100 Years of Communism—and 100 Million Dead

[tonyz]

As many prepare to gather with family and friends - just another reason to be thankful for our country and our way of life.

100 Years of Communism—and 100 Million Dead
The Bolshevik plague that began in Russia was the greatest catastrophe in human history.

By David Satter
The Wall Street Journal
Nov. 6, 2017 6:43 p.m. ET

Armed Bolsheviks seized the Winter Palace in Petrograd—now St. Petersburg—100 years ago this week and arrested ministers of Russia’s provisional government. They set in motion a chain of events that would kill millions and inflict a near-fatal wound on Western civilization.

The revolutionaries’ capture of train stations, post offices and telegraphs took place as the city slept and resembled a changing of the guard. But when residents of the Russian capital awoke, they found they were living in a different universe.

Although the Bolsheviks called for the abolition of private property, their real goal was spiritual: to translate Marxist- Lenin ist ideology into reality. For the first time, a state was created that was based explicitly on atheism and claimed infallibility. This was totally incompatible with Western civilization, which presumes the existence of a higher power over and above society and the state.

The Bolshevik coup had two consequences. In countries where communism came to hold sway, it hollowed out society’s moral core, degrading the individual and turning him into a cog in the machinery of the state. Communists committed murder on such a scale as to all but eliminate the value of life and to destroy the individual conscience in survivors.

But the Bolsheviks’ influence was not limited to these countries. In the West, communism inverted society’s understanding of the source of its values, creating political confusion that persists to this day.

In a 1920 speech to the Komsomol, Lenin said that communists subordinate morality to the class struggle. Good was anything that destroyed “the old exploiting society” and helped to build a “new communist society.”

This approach separated guilt from responsibility. Martyn Latsis, an official of the Cheka, Lenin’s secret police, in a 1918 instruction to interrogators, wrote: “We are not waging war against individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. . . . Do not look for evidence that the accused acted in word or deed against Soviet power. The first question should be to what class does he belong. . . . It is this that should determine his fate.”

Such convictions set the stage for decades of murder on an industrial scale. In total, no fewer than 20 million Soviet citizens were put to death by the regime or died as a direct result of its repressive policies. This does not include the millions who died in the wars, epidemics and famines that were predictable consequences of Bolshevik policies, if not directly caused by them.

The victims include 200,000 killed during the Red Terror (1918-22); 11 million dead from famine and dekulakization; 700,000 executed during the Great Terror (1937-38); 400,000 more executed between 1929 and 1953; 1.6 million dead during forced population transfers; and a minimum 2.7 million dead in the Gulag, labor colonies and special settlements.

To this list should be added nearly a million Gulag prisoners released during World War II into Red Army penal battalions, where they faced almost certain death; the partisans and civilians killed in the postwar revolts against Soviet rule in Ukraine and the Baltics; and dying Gulag inmates freed so that their deaths would not count in official statistics.

If we add to this list the deaths caused by communist regimes that the Soviet Union created and supported—including those in Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia—the total number of victims is closer to 100 million. That makes communism the greatest catastrophe in human history.

The effect of murder on this scale was to create a “new man” supposedly influenced by nothing but the good of the Soviet cause. The meaning of this was demonstrated during the battle of Stalingrad, when Red Army blocking units shot thousands of their fellow soldiers who tried to flee. Soviet forces also shot civilians who sought shelter on the German side, children who filled German water bottles in the Volga, and civilians forced at gunpoint to recover the bodies of German soldiers. Gen. Vasily Chuikov, the army commander in Stalingrad, justified these tactics in his memoirs by saying “a Soviet citizen cannot conceive of his life apart from his Soviet country.”

That these sentiments were neither accidental nor ephemeral was made clear in 2008, when the Russian Parliament, the Duma, for the first time adopted a resolution regarding the 1932-33 famine that had killed millions. The famine was caused by draconian grain requisition undertaken to finance Soviet industrialization. Although the Duma acknowledged the tragedy, it added that “the industrial giants of the Soviet Union,” the Magnitogorsk steel mill and the Dnieper dam, would be “eternal monuments” to the victims.

While the Soviet Union redefined human nature, it also spread intellectual chaos. The term “political correctness” has its origin in the assumption that socialism, a system of collective ownership, was virtuous in itself, without need to evaluate its operations in light of transcendent moral criteria.

