Of course the real crime of the Socialist regimes was to offer an alternative to the Capitalist mode of production, but the people living in the regimes of Late Capitalism are assured of how horrific it was generally: the unfreedom extended to the choice available in the marketplace: under Socialism you wouldn’t be able to order the exact coffee you want! How backwards.

The ideological function of backwardness is of great importance to the countries of Imperialism. These countries themselves create the conditions in which a subject people regresses, in order to justify their having arrived to bring the forces of civilisation. The Taliban were promoted by Western regimes to fight the Soviet Union after its invasion of Afghanistan. Later the backwardness of Afghanistan made it a natural candidate for further invasion, following an attack on the US that was perpetrated by non-Afghans. The grotesque and stifling Irish Catholicism supposed to be a deep-rooted cultural phenomenon only set in as a parasite following the unthinkable trauma of the Great Famine, though not even Irish people know about this process—the Devotional Revolution—and most therefore do not understand how recent it was, how contingent upon English violence, so attached are we to outsiders’ views of ourselves. In short, use of backwardness to justify Imperialist action allows Imperialism to work backwards in time as well as forwards.

Claims of the backwardness of others serve to promote the forwardness of the speaker, foreclosing any critical thinking about the relation between these two supposed poles. Plus, the European Socialist regimes are now locked up in Time’s prison: comparing them to the world today is a fallacy. Some Macdara family members visited the DDR Museum in Berlin recently and cannily observed that what seemed really backwards about the mock-up of domestic interiors could be credited to the fact that these are recreations of domesticity from fifty years ago. It looked like Ireland in the 70s, one of these relatives said: maybe better actually. Another game is to elide the difference between the Socialist regimes themselves and their disastrous collapse: so there is vaccine hesitancy in Eastern Europe, Macdara heard on a podcast, because of the Socialist period. This is poisonous: the hesitancy is because the people were terrorised by the predations of Capitalism when everything they knew collapsed; the Socialist states themselves were utterly and famously committed to vaccinations.

The choice we face is not between Liberal Capitalist regimes with personal freedoms and violent market conditions, and Illiberal Socialist regimes with social protection but without personal freedoms. The best option is always available to us: Socialist regimes with social protection and personal freedoms.