Today is the First of May, which is celebrated by Communists world-wide as a day to celebrate workers and all that Communism brings them. Parades in Moscow’s Red Square, where all of the rhetoric of a peaceful people’s revolution is on display, still happen even 30 years after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Please forgive me if I don’t partake. In fact, just pass me by with the opportunity to celebrate that particular cause.

My stance on Communism, Socialism, or whatever you want to call ‘What’s yours is mine, and how dare you object to that?” comes from multiple sources.

It comes from a woman I knew growing up who escaped East Berlin a day or two before the wall went up, but her husband didn’t.

It comes from holding a friend while she cried her eyes out after her cousins were murdered in Tiananmin Square.

It comes from a Ukrainian woman who taught me Russian, whose earliest memory is of hunger and death during the Holodomor.

It comes from my Russian instructor from Moscow who remembers his father being dragged out of their apartment one cold night, and never coming back.

It comes from seeing the monuments to the people killed by Stalin’s purges sprinkled liberally across Russia.

It comes from seeing multipile countries on multiple continents where the exported terror of Communist or Socialist causes brought death, and in some cases, worse than death, to millions of people through war, famine, and a brutality that cannot be imagined unless you’ve seen its aftermath.

It comes from camps, and trains, and basement prisons, and statues to genocidal dictators, and tee shirts emblazoned with the ugly mug of a homophobic mass murderer, and to lonely graves in cold, dark forests filled with the ashes and bodies of enemies of the people.

So, spare me your platitudes about a better, kinder future through common effort and common reward. Go wave your red banner somewhere else. I’ll be here remembering the dark past of your bright future.