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In the age of social justice and other progressive creeds in prevailing Western discourse, the tragedies of millions of people in dozens of countries living under communist regimes are too often passed off as not being real communism.

While many still view communism as a noble philosophy that may yet be implemented given improvements in technology or human nature, its ideological foundations depict not a utopian dream but a necessarily violent and destructive teaching.

Since its emergence, communist ideologies have promoted violent revolution and brutal dictatorships far outstripping the worst excesses of non-communist governments. Today, the five communist regimes that still existChina, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, and Laosare among the worlds worst human rights offenders.

At the core of communism is the theory of class struggle between two main groupsthe working class, or proletariat, and the ownership class, or bourgeoisie, according to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

All past history was the history of class struggles; these warring classes of society are always the products of the modes of production and of exchange, wrote Engels in 1877.

The proponents of communist ideology typically used distorted and exaggerated language that radically inflamed any anger or resentment felt by members of the working class or other indigent members of society. In his epistolary exchanges, Marx frequently employed explicit profanity and racial slurs, attacking blacks and Jews among others.

Poster of Karl Marx in a Chinese rally in 1966. (AP Photo, File)

As one academic abstract notes, Marxs profane mode of literary production presents an inversion of bourgeois subjectivity which reveals that while faeces is simply natural, capital is in fact disgusting.

Employment was labeled slavery, while the relationship between employer and employee was labeled warfare. These uses pervert the conventional, neutral meanings of these words.

Marx and Engels considered the working class to be systematically exploited for their labor by the more powerful ownership class. They wanted to completely destroy this capitalist class.

We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things, wrote Marx in 1845.

These two representatives of communist theory focused narrowly on the difficult economic experiences of a single group of people. They brushed aside the fact that there are a wide variety of people at all social levels with both positive and negative behaviors and impacts on society, from philanthropists to criminals. Those classified as capitalists often worked hard in important leadership positions and had valuable experience in the production and distribution of essential goods and services.

As the record shows, communist leaders followed these theoretical precepts faithfully, waging actual warfare against designated classes and imposing actual slavery with the introduction of forced labor camps.

The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, reads the Communist Manifesto, the main text of communism, written by Marx and Engels.

Such property as businesses, land, bank accounts, housing and other assets, were to be confiscated by the working class and placed into public ownership.

The inherent contradiction is readily apparent. If ownership itself causes the exploitation of others, and the state becomes the sole owner of all the property and wealth in the entire nation, logically the state and its representatives are capable of exploiting their people. The property simply changed hands.

Soviet Gulag prisoners constructing a road in Kolyma, a Siberian camp where fatality rates could approach 100 percent. (Public Domain)

According to the article series Understanding Conflict and War, by R.J. Rummel, the creation of public property, whether nationalized industry or public lands, does not alter the social relationships creating classes and class conflict.

Under communist systems, Rummel added, property owned by the people is controlled by a few bureaucrats or managers who are given by the state authoritative control over the property.

For years, thosewho escaped communism have shared their experiences of revolutionary soldiers seizing the life savings of their families, or their only means of making a living. Many people lost ownership of their homes and were suddenly forced to pay rent to continue to live there.

Communist Party officials naturally became exactly what they had criticized and fought against. However, their actionsforcibly taking everything of value from everyone and conducting mass executionswere much worse than the crimes of the previous ownership class they claimed contributed to poverty.

Another idea central to communism is materialism. This philosophy holds that nothing exists except physical matter verified by scientific experimentation. This philosophy encouraged the abandonment of religion, spirituality, and morality as the manacles imposed by an oppressive class.

In this 1931 photo, the Church of Christ the Savior in Moscow is demolished to make way for the Palace of the Soviets, a skyscraper that was never completed. The church was rebuilt after the collapse of the Soviet Union. (Public Domain)

The philosophy of Marxism is materialism, wrote Soviet communist leader Vladimir Lenin in 1913.

Yet morality is a key component of human civilization, and it forms the basis of the modern idea of human rights. Actions that violate another persons rights are punished, since people can recognize they are inimical to civilized society.

Communism openly abandoned the concept of objective right and wrong, in order to justify its accusations against entire classes of people. The actions of an individual no longer mattered as much as his class background. Justiceceased to exist.

