Ottawa Sun | Victims of Communism memorial can help unite Canadians, rather ... Ottawa Sun This week, the minister of heritage announced the five finalists for the Canadian Memorial to the Victims of Communism. Canada's Victims of Communism memorial moves ahead |
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Victims of Communism memorial can help unite Canadians, rather ... - Ottawa Sun
In the 1980s conservatives had their champion. The man that would lead them to glory, after years of feeling ignored. After the perceived weakness of President Carter over the previous four years, a new man was in charge. The United States wouldnt be pushed around anymore.
His name was Ronald Reagan, his mission; destroy communism.
With the Soviet Union already in a state of decline economically and militarily, their influence was dwindling but still in place. Upon the death of Leonid Brezhnev in 1982, and two forgettable leaders who died quickly after taking office in between, Mikhail Gorbachev became the new General Secretary in March of 1985.
Gorbachev and Reagan had a relationship that developed into a vision of change..
Whether it was because the Soviet Unions decline was unstoppable or the way Reagan outshined and embarrassed the General Secretary at the Reykjavik summit, many of Gorbachevs citizens considered him weak. This perceived weakness was a driving force to the August 1991 coup dtat by Soviet military hardliners. Even though the coup was put down in a matter of days and Gorbachev returned to power, the event marked the final piece of destabilization and the end of the USSR.
Gorbachev and Reagan had a relationship that developed into a vision of change. Reagan saw the dangers in communism and the need to wipe it from the face of the earth. However, he knew to do it militarily was a no win situation for the two nations and the world as a whole. Gorbachev to his credit became the reformer that the Soviet people needed, whether they were all aware of it or not.
Growing up in the 80s I remember the change in atmosphere. From the belief that the Soviets were our mortal enemies and ready to nuke us at any moment, to eventually Americans developing admiration for the Soviet leader and having a desire to see him succeed in bringing Russia to the new century. From enemies to virtual allies in a little over a decade. The relationship was still fragile but at least it was becoming friendlier.
Over the next two decades, both nations stayed in a constant state of change and to an extent, unrest. In the early 2000s Vladimir Putin began to cement himself as the sole ruler of the Russian government. His tactics, policies, beliefs, and words all reminded the world of an old-school Soviet militant. At home, we faced unending foreign war, near economic collapse, and a nation divided both politically and socially.
The election of President Obama in 2008 was a moment that marked a change in America. How we dealt with other countries, allies and adversaries alike. His foreign policy was measured and constrained, to a fault in the eyes of many. His cautiousness was often mistaken for weakness. His understanding that US policy often had serious adverse effects on other nations made many call him anti-American. Coupled with the fact the wars he had been handed werent traditional military actions and an economy in an uncontrollable nose dive, gave many the excuse to blame all the ills they faced on him.
Many who in the past had been solid communist haters, were now saying positive things about Putin. He was a better leader; he knows more; he doesnt mess around, were all part of the new narrative. Mostly these comments were derived from their hatred for Obama, but over time they began to believe them. What they were really saying is that they wanted a hardline authoritarian to lead the US. They wanted someone who would use the military as his foreign policy arm. They liked the idea of someone who crushed his opposition at home so easily and viciously.
They were craving a ruler, someone that would single-handedly make all their problems disappear. Someone who would tell them that the problems they faced were not of their own accord but because of outside influence. Desperately needing validation for their beliefs and biases. Wanting to be able to shed responsibility for their failures, while at the same time denyingany hatred in their hearts.
Enter 2016.
In many ways, history has repeated itself with the election of President Trump. While Reagan denied a second Carter term; Trump, in the eyes of many, halted a potential Obama third term. The policies and approach of Hillary Clinton were expected to be similar to that of Obamas. Reagan came in on a wave of revived patriotism and an America first message. While focusing on the threats to our way of life from outside forces and the lack of intestinal fortitude of the current administration, real or imagined, to do anything to halt it. For Reagan, it was Iran and the Soviets, for Trump its Muslims and the Mexico.
From building a border wall to destroying ISIS in 30 days, Donald Trump was saying exactly what many needed so desperately to hear.
From building a border wall to destroying ISIS in 30 days, Donald Trump was saying exactly what many needed so desperately to hear. It didnt matter if any of the things he said or promised were feasible, it was about his willingness to say them. Even if he didnt accomplish any of them, they believed he was going to try to do all of them. Their champion had arrived.