When the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, Western intellectuals, influenced by the same lack of an ethical point of reference that led to Bolshevism in the first place, closed their eyes to the atrocities. When the killing became too obvious to deny, sympathizers excused what was happening because of the Soviets’ supposed noble intentions.

Many in the West were deeply indifferent. They used Russia to settle their own quarrels. Their reasoning, as the historian Robert Conquest wrote, was simple: Capitalism was unjust; socialism would end this injustice; so socialism had to be supported unconditionally, notwithstanding any amount of its own injustice.

Today the Soviet Union and the international communist system that once ruled a third of the world’s territory are things of the past. But the need to keep higher moral values pre-eminent is as important now as it was in the early 19th century when they first began to be seriously challenged.

In 1909, the Russian religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev wrote that “our educated youth cannot admit the independent significance of scholarship, philosophy, enlightenment and universities. To this day, they subordinate them to the interests of politics, parties, movements and circles.”

If there is one lesson the communist century should have taught, it is that the independent authority of universal moral principles cannot be an afterthought, since it is the conviction on which all of civilization depends.

Mr. Satter is the author of “Age of Delirium: the Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union” (Yale)

https://www.wsj.com/articles/100-yea...ead-1510011810

https://johnib.wordpress.com/2017/11...-million-dead/

[tonyz]

Originally Posted by Brush Okie

100 million is a conservative number

Under communism - the system, the State's will - must be imposed and there is no tolerance for dissent...no wonder that number is a conservative number.

[tonyz]

Brush's observation citing the conservative number of 100 million dead under communism led me to this older report looking at the Chinese communists not simply the Bolsheviks like the previous article. Between communism and radical Islamists it looks like a race to the civilization bottom. Both share an authoritarian persective where individual liberty takes a back seat to authoritarian power.

Mao's Great Leap Forward 'killed 45 million in four years'
Arts Correspondent, Arifa Akbar Friday 17 September 2010 10:23 BST

Mao Zedong, founder of the People's Republic of China, qualifies as the greatest mass murderer in world history, an expert who had unprecedented access to official Communist Party archives said yesterday.

Speaking at The Independent Woodstock Literary Festival, Frank Dikötter, a Hong Kong-based historian, said he found that during the time that Mao was enforcing the Great Leap Forward in 1958, in an effort to catch up with the economy of the Western world, he was responsible for overseeing "one of the worst catastrophes the world has ever known".

Mr Dikötter, who has been studying Chinese rural history from 1958 to 1962, when the nation was facing a famine, compared the systematic torture, brutality, starvation and killing of Chinese peasants to the Second World War in its magnitude. At least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death in China over these four years; the worldwide death toll of the Second World War was 55 million.

Mr Dikötter is the only author to have delved into the Chinese archives since they were reopened four years ago. He argued that this devastating period of history – which has until now remained hidden – has international resonance. "It ranks alongside the gulags and the Holocaust as one of the three greatest events of the 20th century.... It was like [the Cambodian communist dictator] Pol Pot's genocide multiplied 20 times over," he said.

Between 1958 and 1962, a war raged between the peasants and the state; it was a period when a third of all homes in China were destroyed to produce fertiliser and when the nation descended into famine and starvation, Mr Dikötter said.

His book, Mao's Great Famine; The Story of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, reveals that while this is a part of history that has been "quite forgotten" in the official memory of the People's Republic of China, there was a "staggering degree of violence" that was, remarkably, carefully catalogued in Public Security Bureau reports, which featured among the provincial archives he studied. In them, he found that the members of the rural farming communities were seen by the Party merely as "digits", or a faceless workforce. For those who committed any acts of disobedience, however minor, the punishments were huge.

State retribution for tiny thefts, such as stealing a potato, even by a child, would include being tied up and thrown into a pond; parents were forced to bury their children alive or were doused in excrement and urine, others were set alight, or had a nose or ear cut off. One record shows how a man was branded with hot metal. People were forced to work naked in the middle of winter; 80 per cent of all the villagers in one region of a quarter of a million Chinese were banned from the official canteen because they were too old or ill to be effective workers, so were deliberately starved to death.

Mr Dikötter said that he was once again examining the Party's archives for his next book, The Tragedy of Liberation, which will deal with the bloody advent of Communism in China from 1944 to 1957.

