Once again proving the human mind’s capacity for willful self-deception, the New York Times recently published an article lamenting the victims of 20th century Communism.

A rational, moral, historically informed person, hearing that description of the article, would assume they were about to read an account of the more than 100 million people murdered and hundreds of millions more who suffered systemic torture, starvation, imprisonment and rape at the hands of brutal dictators like Josef Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, and the like. One would assume that such lamentations focused on Mao’s “Great Cultural Revolution” in which teachers and other intellectuals were beaten and killed by the thousands, or the “Great Purge” under Stalin, which saw the deaths of several million Communist Party members who were declared enemies of the state.

But such an assumption would be wrong.

No, the “victims,” according to Times’ writer Vivian Gornick, were the thousands of American communists who “endured social isolation, financial and professional ruin, and even imprisonment” when sane Americans rebuked their murderous ideology for the unadulterated evil that it was and is.

National Review’s Jonah Goldberg (whose brilliant and insightful book, “Liberal Fascism,” outlines the history of the American progressive movement’s embrace of socialism and communism), summed it up perfectly: “It seems to me a bit sad and pathetic, that she — and at least to some extent the New York Times — thinks the most important thing to remember from this sad chapter in American life are victims — not of Stalin’s mass murder or of Soviet espionage — but the victims of their own stupidity.”

Strange indeed. Less than three decades after the fall of the Soviet Union under the moral leadership of U.S. President Ronald Reagan, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II, a growing number of Americans, possibly ignorant of the horrors of Communism, embrace it in principle and in name.

The great irony is this: Only through the blessings of living in a constitutional republic which guarantees their right to hold these views, and of living in a free market economy that not only sustains their basic needs but affords them a level of luxury not even enjoyed by royalty of a half century ago, can they engage in such immoral, historically uninformed indulgence.

Thus we watch in disbelief as an angry, self-proclaimed socialist septuagenarian nearly secures the Democrat presidential nomination, bolstered by throngs of progressive snowflakes who protest and riot in favor of “LGBT rights” and against income inequality and the “evils” of the free market while tweeting from their $800 iPhones, sipping $8 cups of coffee, and sporting Che Guevara t-shirts as a form of virtue signaling.

Yet how many of these socialist/communist sympathizers know their beloved Che was Castro’s enforcer and executioner? He was nicknamed “The Butcher of La Cabana” for his brutal reign over the La Cabana prison, where political dissenters, including artists and musicians like the ones who idolize him today, were tortured and killed.

How many know Chairman Mao slaughtered 10 times more Chinese peasants than the number of Jews killed by Adolf Hitler? How many know that in Stalinist Russia, homosexuality was a crime punishable by imprisonment and hard labor, or that Stalin murdered tens of millions of people?

Why, with mountains of historical evidence documenting the atrocities of these sister ideologies, do we today have millions of Americans who openly embrace them? When faced with a recitation of its evils and failures, a common refrain is that communism/socialism is the ideal form of government; it just hasn’t yet been implemented properly.

To argue that the failures of communism/socialism — nearly 170 years after the publication of Marx’s Communist Manifesto — is a failure of leadership is to argue the movement has been led by crooks or incompetents for nearly two centuries. If so, what does that say about the followers?

Interestingly, it is the clear-eyed proponents of communism/socialism who are the most truthful about what the ideologies are and are not. Friedrich Nietzsche, the nihilist German philosopher who greatly influenced Hitler and his NAZIs (an acronym for the National SOCIALIST German Workers Party), declared, “Socialism is the fantastic younger brother of despotism, which it wants to inherit. Socialism wants to have the fullness of state force which before only existed in despotism.”

It would seem that a large number of the Americans who embrace socialism/communism are utterly ignorant of the misery these ideologies birth. According to a recent YouGov survey, nearly half of Millennials were unfamiliar with Mao and Che (though they still wear t-shirts emblazoned with their images). A third were unfamiliar with Lenin and Marx. Of course, it doesn’t help when the nation’s “newspaper of record” has long been a journalistic fangirl for oppressive regimes.

It is such ignorance that turns out tens of thousands of progressive idealists to rallies for Bernie Sanders, a self-avowed socialist who decries the evils of capitalism despite having recently bought his third home, this one a $600,000 vacation home on the shores of Lake Champlain. One thing is for sure; he is living better in evil, capitalist American than he would in Venezuela, the socialist paradise he says we should emulate — a paradise where millions are starving and have no bread, medicine or toilet paper.

In the meantime, oblivious to the irony, good little progressives march and riot against “fascists” in America (a term they define as “anyone who disagrees with them”), demanding free speech protections even as they beat up political opponents.

We would do well to remember Thomas Jefferson’s words in an 1816 letter to his friend Charles Yancey: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”