This champion was different than Reagan though. Where Reagan despised the philosophy of the Soviet, Trump seemed to understand it differently, going as far as to say that Putin was a far better leader than Obama. Now VP Mike Pence said at the time in defense of Trumps remarks that I think its inarguable that Vladimir Putin has been a stronger leader in his country than Barack Obama has been in this country.
With Trumps continuous war with the media and the seemingly unending parade of questionable Russian ties to administration officials, you would think that conservatives would begin to question their champion. That isnt whats happening at all if anything they are becoming more solidified in their support.
As I look at this country I grew up in; I must begin to question what the heck is going on. Why are we suddenly ok with someone, whom conservative pundit Bill OReilly calls a killer, and Senate Majority Leader McConnell calls a thug, being intimately involved with the process and function of our government? How did we go from a nation that elects a man like Reagan who hated every tenet of communism to electing someone from the same party who admires a leader like Putin? The same Putin that holds dear so many cold war values.
This nations acceptance to be ruled is shocking.
This nations acceptance to be ruled is shocking. The desire to have personal responsibility replaced with government control is sickening. I am immediately reminded of a quote from Reagan himself that I think addresses what we are going through, Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didnt pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same. In the almost 30 years since he left office, America has indeed changed.
My hope is that my more conservative friends will come to their senses and understand the actual threat we face. That they will demand accountability from our elected leaders, no matter who they are. I want my liberal friends to do the same. We have to stop looking at the person and the party and focus on the policy. Quit just trying to win and start trying to understand the other side.
If not the next overlord we choose will simply bring more destruction to the American experiment. Remember the words of Ben Franklin we will only have this republic if you can keep it.
Photo:Getty Images
I am the Politics Editor for The Good Men Project. I am a married father of three boys that keep me on my toes. We are transplants to Surprise Arizona, originally from the deep south. I was raised in the Birmingham Alabama area and have a love for all things southern, especially if they are fried! When I'm not writing or chasing kids, I am an avid sports nut, with an unhealthy love for the Alabama Crimson Tide and the Green Bay Packers. I put off writing for entirely too long, so I finally decided to put my words out in public with the hope that somewhere, someone may be encouraged or comforted by them. You can find me on Twitter or on Facebook
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From Defeating Communism to Embracing Totalitarianism - The Good Men Project (blog)
BombThrowers: Over the years we have been overwhelmed with extraordinary movies and documentaries about the Holocaust and the various atrocities of Nazi Germany. These horrific crimes against humanity deserve to be examined over and over again so they are never repeated.
But we see so little about the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) which killed more people than Hitler did, rivaled the repressive state apparatus of Nazi Germany, and easily outlasted the so-called Thousand-Year Reich. There have been plenty of movies about what Communism did to human beings but there has never been a Schindlers List (1993) at least not in English for the victims of Communism. Schindlers List, for anyone who has never seen it, is a masterpiece. It is a powerful, deeply moving, widely embraced account of the suffering of Jews in the Krakow Ghetto and then in the death camps.
The many victims of Nazism have been depicted and honored as they should be over and over again.
But the tens of millions of people murdered by Communism have not. It is long past time for a true cinematic masterpiece to show the brutal ravages of Communism.
Perhaps the fact it hasnt been done has something to do with the fact that during World War II the USSR was our ally so it was treated with kid gloves by American cinema. The Hollywood Left was not keen on portraying Communism honestly during the Cold War. If anything, movies like Reds (1981) romanticized Communism to an extent.
There have been movies that offer, to varying degrees, honest appraisals of life under Communism.
There was Child 44 (2015), a police procedural about a serial killer set in the Stalin-era Soviet Union. There was The Way Back in 2010 which showed the horrors of Communist repression from the point of view of gulag prisoners in Siberia who escape and walk thousands of miles to freedom.
There was The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1998) which shows what happened to Czechoslovakia when it was invaded in 1968 by the Soviet Union and three of its allies. There was The Inner Circle in 1991 which tells [t]he true story of Ivan Sanchin, the KGB officer who was Stalins private film projectionist from 1939 until the dictators death. There was The Killing Fields (1984), about a journalist trapped in Cambodia during tyrant Pol Pots bloody Year Zero cleansing campaign, which claimed the lives of two million undesirable civilians.
There was Doctor Zhivago (1965) which was set during the Bolshevik Revolution and shows some Communist repression. There was The Manchurian Candidate (1962) which tells the story of a former prisoner of war who is brainwashed as an unwitting assassin for an international Communist conspiracy.
But again, no true masterpieces dealing with Communism.