Arguably the most disturbing part of communist ideology is its embrace of ruthless violence in order to create and preserve a communist state. This is well-documented:

There is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror, according to Marx in 1848.

The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward, according to Engels in 1849.

The state is an instrument for coercion We want to organize violence in the name of the interests of the workers, according to Lenin in 1917.

Executed victims of the Soviet Cheka secret police in 1918 or 1919 in Kiev. (Public Domain)

Violence is common in any transfer of power or revolution, but this outright encouragement of revolutionary terror in communist ideology created a frenzy of killing on a massive scaleat least 100 million lives starting withthe Russian Revolution in 1917.

Entire categories of people were beaten, imprisoned, tortured, and executedsuch as land owners, landlords, business owners, lawyers, doctors, teachers, intellectuals, religious and spiritual leaders, those with right-leaning political views, anyone who opposed the communist takeover, and others that were merely swept up in the struggle.

The level of a regimes civilization can be measured by the degree to which it uses violence, states the Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party editorial series published by the Chinese-language edition of The Epoch Times

By resorting to the use of violence, the communist regimes clearly represent a huge step backward in the level of civilization.

Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely, wrote British historian Lord John Dalberg-Acton in 1887.

Communist theoreticians and revolutionaries thought differently. Marx described a dictatorship of the proletariat with the proletariat organized as the ruling class at the head of an egalitarian society.

In 1847, Marx wrote that the working class, in the course of its development, will substitute for the old civil society an association which will exclude classes and their antagonism, and there will be no more political power properly so-called, since political power is precisely the official expression of antagonism in civil society.

At this point, Marx argued that the state would start to wither away, and all social classes would disappear, because somehow the new rulers would be incapable of exploiting other people.

Results were always the opposite. This new ruling class consisted of normal human beings with both good and bad tendencies, who were certainly able to wield political power andrule as despots.

Soviet leaders Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin in 1922. Between them are the unnatural deaths of some 30 million people. (AFP/Getty Images)

Former working class members were thus promoted to membership in the ruling class, filling the power vacuum created by the violent revolution.The individuals who seized power were oftenthe least fit to hold it. They were rebels with an ideology that glorified violence and had little interest or competencein organizing or harmonizing complex social structures in every sphere of society. The Russian leftists and Bolshevik leaders who made possibleLenins victory in the revolution and civil warwere ruthlessly purged by the Soviet secret police; in China, many of Mao Zedongs closestcompanionsthe men who had led the outnumbered and outgunned Chinese Communist Party to govern all of the mainlandbecame victims of the chairmans crazed Cultural Revolution.

After the communist takeover of China in 1949, a civilization that once reveredscholarly accomplishment and steady administrationtransformed into a regime that despised learning and ruled by whimsical decrees and mass political movements. Many Chinese communist leaders were illiterate or semi-literate and found it difficult to communicate even through simple notes and letters.

As ideological and revolutionary fervor replaced independent thought and traditional order, starvation and poverty followed closely. The tens of millions starved to death in Soviet, Chinese, and countless other man-made famines are the crass testament to this.

With littlemoral inhibition or independent sense of justice, communist leaders continued to deceiveand manipulatethroughcontrol of the media and educational systemsto try to convince people everything was as it should be. Propaganda lay blame at the feet of external enemies, internal traitors, natural calamity, or even the masses themselves.

A Chinese poster in late 1966 showing how to deal with so-called enemy of the people during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. (Jean Vincent/AFP/Getty Images)

Communist countries have also arbitrarily subjected their citizens to artificial povertyhouse arrest, imprisonment, forced laboror even death for their thoughts or beliefs. Communist leaders took drastic measures to try to prevent people from escaping their systems, as the Berlin Wall did for over two decades.

In the Soviet Union, people who applied for visas were often persecuted, jailed, or placed in psychiatric wards. Even citizens traveling by train within the country were often required to show paperwork explaining the nature of their travel before buying a ticket. Something as simple as a road map became classified, so people could not easily find the border.

At this point, the new communist ruling class had actually acquired and concentrated every facet of power that existsall the force, all the wealth, and all the knowledge. Once absolute power had been achieved and the corruption of the most powerful communist leaders made them a powerful interest group, the goals of communist leadership quickly shifted to maintaining that power at all cost.