He said the archives were already illuminating the extent of the atrocities of the period; one piece of evidence revealed that 13,000 opponents of the new regime were killed in one region alone, in just three weeks. "We know the outline of what went on but I will be looking into precisely what happened in this period, how it happened, and the human experiences behind the history," he said.

Mr Dikötter, who teaches at the University of Hong Kong, said while it was difficult for any historian in China to write books that are critical of Mao, he felt he could not collude with the "conspiracy of silence" in what the Chinese rural community had suffered in recent history.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-en...s-2081630.html

[Box]

Communism isn't all bad...

If you are a member of the Inner Party, its actually pretty great. If you live a simple life and don't mind manual labor, even being a lowly proletariat isn't all bad; after all, "only proles and animals are free"

Just like the bread and circuses of the Roman Empire and the prolefeed of Oceania, modern day America is chocked full of shlock films, activist athletes, education lottery tickets, and craft beer to keep the working class busy and distracted.

Hell even members of the Bush dynasty recently referred to an American "governing class" because that is how "the inner party" views itself.


You gotta break a few eggs to make a good omelet...
...the great leap forward was just Mao breaking a few eggs.
Besides, didn't our last POTUS say Russia wasn't a threat? Haven't our elected leaders agreed to trade practices that allowed the communist nations of China and Russia to improve their own economies at our own detriment?



Lets not bad-mouth communism - we have a shit ton of elected leaders practicing its tenets on us everyday and an entire generation that cant wait to vote more of them into office.

...oh, and Happy Thanksgiving

[TJ11B]

“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.”

― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

Profound words for present times...

[tonyz]

Great post Brush.

The history of communism and socialism is one littered with mass starvations and suffering.

One need only look at Venezuela as the latest example.

More reason to be thankful for the USA and our way of life. It would be nice if our younger audience were inclined to read these stories. Instead, they listen to Bernie and that charismatic con-artist who was Barry.

[tonyz]

Originally Posted by Box

Communism isn't all bad...

If you are a member of the Inner Party, its actually pretty great. If you live a simple life and don't mind manual labor, even being a lowly proletariat isn't all bad; after all, "only proles and animals are free"

Just like the bread and circuses of the Roman Empire and the prolefeed of Oceania, modern day America is chocked full of shlock films, activist athletes, education lottery tickets, and craft beer to keep the working class busy and distracted.

Hell even members of the Bush dynasty recently referred to an American "governing class" because that is how "the inner party" views itself.


You gotta break a few eggs to make a good omelet...
...the great leap forward was just Mao breaking a few eggs.
Besides, didn't our last POTUS say Russia wasn't a threat? Haven't our elected leaders agreed to trade practices that allowed the communist nations of China and Russia to improve their own economies at our own detriment?



Lets not bad-mouth communism - we have a shit ton of elected leaders practicing its tenets on us everyday and an entire generation that cant wait to vote more of them into office.

...oh, and Happy Thanksgiving

Bread and circuses for the poor - trinkets, fads and it appears an endless stream of young actors and actresses for the wealthy and political elite !

[The Reaper]

This is the society the Antifas would restore.

TR

[tonyz]

Speaking of the Ukraine's famine - seems the press as useful idiots is nothing new: “Russians Hungry But not Starving” became the accepted wisdom - because of the press of the time. Complete article at link. Edited excerpts below makes for some interesting reading and an unambiguous indictment of the international press from a publication not necessarily known for a conservative perspective.

How Stalin Hid Ukraine's Famine From the World
In 1932 and 1933, millions died across the Soviet Union—and the foreign press corps helped cover up the catastrophe.

ANNE APPLEBAUM OCT 13, 2017
The Atlantic

https://www.theatlantic.com/internat...-union/542610/

...Extra rewards were available to those, like Walter Duranty, who played the game particularly well. Duranty was The New York Times correspondent in Moscow from 1922 until 1936, a role that, for a time, made him relatively rich and famous.

