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WHAT MAKES COMMIES so cuddly? What is it about them that gives so many people the warm-and-fuzzies? I’ve never felt the rosy glow that Bolsheviks seem to evoke in others, so I’m in the dark on this. There must be something lovable about those who promote the most evil doctrine since slavery, since smart people are forever fawning over and snuggling up to them. I just can’t imagine what it is. Wherever Communists rule, after all, the results are poverty, misery, refugees and death. Like Nazis, you might say. Only — nobody celebrates Nazis anymore. Why are Communists different?

Take dictators. Your basic repressive, rigged-elections, no-free-speech, political-enemies-rounded-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night sort of autocrat usually draws fairly negative PR. When was the last time you heard someone put in a good word for Saddam Hussein? Or Gen. Cedras? Or Mussolini?

But let a tyrant call himself “Marxist,” and suddenly he’s a soulful revolutionary and a cult hero. Doesn’t matter if he’s the worst thing that ever happened to his country (which he generally is) and refugees are risking their lives to get out (which they generally are). In America, journalists and academics and Pete Seeger will line up to sing his praises and denounce his foes.

Fidel Castro, for instance. For 36 years, “progressive” Yanquis have tingled with esteem for the Bearded One, never mind that he has turned Cuba into an impoverished rathole where freedom is nonexistent and dissidents are tortured in psychiatric wards. When Mel King ran for mayor of Boston, he declared zanily that he would prefer the government of Castro to that of Ronald Reagan. Time and again, journalists have flown to Havana, interviewed the little maniac, then swooned about how charismatic he is and what wonders he has done for Cuba.

CBS’ Giselle Fernandez in Cuba (click for video)

“Welcome to Fidel Castro’s playground, Cuba’s Caribbean paradise . . . a Cuba the comandante is now inviting the world to enjoy,” bubbled CBS’ Giselle Fernandez not long ago. “Cuba and its sultry beaches have become a major vacation hot spot.” Fernandez never rhapsodized about “Pinochet’s playground.” But then, Pinochet wasn’t a Communist, so maybe his beaches weren’t sultry.

Communist chic can make even the most homicidal thug seem appealing and full of charm. “I like old Joe,” chuckled Harry Truman in 1948, by which point Joseph Stalin had killed perhaps 50 million people and slammed an Iron Curtain across Europe. “He is a decent fellow.”

Ted Kennedy gushed that Leonid Brezhnev — a leading practitioner of state terror, the tyrant who sent the tanks into Prague and Sakharov into exile — was “a warm individual, highly intelligent, highly aware, a sense of humor, completely at ease, very informal . . . completely committed to peace.” Add a beard and a red suit, and you’ve got Santa Claus. When Yuri Andropov, the head of the KGB, succeeded Brezhnev, reporters approvingly noted that he enjoyed jazz and drank Scotch. Anybody ever bother finding out what kind of music Franco liked?

The Bolsheviks lost the Cold War, but in elite circles they have lost none of their dazzle.

In 1993, the Globe ran an admiring magazine cover story on Gus Hall, general secretary of the Communist Party of the USA. “Pure,” it called him. “Unbowed . . . resilient . . . optimistic . . . sturdy . . . affable.” That came a few months after the admiring article on Communist bookstores in Cambridge. Before that was the admiring article on dejected Sandinista supporters around Boston, glum over the Communists’ defeat in Nicaragua. Last fall came the admiring profile of “committed Marxist” Dirk Struik, a retired MIT mathematician who supported the Kremlin during its bloodiest years. More recently still, an admiring look at the Marxist economists who teach at New England colleges.

Can you imagine the Globe — or any mainstream paper — printing a glowing story on neo-Nazi activists or white supremacist bookstores?

For that matter, can you imagine the University of Massachusetts naming a library after Ezra Pound, a great American poet who embraced Fascism? The idea is grotesque. Yet UMass is naming a library after W.E.B. Du Bois, a great American writer who embraced Communism, championed racial segregation, supported Stalin, hated the United States, and renounced his citizenship. Excuse me, but why isn’t that grotesque, too?

Out on the Left Coast, the University of California at Santa Cruz just bestowed its most illustrious professorship, the Presidential Chair, on Angela Davis. Now here’s a role model. Davis was accused of supplying the guns used in the 1970 assault on the Marin County Courthouse (during which Judge Harold Haley was shot dead). A Communist Party stalwart, she spent years shilling for the Soviets, and was rewarded by Moscow with the 1979 Lenin Prize. Her tracts are filled with raw anti-American propaganda. If she were a right-winger, we’d be calling her a paranoid militia member. Since she’s a Commie, we’ll just call her: “Professor.”