With the short-lived exception of the Cambodian Khmer Rouge regime, communist statesthat do not collapse undergo reforms to preserve one-party rule. In China, the worlds largest remaining communist country, the Party was willing to abandon direct central planning and embrace some capitalist economic practicesthe policy it terms socialism with Chinese characteristics.

Former Chinese Communist Party leader Deng Xiaoping (R) and his successor Jiang Zemin shake hands in October 1992. Deng launched Chinese capitalist transformation and Jiang built a sprawling factional network supported by the corruption endemic to the one-party state. (AFP/Getty Images)

Far from eliminating poverty, communist-controlled China has developed one of the worlds most serious income gaps. Hundreds of millions of Chinese live in povertyparticularly in the western and inland provincesand disenfranchised migrant workers form an underclass the size of the U.S. population. Meanwhile, Party cadres have lined their pockets with embezzled money and moved trillions to offshore banks and investments.

This is not a benevolent autocracy. This is a hard, relentless, unforgiving dictatorship near to an all-out totalitarian state, said Stein Ringen, a Norwegian political scientist and Oxford emeritus professor at a speech on China at USC on March 2.

From past to present, many have professed lofty goals about changing the world for the better. Communist movements around the world have extinguished liberty and imposed absolute dictatorship, ostensibly for the sake of equality and utopia.

But as Lord Acton noted, Men cannot be made good by the state, but they can easily be made bad. Morality depends on liberty.

Communism is estimated to have killed around 100 million people, yet its crimes have not been fully compiled and its ideology still persists. Epoch Times seeks to expose the history and beliefs of this movement, which has been a source of tyranny and destruction since it emerged.

See entire article series here

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The Dystopian Principles of Real Communism - The Epoch Times

The New York Times has a lengthy, melancholy essay celebrating the role of Communism in American life by Vivian Gornick. Its getting all of the predictable and mostly deserved blowback from conservatives.

As someone raised in anti-Communism, I expected to have a similar enraged reaction, but I have to say I found the piece almost touching. Almost.

Gornick writes:

Most Communists never set foot in party headquarters, laid eyes on a Central Committee member, or were privy to policy-making sessions. But every rank-and-filer knew that party unionists were crucial to the rise of industrial labor; party lawyers defended blacks in the South; party organizers lived, worked, and sometimes died with miners in Appalachia; farm workers in California; steel workers in Pittsburgh. What made it all real were the organizations the party built: the International Workers Order, the National Negro Congress, the Unemployment Councils. Whenever some new world catastrophe announced itself throughout the Depression and World War II, The Daily Worker sold out in minutes.

It is perhaps hard to understand now, but at that time, in this place, the Marxist vision of world solidarity as translated by the Communist Party induced in the most ordinary of men and women a sense of ones own humanity that ran deep, made life feel large; large and clarified. It was to this clarity of inner being that so many became not only attached, but addicted. No reward of life, no love nor fame nor wealth, could compete with the experience. It was this all-in-allness of world and self that, all too often, made of the Communists true believers who could not face up to the police state corruption at the heart of their faith, even when a 3-year-old could see that it was eating itself alive.

I think this is all a bit too rose-colored, but its not exactly wrong either. Lots of fairly ordinary Americans considered themselves Communists. The Communist Party did fight for civil rights and free speech in America. The individual lawyers and activists behind those efforts were no doubt often sincere. But whats left out of this telling is that they were cleared to do this sort of thing by the party bosses for the propaganda value. If you think Stalin and his apparatchiks gave a whit about civil rights or free speech in America, or anywhere else, youre ignorant or a fool.

One small example. The Smith Act was the heart of what would later be called McCarthyism. It allowed the Federal government to prosecute members of subversive organizations that sought the overthrow of the U.S. government. It was initially used and abused by FDR against alleged pro-Nazi elements during World War II, in what historian Leo Ribuffo called the Brown Scare. Later, it was used against Communists. The first Communists it was used against? Trotskyists (you know, the ones who actually supported a worldwide community of workers). And you know who supported these anti-Communist witch-hunts? The Stalinist pawns of the Communist Party of the United States. They named names and publicly supported the trials, because the first priority for the Communist Party was supporting Stalin, not workers liberation or any of the stuff Ms. Gornick rhapsodizes over.

