For many months, I have been irritated at poles suggesting that millennials, generation Xers, and other people younger than us boomers do not seem to understand that communism (and more aggressive forms of socialism) amounts to the most horrific political system ever devised by man – responsible for murdering or starving to death far more than a 100 million people. “How can they not know that?” I would often say to myself. Then I realized it was our fault. It is the fault of older generations that the younger generations do not know the follies and arrogance and horrors of communism. We put our kids in leftist leaning public schools and colleges, where many of the teachers and professors have very little real world experience and are more interested in manipulating our children, and exploiting those children for their own inappropriate purposes, than in teaching our children hard truths they will need to protect themselves and make sound, wholesome decisions for their families. Of course Marxists actually want to destroy the nuclear family. They want to destroy any institution that could compete with the supremacy of state power – the all-powerful centralized government. This is why the Chinese Communist Party is so hostile towards religion and is currently liquidating – meaning engaging in genocide – its Muslim Uyghurs population, which is being housed in “re-education camps,” similar to WWII era Soviet and Nazi camps – as the population is slowly squeezed out of existence, like so many populations wiped from the map of the world by communists.
In addition to being subjected to a steady diet of complete mental garbage from socialist professors who never served in the military, and indeed never had a real job, our youth frankly do not hear enough even from conservatist thinkers and politicians, who give only the most limited talking points on the perils of communism, while providing very little in-depth thought and analysis that could guide our youth. For example, Donald Trump has stated several times at rallies and stump speeches that, “America will never be socialist,” but he has never given a meaningful, probing speech on exactly why socialism and communism are terrible systems. He gave the same rousing stump speech dozens of times, but never bothered to explain to America, for example, why the hardline communist system adopted in Venezuela in 2014 was able to reduce a prosperous and thriving society to a society of empty shelves with people eating out of dumpsters, and even eating their own household pets, within just a few years. That is a perfect example of communism. The hardline communist regime took over in Venezuela, to loud acclaim from Hollywood dingbats, promising to share Venezuela’s great wealth evenly amongst the population. The sharing never happened. Instead the hardline government nationalized everything, confiscated much of the wealth for communist leaders (which always happens), and chased away foreign and domestic experts, investors, and business leaders, who understood things like how to keep the oil pumping and how to keep the grocery stores full of products. The inevitable result was a vast and sudden decrease in Venezuela’s wealth so dramatic that middle class Venezuelans throughout the country lost on average more than 20 pounds of body weight and ended up having to broil and eat their own cats and dogs to survive. That is the true face of communism: if you doubt it, spend less time listening to college professors and ideologs like Bernie Sanders, Obama, and AOC, and go and talk to some actual Venezuelan refugees, so you can learn the truth about communism and not the fantasy version made up by liberal nincompoops.
I originally imagined writing a single concise, incisive article on the many reasons that communism (and socialism) always and inevitably fail. There are no historical examples of truly successful communist countries. I soon realized however, how complex the topic is, which is probably why our politicians discuss the issue only in the most simplistic terms, relying on meaningless bromides, such as “pay your fair share” – an injunction that no communist government would ever insist on for itself. It is only the beaten down taxpayers who must “pay their fair share” under increasing threats of government action and outright confiscation of their wealth and assets. The corrupt, envious, hateful centralized government never needs to pay its fair share to its citizens, but can break every contract it enters (China, Hong Kong), run endless deficits, be completely unaccountable to the people and rob the people blind of their wealth to pay lavish salaries, perks, vacations, pensions, and country houses to communist officials, who never stop talking about equality, while draining all life and wealth from the people of the countries they plague.