There is a new film called Bitter Harvest that looks like it might do some justice to the story of Communist persecution and the deliberate famine Stalin engineered in Ukraine, which was viewed as a hotbed of counter-revolutionary opposition by Stalin.
Here is a trailer for it:
According to the films page at IMDb, Bitter Harvest, is set in 1930s Ukraine, as Stalin advances the ambitions of communists in the Kremlin. A young artist named Yuri battles to save his lover Natalka from the Holodomor, the death-by-starvation program that ultimately killed millions of Ukrainians.
The blurb for the movie on YouTube is more expansive.
Based on one of the most overlooked tragedies of the 20th Century, BITTER HARVEST is a powerful story of love, honor, rebellion and survival as seen through the eyes of two young lovers caught in the ravages of Joseph Stalins genocidal policies against Ukraine in the 1930s. As Stalin advances the ambitions of the burgeoning Soviet Union, a young artist named Yuri (Max Irons) battles to survive famine, imprisonment and torture to save his childhood sweetheart Natalka (Samantha Barks) from the Holodomor, the death-by-starvation program which ultimately killed millions of Ukrainians. Against this tragic backdrop, Yuri escapes from a Soviet prison and joins the anti-Bolshevik resistance movement as he battles to reunite with Natalka and continue the fight for a free Ukraine.
Nobody knows much, if anything, about the Holodomor.
As journalist Eric Margolis wrote last year, Stalin was the biggest murderer of modern history and maybe in of all mankinds past. His number of victims was only rivaled by Genghis Khan and, in our era, Mao Zedong.
He continued:
From 1918 to the late 1950s (Stalin died in 1953), an estimated 20 million or more Soviet citizens were worked to death, shot or starved in the 500 camps that made up the Gulag. The most infamous and lethal were in the Arctic Circle and eastern Siberia.
The greatest number of deaths occurred in the 1930s when Stalins reign of terror was at its apogee. By the end of the 1930s, the Gulag held close to 2 million inmates, about half political prisoners convicted on false charges. Millions of other Soviet citizens were starved in local prisons, shot in execution grounds or forests, and worked to death building canals and rail lines or forced to mine with their bare hands.
During 1932-33, Stalin sent chief henchman Lazar Kaganovitch to break resistance by Ukrainian independent small farmers to collectivization by starving them to death. In only a few years, some 6-7 million Ukrainians perished in what they call the Holodomor. No one was ever punished for this historic crime. Stalin told Churchill, Kaganovitch is my Himmler.
Will Bitter Harvest, which is now in the theaters (I havent seen any ads on television about it) help to open the floodgates to a great, long overdue truth-telling about Communism? Its hard to say. It looks promising but I havent seen it yet.
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Will the movie Bitter Harvest do justice to the evils of Communism? - Canada Free Press
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By Joshua Philipp, Epoch Times and John Nania, Epoch Times
People naturally look for a path to follow. During times ancient and modern, human beingshave looked for a way forward to become healthier, happier, and better in all ways.
Communism is not a path that offers a way forward. A path can be judged by its fruits, and by the character of its leading figures.
Communism has been tried for more than 100 years by hundreds of millions of people, and the results are always the same: Its fruits are death, destruction, and despair.
Its leading figures were cynical and sly men who masked their hatred of humanity with high-sounding words. By any measure, they were as dark and sinister as could be.
It was at the crossroads of history, with the rise of industrialization and the decline of monarchs, when mankind was offered a Faustian bargain: Abandon your traditions and morals, and enter a new age. The promise was heaven on earth, and the cost was to partake in a movement to destroy morals and religious beliefand to destroy anyone who stood against this new future.
Karl Marx. (Creative Commons/Wikimedia)
The ideas of communism, and the various schools of thought at its foundation, had already seeped deeply into the societies of Europe ahead of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia. Provocateurs presented it as a way out of the suffering of this worldwith dreamy tales of an end to poverty and hunger, and a future of earthly delights.
Behind the offer were other intentions, however, and these are made clear by looking at the histories of Karl Marx and others credited with laying the foundations of communism.
In his early poem Invocation of One in Despair, Marx wrote about his will to create a new system. He states: So a god has snatched from me my all /Nothing but revenge is left to me!
To exact this revenge, Marx states in the poem that he will build [his] throne high overhead. Of this throne, he writes: Cold, tremendous shall its summit be./For its bulwarksuperstitious dread,/For its Marshallblackest agony./Who looks on it with a healthy eye,/Shall turn back, struck deathly pale and dumb;/Clutched by blind and chill Mortality/May his happiness prepare its tomb.