In all of human history, no “ism” has spilled more blood or crushed more souls than Communism. How queer it is that the architects of so much horror, and those who aided and abetted them, should be so admired and flattered by free Americans. How queer — and how sick.

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ON THE 60^th anniversary of Josef Stalin’s death last week, the Associated Press reported that admirers of the Soviet dictator, one of history’s bloodiest tyrants, were flocking to the Kremlin to venerate him as a great leader despite his ghastly record of repression. With polls showing a rise in Russians’ admiration and nostalgia for Stalin, observed AP, “experts and politicians puzzled and despaired over his enduring popularity.”

As many as 7 million Ukrainians were deliberately starved to death under Josef Stalin. That didn’t deter prominent Americans from hailing Stalinist rule as the “moral light at the top of the world.”

That some Russians express approval for a despot who has been dead since 1953 is distressing, though perhaps not surprising given the ongoing campaign to burnish Stalin’s image by Russia’s autocratic president, Vladimir Putin. But even more of a reason for puzzlement and despair is the enthusiastic applause for Stalin by influential American liberals when he was at the height of his bloody reign — and the willingness of similar propagandists, naifs, and true believers today to sing the praises of other thugs and dictators.

In the 1930s, as millions were being murdered in Stalin’s terror-famine and Great Purge, Walter Duranty was assuring readers of The New York Times that the Soviet ruler was “giving the Russian people … what they really want, namely joint effort, communal effort.” The renowned literary critic Edmund Wilson extolled Stalinist Russia as the “moral light at the top of the world.” Upton Sinclair, who would later win a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, vigorously defended the integrity of the “confessions” extracted by the secret police from many of Stalin’s victims: It “seems obvious,” Sinclair wrote, that they would not have “confessed to actions which they had not committed.”

The adulation of left-wing dictators and strongmen by Western intellectuals, journalists, and celebrities didn’t begin with Stalin (in 1921 Duranty had hailed Lenin for his “cool, far-sighted, reasoned sense of realities”), and it certainly didn’t end with him. Mona Charen chronicled the phenomenon in her superb 2003 book Useful Idiots, which recalls example after jaw-dropping example of American liberals defending, flattering, and excusing the crimes of one Communist ruler and regime after another. Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Tse-tung, the Khmer Rouge, Leonid Brezhnev, Kim Il Sung, the Sandinistas: Over and over the pattern was repeated, from the dawn of the Bolshevik Revolution to the collapse of the Iron Curtain – and beyond.

And the useful idiocy lives on.

When Venezuela’s America-hating caudillo Hugo Chávez died last week, Human Rights Watch summarized his legacy starkly: “a dramatic concentration of power and open disregard for basic human rights guarantees.” Over his 14-year rule, Chávez succeeded in rewriting the constitution to abolish the Venezuelan Senate and repeal the one-term limit for presidents. He stifled judicial independence, cracked down on freedom of speech, and used his power to “intimidate, censor, and prosecute Venezuelans” who opposed his political agenda. Chávez cemented Venezuela’s alliance with Cuba – “the only country in Latin America that systematically represses virtually all forms of political dissent,” Human Rights Watch noted – and vocally backed dictators elsewhere, including Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and Libya’s Moammar Qaddafi.

Hugo Chavez, an America-hating megalomaniac, stifled human rights, jailed critics, vocally supported dictators, and ravaged Venezuela’s economy. But useful idiots in America gushed over him as a humanitarian and a moral hero.

None of that troubled the ideologues who raced to praise the dead bully. Chávez “understood democracy and basic human desires for a dignified life,” gushed US Representative José Serrano of New York. Former President Jimmy Carter saluted his “commitment to improving the lives of millions of his fellow countrymen.” And former Massachusetts Congressman Joseph Kennedy II, a longtime Chavez booster, eulogized Chávez as a humanitarian who cared about the poor.

All this was preceded by Dennis Rodman’s return to the headlines, as the former basketball star traveled to North Korea, where the planet’s most ghastly regime presides over a Stalinist hellhole in which hundreds of thousands of people are imprisoned in slave-labor camps. But Rodman, whose trip was financed by Vice Media, an American documentary production company, wasn’t there to see a human-rights nightmare. He came to watch some basketball, to hang out with the country’s new dictator, Kim Jong Un, and – in a country where starvation is a leading cause of death — to eat 10-course meals that participants described as “an epic feast.”

All in all, the trip’s organizer said, “they had a grand old time.” So much so, apparently, that before a crowd of thousands, Rodman assured Kim: “You have a friend for life.”

Indeed. It’s a shameful thing, but dictators like Kim always do.

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)