SACRAMENTO, CA - Gus Hall, longtime boss of the Communist Party USA, died at 90 earlier this month. What does this have to do with Halloween? As it happens, quite a lot. For one thing, Mr. Hall and his party were in perpetual costume.

They appeared as just another political party, decked out in populist pieties about the people, the poor, the workers, progress, and, of course, social justice. Behind the costume they were Stalinist stooges, an anti-American hate group founded, funded, and directed by the Soviet Union. They also denied a holocaust more vast than the one perpetrated by Hitler, some 100 million deaths worldwide according to the careful count of The Black Book of Communism.

Despite this chronicle of horror, to write critically of communists was for decades blasted as a “witch hunt,” as though Mr. Hall (real name Arvo Halberg) and his comrades suffered from some kind of existential problem. And consider selections from the obituary of Hall by Myrna Oliver of the Los Angeles Times.

“Affable, nattily dressed, and adept at telling funny stories over endless cups of coffee,” said the Times. Mr. Hall “mellowed with age” and “painted pictures of woodpeckers” at his cozy home in Yonkers. His “hardscrabble experiences in the logging camps, mines, and mills convinced him of the rightness of communism.” But here’s the collector’s item, a true classic. Hall was “quintessentially American.”

It’s not clear how it’s quintessentially American for anyone to dedicate their life to an ideology which, according to its own founders, is rule by force and terror. For purposes of comparison, imagine an obit of a longtime paid agent of Nazism reading “He mellowed in his later years, believing National Socialism would come to America not by violent revolution but through the ballot box, and liked to tell a good joke while quaffing a cold beer at his cottage in Vermont.” The consequences of this ignorance and blindness go far beyond Gus Hall.

Czech novelist Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being) observes that the struggle of mankind against tyranny is the struggle of memory against forgetting. This should be the watchword for a new century. Kundera remembers Stalin’s anti-Semitic show trials in his country while others have forgotten, or never knew in the first place.

For the militant Left, history is not something to be studied but to be created. Markus Wolf, former intelligence boss of the secret police in East Germany, a nation that killed people for attempting to emigrate, recently said that the regime was “essentially a force for good.” Further, “The ideas were the outcome of a long struggle of millions of people for freedom, social and economic rights…. The capitalist system has no answers to the great problems. I still believe in these ideas and I am sure they will come back.”

In some quarters, particularly American universities, those ideas never left, and they still control the most populous nation on earth. Those ideas need to have a stake driven through their heart, and that is a job for truth. If we want sequels of the socialist horror show to flee, like vampires from a cross, we need to know what happened. To paraphrase Santayana, those who don’t know what happened may wind up wondering what happened.

- K. Lloyd Billingsley