Marx had many similar writings, many of which suggest his goal in using communism was never to help humanity, but instead to enact a sort of vengeance against heaven.
In his 1839 play Oulanem, believed to be named for a backward pronunciation of Emmanuel, an alternative biblical name for God, Marxbegins with, Ruined! Ruined! My time has clean run out! The clock has stopped, the pygmy house has crumbled. Soon I shall embrace eternity to my breast, and soon I shall howl gigantic curses at mankind. If there is a Something which devours, Ill leap within it, though I bring the world to ruinsthe world which bulks between me and the abyss, I will smash to pieces with my enduring curses.
In the book The Making of Modern Economics, Mark Skousen writes that a pact with the devil is a central theme in Oulanem, and the play reveals a number of violent and eccentric characters. Skousen notes that Marxs fixation with self-destructive behavior was prevalent through most of his life.
Just like his character Oulanem, Marx shows in his writings a desire to not only destroy himself, but to destroy humankind along with him.
In his 1841 poem The Player (also translated as The Fiddler), Marx writes, Look now, my blood-dark sword shall stab/Unerringly within thy soul./God neither knows nor honors art./The hellish vapors rise and fill the brain/Till I go mad and my heart is utterly changed. He continues, See this swordthe Prince of Darkness sold it to me, and, Ever more boldly I play the dance of death.
A Khmer Rouge soldier waves his pistol and orders store owners to abandon their shops in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, on April 17, 1975, as the capital fell to the communist forces. A large portion of the citys population was forced to evacuate. (AP Photo/Christoph Froehder)
An analysis of the above poem from biographer Robert Payne, in his 1968 book Marx, states, Marx is here celebrating a satanic mystery, for the player is clearly Lucifer or Mephistopheles [a Faustian devil], and what he is playing with such frenzy is the music which accompanies the end of the world.
He continues, Marx clearly enjoyed the horrors he depicted, and we shall find him enjoying in very much the same way the destruction of whole classes in the Communist Manifesto. He was a man with a peculiar faculty for relishing disaster.
There can be very little doubt that those interminable stories were autobiographical, wrote Payne. [Marx] had the Devils view of the world, and the Devils malignity. Sometimes he seemed to know that he was accomplishing works of evil.
However bizarre Marxs early writings were, his stated claims and goals were not far from the reality of what he created: a system that in a single century took an unprecedented number of lives. Estimates vary, but according to combined research from historians, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Jung Chang, and Jon Halliday, and numbers collected by The Black Book of Communism, published by Harvard University Press in 1999, the number is close to 150 million deaths.
What Marx and Friedrich Engels set forth in The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848, was an ideology based on struggle that, according to its own words, abolishes all religion, and all morality. They regarded their beliefs as being absolutethe end of human progressand set forth a proposal that all other beliefs should be destroyed through violent revolution.
They based their version of communism in the concept of dialectical materialism, the absolute idea that all development comes through struggle and that life is nothing more than matter. An effect of this belief has been a disregard for human life under all communist leaders.
In 1906, Vladimir Lenin wrote in Proletary magazine that his interest was in armed struggle, aimed at assassinating individuals, chiefs, and subordinates in the army and police, as well asseizing money from governments and individuals.
After taking power in 1917, Lenin followed through on these concepts. Tens of thousands of people were arrested for opposing the new regimemany of whom were tortured and executed en masse.
Children during a Stalin-era famine in Ukraine. The famine, known as the Holodomor, took place between 1932 and 1933. (Public Domain)
Lenin and his followers decided to eliminate, by legal and physical means, any challenge or resistance, even if passive, to their absolute power, according to The Black Book of Communism.
This strategy applied not only to groups with opposing political views, but also to such social groups as the nobility, the middle class, the intelligentsia, and the clergy, as well as professional groups such as military officers and the police, it states.
Lenin also forbade private property, and peasants throughout Russia had their food seized by the state. Lenin set strict quotas on how much was to be confiscated, and when he saw the numbers go unmet, he ordered that even seeds should be seized.
With peasants unable to plant new crops, and without a surplus of food for the winter, a man-made famine swept Russia between 1921 and 1922. According to the Hoover Institute, the famine killed between 5 million and 10 million people.
Lenin was overjoyed. According to The Black Book of Communism, one of his friends later recalled that Lenin had the courage to come out and say openly that famine would have numerous positive results, since he claimed it would bring about the next stage more rapidly, and usher in socialism, the stage that necessarily followed capitalism.
Famine would also destroy faith not only in the tsar, he added, but in God too.