Lenin supposedly called Western intellectuals who supported the Soviet Union useful idiots (though theres some doubt whether he actually used the term). The people Ms. Gornick describes werent intellectuals, but they were dupes. Probably, or at least possibly, decent on the whole, but fools nonetheless. It was hardly as if one needed to be a member of the CPUSA to support labor unions or civil rights. Just ask Norman Thomas.

Gornick concludes at the end:

I was 20 years old in April 1956 when Nikita Khrushchev addressed the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party and revealed to the world the incalculable horror of Stalins rule. Night after night the people at my fathers kitchen table raged or wept or sat staring into space. I was beside myself with youthful rage. Lies! I screamed at them. Lies and treachery and murder. And all in the name of socialism! In the name of socialism! Confused and heartbroken, they pleaded with me to wait and see, this couldnt be the whole truth, it simply couldnt be. But it was.

The 20th Congress report brought with it political devastation for the organized left around the world. Within weeks of its publication, 30,000 people in this country quit the party, and within the year it was as it had been in its 1919 beginnings: a small sect on the American political map.

The effective life of the Communist Party in the United States was approximately 40 years in length. Hundreds of thousands of Americans were Communists at one time or another during those 40 years. Many of these people endured social isolation, financial and professional ruin, and even imprisonment. They were two generations of Americans whose lives were formed by political history as were no other American lives save those of the original Revolutionists. History is in them and they are in history.

Yes, some of those people suffered imprisonment, in no small part thanks to the treachery of the Communists themselves. Others suffered because they were part of an organization that was expressly hostile to the United States of America and in the service of a regime that murdered millions while claiming to be a champion of civil rights. I can appreciate Ms. Gornicks nostalgia, but as Robert Nisbet said, nostalgia is the rust of memory. 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 Stalins mass murder or of Soviet espionage but the victims of their own stupidity.

Update: A reader made a point that was gnawing in the back of my head that I should have made above. If you really had to wait for Kruschevs1956 speech to be disillusioned with Communism, you really were pretty deep in the bunker. The Nazi Soviet Pact in 1939 removed illusions for many Communists nearly two decades earlier. If your faith in Communism kept you in the Party after that (or, say, the assassination of Trotsky), you really dont deserve any sympathy for your later disappointment or for your alleged idealism.

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The Times' Postcard for Communism - National Review

FrontPage Magazine

Celebrating Communism at the New York Times FrontPage Magazine The New York Times commemorated the Communist holiday in its own way with an essay by Vivian Gornick, now eighty-one, a card-carrying member of the old New York intellectual crowd and author of a 2011 biography of anarchist heroine Emma ...

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Celebrating Communism at the New York Times - FrontPage Magazine

Today, May 1, is -- as we all have heard repeatedly -- International Workers' Day. It's instructive -- if not very informative -- to look at al Jazeera's take on it.

In dozens of countries, May Day is an official holiday, and for labour rights campaigners it is particularly important.

In the United States, it is symbolic of past labour struggles against a host of workers' rights violations, including lengthy work days and weeks, poor conditions and child labour.

Of course, starting in the '20s, and eventually formalized in the '50s, the United States made it Loyalty Day. Also Law Day. We've already seen how Loyalty Day has suddenly become a Big Deal this year, so I won't repeat myself. But May 1 is also suggested as a commemorative day for another, much darker, reason. Ilya Somin has been campaigning for years to have May 1 declared Victims of Communism Day.

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Remember the VICTIMS of Communism on May Day! - PJ Media

After Pope Francis early in his papacy decried capitalism as trickle-down economics a polemical phrase coined by the left during the Reagan years that Francis frequently borrows radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh commented, This is just pure Marxism coming out of the mouth of the Pope. Talk show host Michael Savage called him Lenins pope. Pope Francis took such comments as a compliment. I have met many Marxists in my life who are good people, so I dont feel offended, he told the Italian press.

Pope Francis grew up in socialist Argentina, an experience that left a deep impression on his thinking. He told the Latin American journalists Javier Camara and Sebastian Pfaffen that as a young man he read books of the Communist Party that my boss in the laboratory gave me and that there was a period where I would wait anxiously for the newspaperLa Vanguardia, which was not allowed to be sold with the other newspapers and was brought to us by the socialist militants.

