject these days.

Meanwhile, contemporary conservatives revisit the concrete evils of Communism semi-regularly. Jay Nordlinger continues to write about such things often, not just about the Soviet Union but about contemporary Cuba and China. Robert Conquest, Paul Johnson, and other titans of conservatism have covered the mass deportations, the labor camps, the killing fields, etc. I’m all in favor of bringing up the issue more. But when Caplan says it’s rare for conservatives to do so, the question I have to ask is, compared to whom?