Soviet historian Richard Pipes wrote in his book The Unknown Lenin that Lenin brought about the famine intentionally. He stated, For humankind at large, Lenin had nothing but scorn.
Peasants stand in front of human remains. Cannibalism was widespread during the Russian famine between 1921 and 1922. (Creative Commons/Wikimedia)
He said Lenin had almost no interest in the lives of individual people, and he treated the working class much as a metal worker treated iron ore.
History repeated itself under Josef Stalin, following the death of Lenin on Jan. 21, 1924. Stalin began his 29-year rule of the Soviet Union by consolidating his power and having his rivals arrested or executed.
In 1929, Stalin launched a program under the banner of collectivism, to not only take farmers belongings, but to also seize their land and destroy their ability to sell produce. He sent the Red Army to confiscate their belongings, including their farming equipment.
A famine again swept the country. In Ukraine, between 7 million and 10 million people were killed, according to United Nations estimates published in November 2003. In Kazakhstan, an estimated 1.5 million people starved, according to theWilson Center. Meanwhile, farmers who opposed Stalins collectivism program were labeled kulaks (Russian for fists), and tens of thousands were rounded up and executed. Stalin also used this opportunity to strike out at enemies of his revolution, which included priests and devout religious believers.
Josef Stalin (Public Domain)
As did Lenin, Stalin later declared the program a success. Through these movements and others that followed, Solzhenitsyn, a renowned Russian novelist and historian, estimated that Stalin killed 60 million to 66 million people.
The bloody legacy of Stalin was only surpassed by that of Mao Zedong, head of the Chinese Communist Party. Under a similar program of collectivism, Mao started his Great Leap Forward in 1958, and through various means managed to also trigger a famine that, in four years, killed at least 45 million people,according to Maos Great Famine by Hong Kong-based historian Frank Dikotter.
Cannibalism was also common during this famine. Materials uncovered by Chinese and Western scholars, and by The Washington Post in 1994, give glimpses into what took place: In Damiao commune, Chen Zhangying and her husband Zhao Xizhen killed and boiled their 8-year-old son Xiao Qing and ate him; and, In Wudian commune, Wang Lanying not only picked up dead people to eat, but also sold two jin [2.2 pounds] from their bodies as pork.
Just like Stalin and Lenin, Mao excused these deaths, according to research from religious author and historian Harun Yahya. Mao and his supporters regarded the famine as punishment for villagers not being sufficiently obedient to the Chinese Communist Party.
Communist Party cadres hang a placard on the neck of a Chinese man during the Cultural Revolution. The words on the placard states the mans name and accuse him of being a member of the black class. (Public Domain)
Just a year prior to the Great Leap Forward, in 1957, Mao held his Hundred Flowers campaign, when he invited intellectuals to present their criticisms of his regime, then used their criticisms as admissions of guilt. According to Red Holocaust by Steven Rosefielde, Mao labeled the estimated 550,000 intellectuals as rightists and then had them humiliated, fired, imprisoned, tortured, or killed.
In the book Mao: The Unknown Story, authors and historians Chang and Halliday show Mao was responsible for at least 70 million deaths.
Under communist regimes, and their ideology of struggle, people were turned against each other. Children reported on their parents, students beat and tortured their teachers, young people were turned against the elderly, and neighbors were turned against neighbors.
One of Marxs partners in the First International, Mikhail Bakunin, wrote, The Evil One is the satanic revolt against divine authority, revolt in which we see the fecund germ of all human emancipations, the revolution. Socialists recognize each other by the words In the name of the one to whom a great wrong has been done, according to the book Marx and Satan by Richard Wurmbrand.
In this revolution we will have to awaken the Devil in the people, to stir up the basest passions, Bakunin wrote. Our mission is to destroy, not to edify.
This concept was seen clearly in the effects of communism, as it worked by first breaking peoples spirits through famine, then jarring them with public executions and harassmentall of which worked to turn people away from their morals and beliefs.
A man and woman with body parts of children in front of them, whom they had partially eaten. A famine in Russia between 1921 and 1922 is estimated to have killed 5 million to 10 million people. (Public Domain)
According to The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism, 19181924 by Bruno Cabanes, this was seen immediately after Lenin took power.
These peasant wars unleashed demons on both sides: the Communists against the hoarders and enemies of the people; the villagers against all symbols of collectivization, Cabanes wrote.
During the famine under Stalin, there were cases of people cannibalizing human corpses, and of people kidnapping children to cannibalize. An infamous image from this time shows a Russian couple standing over the bodies of children they had partially eaten.