At any rate, with a subject so complex, and with such a long record of communism’s disastrous historical failures – which few professors seem to notice – I resolve to write a series of shorter articles, each focusing on one particular deficiency of powerful centralized governments. As an historical aside, it is worth noting that the US Constitution was organized and drafted precisely to try to protect US citizens from the dangers and oppression of a centralized government. This is the main reason modern leftists are hostile to the US Constitution: it prevents the envious and hateful leftists from doing all kinds of evil things they really want to do, such as seizing other peoples’ property and miseducating our children to become the misguided, perverse, antifamily people that many American leftists are.
Coming to the point of this article – the first in a series – I would argue that any modern, western youth should carefully examine the history of communist and socialist governments and try to understand why such governments end up murdering so many of their own people. Before you vote for politicians who claim to be Marxists or Socialists, do you not have an obligation to explore how and why such governments killed over 100 million persons in the 20th century. Even the rightly reviled Nazi and fascist regimes were socialist governments.
People forget that Nazism was itself just a version of socialism – another species of leftist, centralized control, this one flavored by extreme nationalism. The term “NAZI” is a simplification of the German abbreviation NSDAP, which stands for Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, meaning the National SOCIALIST German Workers’ Party. (https://www.britannica.com/topic/Nazi-Party). Hitler was a SOCIALIST. Ironically he was completely in favor of many of the same policies that American leftists like Bernie Sanders are championing now, such as state controlled education, a more limited free market, family and medical leave paid for by the state, and government control over reproductive rights, such as who should bear children and who should get government payments to have children.
Tallying only Hitler’s socialism, Lenin and Stalin’s communism, and Mao’s absurdly-named “Great Leap Forward” (and other parts of the “Cultural Revolution”) at least 100 million people were murdered or starved in leftist government-induced famines or death camps in the 20th century. See Washington Post, “How Many People Died?” (July 17, 1994) (ascribing 42 million deaths to Hitler, 30-40 million to Stalin, and 40-80 million or more to Mao); R.J. Rummels, Death by Government (1994), S. Courtois, Black Book of Communism (1999); T. Snyder, Hitler vs. Stalin, Who Killed More? (2011). And this does not even count deaths caused by leftist regimes in North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, the former Yugoslavia, Romania, Nicaragua, Albania, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Angola, Burma, Syria, Ethiopia, Mozambique (which add tens of millions of additional dead bodies), and on and on. The dead bodies (laid side-by-side) caused by bankrupt but still faddish socialist ideas could cover the Earth’s surface world in a vast carpet of human death. No other idea in the annals of man has killed so many or caused so much misery. Again, an educated young person callowly flirting with the idea of communism and “equal distribution of all property,” whether in the Yale faculty lounge or in the campaign staff rooms of deluded politicians like Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden, should first count all the dead bodies and try to understand and explain why extreme leftist ideas so often lead to so many dead people, regardless of where the idea is tried and regardless of which population is sacrificed on the false alter of communist equality. Finally, in reviewing this tragic history of communist ruination, communist acolytes need to avoid the fatal conceit of assuming that communism has failed 20 or more times, “because it was not done correctly.” Everyone has said that, and yet the bodies keep piling up. New leftist luminaries are not smarter or better informed than the old communists. Indeed, our new leftists are far less informed and well read than the old guard. Moreover, the old communists were born into the context of European wars, political uprisings, and romantic era intellectualism. Karl Marx himself was a German Jew who studied in Berlin before he married a rich woman and moved to London, where he wrote his famous Communist Manifesto, which is not a book at all, but a 24 page pamphlet. Yet, our current leftist light weights do not appear to have even read the pamphlet, based on the gibberish that comes out of their mouths. There is zero chance that any experimentation with communism orchestrated by our current ill-informed , privileged, and thumb sucking leftists will end any better than the previous disasters. Millennials and other young people must reflect on all this before surrendering their personal freedoms and constitutional protections forever to another failed socialist experiment engineered by people like Bernie Sanders, Susan Rice, Barack Obama, AOC, and Patrisse Cullors (founder of Black Lives Matter and self-proclaimed Marxist).
By Paul H. Beattie
Notes from the Secular Right 