This position made Duranty enormously useful to the regime, which went out of its way to ensure that Duranty lived well in Moscow. He had a large flat, kept a car and a mistress, had the best access of any correspondent, and twice received coveted interviews with Stalin. But the attention he won from his reporting back in the U.S. seems to have been his primary motivation. His missives from Moscow made him one of the most influential journalists of his time. In 1932, his series of articles on the successes of collectivization and the Five Year Plan won him the Pulitzer Prize. Soon afterward, Franklin Roosevelt, then the governor of New York, invited Duranty to the governor’s mansion in Albany, where the Democratic presidential candidate peppered him with queries. “I asked all the questions this time. It was fascinating,” Roosevelt told another reporter.

As the famine worsened, Duranty, like his colleagues, would have been in no doubt about the regime’s desire to repress it. In 1933, the Foreign Ministry began requiring correspondents to submit a proposed itinerary before any journey into the provinces; all requests to visit Ukraine were refused. The censors also began to monitor dispatches. Some phrases were allowed: “acute food shortage,” “food stringency,” “food deficit,” “diseases due to malnutrition,” but nothing else. In late 1932, Soviet officials even visited Duranty at home, making him nervous.

Everyone knew—yet no one mentioned it. Hence the extraordinary reaction of both the Soviet establishment and the Moscow press corps to the journalistic escapade of Gareth Jones.

Jones was a young Welshman, only 27 years old at the time of his 1933 journey to Ukraine.

In early 1932, before the travel ban was imposed, he journeyed out to the Soviet countryside (accompanied by Jack Heinz II, scion of the ketchup empire) where he slept on “bug-infested floors” in rural villages and witnessed the beginnings of the famine.

In the spring of 1933, Jones returned to Moscow, this time with a visa given to him largely on the grounds that he worked for Lloyd George (it was stamped “Besplatno” or “Gratis,” as a sign of official Soviet favor). Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador to London, had been keen to impress Lloyd George and had lobbied on Jones’s behalf. Upon arrival, Jones first went around the Soviet capital and met other foreign correspondents and officials. Lyons remembered him as “an earnest and meticulous little man … the sort who carries a note-book and unashamedly records your words as you talk.” Jones met Umansky, showed him an invitation from the German Consul-General in Kharkiv, and asked to visit Ukraine. Umansky agreed. With that official stamp of approval, he set off south.

Jones boarded the train in Moscow on March 10. But instead of traveling all the way to Kharkiv, he got off the train about 40 miles north of the city. Carrying a backpack filled with “many loaves of white bread, with butter, cheese, meat and chocolate bought with foreign currency” he began to follow the railway track towards the Kharkiv. For three days, with no official minder or escort, he walked through more than 20 villages and collective farms at the height of the famine, recording his thoughts in notebooks later preserved by his sister:

I crossed the border from Great Russia into the Ukraine. Everywhere I talked to peasants who walked past. They all had the same story.

“There is no bread. We haven’t had bread for over two months. A lot are dying.” The first village had no more potatoes left and the store of burak (“beetroot”) was running out. They all said: “The cattle are dying, nechevo kormit’ [there’s nothing to feed them with]. We used to feed the world & now we are hungry. How can we sow when we have few horses left? How will we be able to work in the fields when we are weak from want of food?”

In Kharkhiv, Jones kept taking notes. He observed thousands of people queueing in bread lines: “They begin queuing up at 3-4 o’clock in the afternoon to get bread the next morning at 7. It is freezing: many degrees of frost.” He spent an evening at the theater—“Audience: Plenty of lipstick but no bread”—and spoke to people about the political repression and mass arrests which rolled across Ukraine at the same time as the famine. He called on Umansky’s colleague in Kharkiv, but never managed to speak to him. Quietly, he slipped out of the Soviet Union. A few days later, on March 30, he appeared in Berlin at a press conference probably arranged by Paul Scheffer, a Berliner Tageblatt journalist who had been expelled from the USSR in 1929. He declared that a major famine was unfolding across the Soviet Union and issued a statement:

Everywhere was the cry, “There is no bread. We are dying.” This cry came from every part of Russia, from the Volga, Siberia, White Russia, the North Caucasus, Central Asia …

“We are waiting for death” was my welcome: “See, we still have our cattle fodder. Go farther south. There they have nothing. Many houses are empty of people already dead,” they cried.