Similar acts of cannibalism were recorded under Maos Great Leap Forward, and Mao took the acts of turning people against one another a step further with additional social movements. Under his Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, children beat their own parents, students stopped and questioned people on the street about the teachings of Maoand subsequently beat them for incorrect answersand teachers, landlords, and intellectuals were hunted and publicly shamed or worse by Maos militant group, the Red Guards.
Mao branded himself as being superhuman, with posters and portraits of him hung throughout China.
The Cultural Revolution destroyed or damaged vast quantities of the physical components of traditional culture, such as artwork, temples, museums, and written works. It also left a spiritual void, as the Chinese people lost connection with their own history and the legacy of 5,000 years of Chinese civilization, with its rich traditions of Buddhism and Daoism.
Mao Zedong in Yanan in the 1930s. (Creative Commons/Wikimedia)
Michael Walsh, author of The Devils Pleasure Palace, noted in a phone interview that Marxs writings mirror the story of Lucifer in John Miltons Paradise Lost, in which, realizing he cant defeat God, he comes up with an alternative plan for vengeance by destroying the creations of God.
Its that notion of transcendence that communism plays on, but never succeeded at. It wants death, and it creates death. Death is the end of every communist system, and it is the goal of Satan, Walsh said.
What communism is, is a revenge of the losers. It plays on peoples aggrievement and their want for revenge, he said. Marx was the biggest loser ever. He was a bum who preyed on his friends. He was insane. Its a cult of insanity, of aggrievement and vengeance.
Walsh said the values at the heart of religion are something shared in nearly all societies throughout historyand that communism played on this same innate root to manipulate humankind. Everybody wants to be the hero of their own narrative, he said.
[Communism] uses less admirable traits in humanity, like jealousy, to engage you in revolutionevery young person wants to be a revolutionary against the established orderin order to get what you want, Walsh said. If it says from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs, suddenly nobody has any abilities and everybody has lots of needs. Thats the flaw in the argument.
Tibetan woman being condemned in a communist struggle session in 1958. (Creative Commons/Wikimedia)
Communism capitalized on humankinds desire for higher purpose, and did so by destroying religion and placing itself at the helm instead.
According to The White Nights by Dr. Boris Sokoloff, in October 1919, Lenin visited the scientist Ivan Pavlov, known for his conditioned reflex experiments on animals, and Lenin borrowed these animal training methods to likewise train people under the Soviet education system.
Sokoloff wrote that Lenins belief was that by conditioning his reflexes, man can be standardized, can be made to think and act according to the pattern required. Lenin said in place of individualism, I want the masses of Russia to follow a Communistic pattern of thinking and reacting.
Wherever the ideas of communism have been adopted, traditional religions have always been among their first targets for destruction. This held just as true under the Soviet Union, which suppressed the Russian Orthodox Church and Catholicism, as it does today under the Chinese Communist Party, which suppresses Western religions as well as Buddhism and Daoism.
The Black Book of Communism gives unofficial estimates of the death tolls from communist regimes elsewhere, including 1 million in Vietnam, 2 million in Cambodia, 1.7 million in Africa, 1.5 million in Afghanistan, 1 million in Eastern Europe, and 150,000 in Latin America. It estimates international communist movements and parties not in power were responsible for close to 10,000 deaths.
Buddhist statues are incinerated in an event that was repeated countless times during Chinas Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. Communist regimes aim to destroy existing traditional cultures, especially religions and their artifacts. (Public Domain)
In Marx and Satan, Wurmbrand posed a question, one raised by many: After religion and culture are destroyed, what is left? The simple answer is that whats left is a people stripped of their ability of self-control, and with that, their ability of self-governance. It creates people who look to no higher power than that of their state leaders and who see no higher ideals than those of the state. The people then become dependent on the state.
This abandonment of morals was also at the foundation of the brutality of the communist leaders and their devout followerswithout a belief in a soul, in the traditional ideas of good and evil, or the ideas of a heaven or a hell, their only ambition was the ambition of the Party, and the ideas of right and wrong were boiled down to supporting or opposing the revolution. Without a belief that good and evil have consequences, the leaders and supporters of communism have carried out atrocity after atrocity.
Vladimir Lenin. (Public Domain)
Later in his life, Lenin was credited as saying, as Wurmbrand notes, The state does not function as we desired. How does it function? The car does not obey. A man is at the wheel and seems to lead it, but the car does not drive in the desired direction. It moves as another force wishes.
