1. You're not supposed to be actively proud of what people were doing during communist rule. Just take a note of facts and move along.

2. However, you seem to be in position of so much privilege that your opinion is worthless and is a disgrace.

A whole country cannot "escape". A whole country also does not consist solely from "neighbourhood snitches and apparatchiks". A country and its general population is the victim.

You make it sound like it's so easy to fix a dysfunctional society. Go fix zoning laws and housing affordability. Or the fact that incarcerated people are charged for the privilege of being behind bars. This assuming you're from the USA.

You don't just move along and forget. A functional society is one that makes sure it never happens again, or here. It may seem like privilege in the context of a sophomoric critical theory, but here in the west we call it freedom. The entire communist system was designed to liquify any moral clarity that would pose resistance to it, and it is as objective an evil as racism, which we all have the imperative to confront. For this reason it deserves the very same level of confrontation. The best thing about these opinions that one might say are worthless and disgraceful is that, I get to have them. And in exchange for making them constructive to discourse and entertaining, I also get to present them in a civil and thoughtful form in open debate.

The jokes in the article were funny, but to accept them as comforting normalization of the horrors they were a coping mechanism for does not do justice to the targets of the system that produced them. Keeping the horrors of communism in frame is the very least we can do.

> act like it was some kind of forgivable quirky accident

Sounds quite uncivil and unthoughtful.

Did you live under communism or face its fallout? Who are you to forgive or not forgive anything?

With racism we are likely to to face some issue with you, where you are going to be moralizing and unforgiving instead of being humble and sorry.