Jones’s press conference was picked up by two senior Berlin-based U.S. journalists, in The New York Evening Post (“Famine grips Russia, millions dying, idle on rise says Briton”) and in the Chicago Daily News (“Russian Famine Now as Great as Starvation of 1921, Says Secretary of Lloyd George”). Further syndications followed in a wide range of British publications. The articles explained that Jones had taken a “long walking tour through the Ukraine,” quoted his press release and added details of mass starvation. They noted, as did Jones himself, that he had broken the rules which held back other journalists: “I tramped through the black earth region,” he wrote, “because that was once the richest farmland in Russia and because the correspondents have been forbidden to go there to see for themselves what is happening.” Jones went on to publish a dozen further articles in the London Evening Standard and Daily Express, as well as the Cardiff Western Mail.

The authorities who had showered favors on Jones were furious. Litvinov, the Soviet Foreign minister, complained angrily to Maisky, using an acidic literary allusion to Gogol’s famous play about a fraudulent bureaucrat:

It is astonishing that Gareth Johnson [sic] has impersonated the role of Khlestakov and succeeded in getting all of you to play the parts of the local governor and various characters from The Government Inspector. In fact, he is just an ordinary citizen, calls himself Lloyd George’s secretary and, apparently at the latter’s bidding, requests a visa, and you at the diplomatic mission without checking up at all, insist the [OGPU] jump into action to satisfy his request. We gave this individual all kinds of support, helped him in his work, I even agreed to meet him, and he turns out to be an imposter.

The Moscow press corps was even angrier. Of course its members knew that what Jones had reported was true, and a few were looking for ways to tell the same story. Malcolm Muggeridge, at the time the correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, had just smuggled three articles about the famine out of the country via diplomatic bag. The Guardian published them anonymously, with heavy cuts made by editors who disapproved of his critique of the USSR, and, appearing at a moment when the news was dominated by Hitler’s rise to power, they were largely ignored. But the rest of the press corps, dependent on official goodwill, closed ranks against Jones. Lyons meticulously described what happened:

Throwing down Jones was as unpleasant a chore as fell to any of us in years of juggling facts to please dictatorial regimes—but throw him down we did, unanimously and in almost identical formulations of equivocation. Poor Gareth Jones must have been the most surprised human being alive when the facts he so painstakingly garnered from our mouths were snowed under by our denials.

Whether or not a meeting between Umansky and the foreign correspondents ever took place, it does sum up, metaphorically, what happened next. On March 31, just a day after Jones had spoken out in Berlin, Duranty himself responded. “Russians Hungry But Not Starving,” read the New York Times headline.

<snip>

[Flagg]

Cuba's medical professionals, locked into indentured servitude as a "national export" for Cuba's government to earn hard currency:

http://babalublog.com/2017/11/16/cub...e-for-slavery/

[CloseDanger]

As noted on the twitterz, Communism is nothing but pre-meditated Murder.

[miclo18d]

Originally Posted by Flagg

Cuba's medical professionals, locked into indentured servitude as a "national export" for Cuba's government to earn hard currency:

http://babalublog.com/2017/11/16/cub...e-for-slavery/

I witnessed this in 2007 in Peru. My team was in country and the embassy gave us a change of mission to see what we could do to help during the Pisco earthquake.

I would drop the US doctors at a preplanned sight for the day and then go scout out future locations and talk with firefighters and police. One day I stumbled into an area and there was a Cuban hospital set up there. I went up to the nearest doctor and started a conversation with him. It’s hard to put into words, it was more body language and observation, but there was a “bodyguard” near him and he looked scared shitless! There was fear in his eyes. Not fear of me... the whole thing was surreal. Almost as if his eyes were crying to help him defect! Begging. I felt very badly for him. Especially with our motto hanging in my brain.

Side note: Later when we ended mission, on our way back to Lima, we had heard that the Venezuelan contingent had brought in tuna cans to help with food, however, the cans supposedly had a picture of Chavez and, the then, opposition leader to the current president. We looked for these cans for a souvenir but never actually saw one.

[Badger52]

Originally Posted by The Reaper

This is the society the Antifas would restore.

TR

Indeed. There are those in "conservative" circles as well who hold the position that if you are a "boomer" you are part & parcel of a class responsible for the complete decline of America. Ergo, your individual life or its contributions matter not. Only the "class" to which you belong is what gets you stood up against a wall. Regardless of how they vote, they are communists in thinking to me & therefore targets.