Lenin later went mad, but he had a moment of clarity on his deathbed, according to Wurmbrand, when he told his wife, I committed a great error. My nightmare is to have the feeling that Im lost in an ocean of blood from the innumerable victims. It is too late to return. To save our country, Russia, we would have needed men like Francis of Assisi [a Catholic saint]. With 10 men like him, we would have saved Russia.
There was a grim joke among readers of the Soviet Unions state-controlled newspaper Pravda (Russian for truth) that reveals an underlying theme: The only thing thats true in todays newspaper is the date.
Communism has proved to be a grand deception, a con job in human history.
The theory is bad, and every implementation of the theory has been destructive to life and morality, starting with the Paris Commune, gathering speed with the Soviet Union, and continuing today in China.
After more than 140 years of communism in practice, we can certainly judge communism by its fruits, rather than by what it claimed it would do.
No rational human beingwould follow such a path.
Humanity can breathe freely when Marxs evil specter of communism, sooner or later, leaves the planet.
Communismepoch timesKarl Marxpath forward
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Communism: The Dead-End Path - The Libertarian Republic
Fresh from his Brexit victory over Brussels, Conservative MEP and thinker Daniel Hannan now has Communism in his sights organising an ACRE conference next month in Tirana, Albaniaon the legacy of state socialism for Europe.
EURACTIV.coms Matt Tempest met him for a discussion ranging across the 1968s Prague Spring, first loves, enforced secularism, Che Guevara and the Dunblane handgun ban.
Mr Hannan, youre organising a conference on the legacy of communism and its to coincide with the centenary of the Bolshevik revolution. But it seems to me that anybody who can remember a communist government in Europe must be at least 40 years old and no communist party is in government or even poised to take power anywhere across Europe. So it has to be asked: why now?
Its exactly the centenary year. So 100 years since the beginning of what has to be reckoned, mathematically, the most murderous ideology ever devised by human intelligence. But I think this is an argument that we have to have in every generation. Youre right, there is not a communist regime still standing in Europe and most communist parties have transformed themselves into something else. But the argument has to be held again in every generation.
I read a poll last month that a third of American millennials think that more people were murdered by George W. Bush than by Stalin. When you see those idiotic Che Guevara t-shirts when people unconsciously adopt Marxist language about the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, very few people realise that theyre indirectly quoting him. You realise that this is something that goes very deep and you need to show that this is not some respectable alternative among many. The ethic of coercion which was intrinsic to communist rule, leading, sooner or later, to the secret police and the gulags. You can have it in a mild version or you can have it in a brutal version, but in the end, it always ends in autocracy.
I lived in Berlin for six years and had several East German friends. None of them was nostalgic at all for the Stasi, or the Berlin wall, or for the fact that they couldnt leave the country. But there was a certain sense, youve heard of the term Ostalgie they were nostalgic for that sense of free education, full employment, effectively rent-free accommodation. Obviously, none of it was very nice but it removed that worry you have in a capitalist rat race society of How do I pay the bills every month? Is there anything in you, even from the right end of the spectrum, that can see those lures or attractions of communism?
I think something else is going on there. I think people are nostalgic for having been 17-years-old. Which is a very natural and human thing. Were all the centre of our own universes. When we think back to the bright primary colours of our teenage years; the intensity of your first adolescent crush on someone, then the Stasi and the shortages and the drabness fade into the background. Thats not really what youre thinking about. But youre right, it has created this bizarre nostalgia in every communist country from people who forget what it was really like. Theyll say things like we had time to talk.
Well, living one week like that again, without even the most basic necessities being available would be a pretty strong cure if you actually had to go back and do it. But again, this exactly illustrates why we need to keep explaining to people where it leads. This wasnt a system that just meant a bit more state control and a bit less individual liberty. It was a complete hollowing out of civil society; the destruction of everything between the individual and the state. And then, ultimately, the NKVD, the knock in the night, and the torture chambers.
Obviously, all communist governments and regimes were officially atheist and secular. Isnt there something now, when were living in a period of, supposedly, a clash of civilisations Islam versus the West or Islam versus Christianity wasnt there something progressive in this idea of secular states?
I think theres a very respectable argument for secularism on the American model, where the state is effectively holding the ring and allowing each religion to proselytise. Or even secularism on the French model, where you say all of this is a private business. But enforcing atheism, which is effectively what ends up happening because everything is enforced, is every bit as tyrannical as enforcing Taliban-style sharia law, or enforcing fundamentalist Christianity, or any other belief system. The reason that this still matters is its very difficult, even a generation on, to rebuild where civil society has been systematically hollowed out and destroyed.
