democracy bad.

The mask slipped.

Yes. The article points to Germany as an example. Okay, so East Germany was more progressive than West Germany. That doesn’t mean that every communist country is more progressive than every capitalist country. As it stands, we have five communist countries: China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea (de facto) and Vietnam. None of these countries allow gay marriage, none recognise civil partnerships, and only Cuba includes sexual orientation in its anti discrimination law. Cuba could legalise gay marriage in the near future, but would the other communist countries do the same? Fat chance China will.

If you look at Europe more broadly, and look at the European map on gay marriage, you can clearly see the iron curtain lingering on. None of the countries on our continent that have legalised gay marriage were ever communist, except for Germany having had some of its territory under communism. Meanwhile, only six former communist countries have civi partnerships: Czechia (2006), Slovenia (2006 - expanded in 2017), Hungary (2009), Croatia (2014), Estonia (2016 - not fully implemented) and Montenegro (2021). In Czechia and Estonia, civil partnerships give only a fraction of the rights of marriage, and only Croatia, Slovenia (since 2017 only) and Montenegro do civil partnerships give all the rights of marriage. Only Croatia allows same sex couples to adopt children, although stepchild adoptions are allowed in Slovenia and Estonia as well, and Montenegro allows guardianship rights. In other post-communist countries in Europe, there is no legal recognition of same sex unions, although Poland and Slovakia do grant a small number of benefits to cohabitating couples. And even in a country with civil partnerships, societal acceptance is not guaranteed: most Montenegrins see homosexuality as a mental illness, and most Hungarian institutions are strongly critical of homosexuality.

To be fair, the form of capitalism employed in America and in most western countries is bad. It’s called neoliberalism, and neoliberalism is basically socialism for large corporations and billionaires, while the middle class and the working class cannot rely on social services like healthcare or education, because these services are either prohibitively expensive or they are terrible and unreliable. I even consider neoliberalism to be worse than communism. But communism is still bad, and it’s still a dangerous and unnatural system. There are alternatives to both these economic models, like free market industrial capitalism, the Nordic-model (which works only for small, homogeneous countries that have a strong culture), feudalism, or strong, tightly-knit communities.