The boss to whom Pope Francis referred is Esther Ballestrino de Careaga. He has described her as a Paraguayan woman and a fervent communist. He considers her one of his most important mentors. I owe a huge amount to that great woman, he has said, saying that she taught me so much about politics. (He worked for her as an assistant at Hickethier-Bachmann Laboratory in Buenos Aires.)

She often read Communist Party texts to me and gave them to me to read. So I also got to know that very materialistic conception. I remember that she also gave me the statement from the American Communists in defense of the Rosenbergs, who had been sentenced to death, he has said. Learning about communism, he said, through a courageous and honest person was helpful. I realized a few things, an aspect of the social, which I then found in the social doctrine of the Church. As the archbishop of Buenos Aires, he took pride in helping her hide the familys Marxist literature from the authorities who were investigating her. According to the author James Carroll, Bergoglio smuggled her communist books, including MarxsDas Kapital, into a Jesuit library.

Tragically, Ballestrino herself disappeared at the hands of security forces in 1977, reported Vatican correspondent John Allen. Almost three decades later, when her remains were discovered and identified, Bergoglio gave permission for her to be buried in the garden of a Buenos Aires church called Santa Cruz, the spot where she had been abducted. Her daughter requested that her mother and several other women be buried there because it was the last place they had been as free people. Despite knowing full well that Ballestrino was not a believing Catholic, the future pope readily consented.

These biographical details throw light on the popes ideological instincts. Yet many commentators have ignored them, breezily casting his leftism as a bit confused but basically harmless.

I must say that communists have stolen our flag. The flag of the poor is Christian, he said in 2014.Such a comment would have startled his predecessors. They didnt see communism as a benign exaggeration. They saw it as a grave threat to God-given freedom, as it proposes that governments eliminate large swaths of individual freedom, private property and business in order to produce the equality of a society without economic classes.

In the early twentieth century, as Marxs socialism spread across the world, Pope Pius XI declared the theory anathema. No one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist, he said. To hear Pope Francis speak today, one might conclude the reverse: that no can be at the same time a good Catholic and an opponent of socialism.

Inequality is the root of all evil, Pope Francis wrote on his Twitter account in 2014.One can imagine Karl Marx blurting that out, but none of Franciss predecessors would have made such an outrageous claim. According to traditional Catholic theology, the root of all evil came not from inequality but from Satans refusal to accept inequality. Out of envy of Gods superiority, Satan rebelled. He could not bear his lesser status.

He was in effect the first revolutionary, which is why the socialist agitator Saul Alinsky a mentor to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton (who did her senior thesis at Wellesley on his thought) offered an acknowledgment in his book,Rules for Radicals, to Satan. Alinsky saw him as the first champion of the have nots.

Were the 20th-century English Catholic satirist Evelyn Waugh alive today, he would find the radical left-wing political flirtations of Pope Francis too bitterly farcical even for fiction. Could a satirist like Waugh have imagined a pope happily receiving from a Latin American despot the gift of a crucifix shaped in the form of a Marxist hammer and sickle? That surreal scene happened during Pope Franciss visit to Bolivia in July 2015.

Evo Morales, Bolivias proudly Marxist president, offered the pontiff that sacrilegious image of Jesus Christ. Morales described the gift as a copy of a crucifix designed by a late priest, Fr. Luis Espinal, who belonged to the Jesuit order (as does Pope Francis) and had committed his life to melding Marxism with religion. Pope Francis had honored Espinals memory upon his arrival in Bolivia.

Had John Paul II or Pope Benedict XVI seen such a grotesque cross, they might have broken it over their knees. Not Pope Francis. He accepted the hammer-and-sickle cross warmly, telling the press on the plane ride back to Rome that I understand this work and that for me it wasnt an offense. After the visit, Morales gushed, I feel like now I have a Pope. I didnt feel that before.

George Neumayr is the author of The Political Pope: How Pope Francis Is Delighting the Liberal Left and Abandoning Conservatives, to be released Tuesday by Center Street.

See the article here:
Pope Francis's Communist Mentor | The American Spectator - American Spectator