In 1948, when the Communists took power in Hungary, Jnos Kdr, who went on to become the Hungarian leader, was given the job of destroying independent associations. He systematically went through and closed down every church, every charity, every chess club, every village band, every boy scouts troupe; everything that fills the space normally between the individual and the government. 5,000 organisations, he boasted, that hed liquidated. Thats what we mean by a totalitarian society. And it bizarrely leaves people both atomised and controlled because people are denied the wherewithal to relate one to the other in a voluntary way as individuals. Everything is channelled through the party and the state.
I think of you as the libertarian, free market, property rights end of the right-wing spectrum, but not really the evangelical Christian, who are more obsessed with issues around handguns, banning abortion. Am I right in thinking that those arent your pet issues?
Handguns are not a big issue in the UK. Actually, I do regret the handgun ban. I think it was disproportionate and I dont think it was anything to do with what had just happened the abomination that wed seen. Nobody serious tried to argue that it would have made a difference. But, you know, we are where we are. Its not a campaign of mine to try and reverse the ban. But I do believe in freedom. I believe, very much, in people perusing their own happiness by making their own decisions and finding virtue by not having it coerced. And the defining ethic of communism was not equality, it was coercion.
Sort of a Brexit question, the only Brexit question, and its not a totally facetious analogy; but having defeated the EU with Brexit, and looking at communist regimes, can you see something of that in the EU? Not with the violence or the oppression or the authoritarianism, but as a supranational institution; pan-states and sucking sovereignty inwards.
Not in my worst nightmares have I ever thought that the European Union is going to take away our passports, throw us into gulags or torture us. I suppose that the parallel, and its a very minor and limited one, but its an interesting one in so far as it goes, would be this. By the end of the communist era, you really struggled to find anyone who believed in it. I remember travelling in what we still called Eastern Europe in the late 1980s and I remember thinking this cant carry on because nobody believes in it. None of the people running these countries still believed, if ever they did believe, in the principles of Marxism or Leninism.
But on the other hand, how was it going to end? Because so many people had a vested interest in the status quo. So many people had learned to rise through that power structure. And in that limited sense, I think you can draw a parallel, in that there are very few true believers left in Brussels. But there are an awful lot of people who have learned how to make a good living out of it. And I dont just mean Eurocrats. I mean the armies of consultants and contractors, the big landowners getting money from the CAP, the lobbyists, the professional associations; all sorts of parastatal actors who have learned how to make a handy living out of the EU, one way or another. And just like the nomenklatura in the 1980s, they will fight very hard to maintain their position, not on dogmatical grounds, but out of sheer self-interest.
Certainly, we saw that in the UK referendum a lot of the opposition came from organisations that were directly or indirectly funded by the EU. This wasnt, in other words, about sovereignty or federalism or democracy; it was about mortgages and school fees. And that is a very difficult thing to end. But Ill end on a cheerful note. I think the communist system had been basically delegitimised after the Prague Spring. Up until 1968, you could find idealistic Marxists in central and eastern Europe, who believed that they would eventually get to the stage where they could reintroduce democracy. That once the system had been shown to work, shown to be more economically productive than capitalism, then they could have free elections again. After 1968, nobody really believed that and there were just people clinging on to their position.
I think the French and Dutch referendums in 2004 were a similar moment in Brussels. I think after that, people stopped believing that European federalism would win mass support. But they were determined to cling on to their positions. What was it in the end that brought the communist system down? Again, I can remember in the 80s, very few people saw the end coming. People would say maybe over twenty or thirty years there will be a gradual move to a more reformed kind of Marxism. And a few isolated dreamers would say, no, maybe there will be an exogenous shock; a kind of Chernobyl type massive event that will bring it all down. What was the event that brought down the Marxist system in the end? It was the smallest thing. It was the decision of the Hungarian interior ministry to stop requiring exit visas from East Germans who wanted to travel to Austria. Within two weeks, the whole rotten system had unravelled. And that, I think, does give me hope. Permanence is the illusion of every age.
So why Tirana, Albania?
Tirana is, if you like, the most vivid physical place where you can see the legacy of a communist regime. It was the ultimate autocratic system and the ultimate paranoid system. Enver Hoxha spent an immense amount of money fortifying the country. It was rather like North Korea is today. And a hungry and immiserated population, to use a Marxist word, was paying the cost of what had become a leadership cult, because thats where it ends.
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Dan Hannan on Communism, Ostalgie, first loves and enforced atheism - EurActiv