Posted on 08/22/2018 8:40:29 AM PDT by Sarcasm Factory
A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic. — Joseph Stalin
It is a great irony that at a time when Facebook and Twitter are closing accounts of conservatives for allegedly promoting “hate,” and conservative speakers are banned from college campuses for (as it is charged) “peddling hate,” opinion polls suggest that socialism is more popular than ever among college students and in progressive precincts of the Democratic Party. Bernie Sanders, a self-proclaimed socialist, is the most popular figure among progressive Democrats, while Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has emerged from the Bronx as the newest socialist celebrity and is traveling the country singing the virtues of socialism, as if no one has heard those songs before.
Which raises the question: given our loose standards on the subject, why isn’t socialism a “hate crime”?
After all, the evidence for its malignant effects is obvious to anyone with sufficient curiosity to look at the historical record. The socialist movement has been responsible for the murder, imprisonment, and torture of many millions, and perhaps hundreds of millions, of innocent people during its heyday in the twentieth century. That history of murder and tyranny continues on a smaller scale today in the handful of countries living under the misfortune of socialism—for example, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, and (more recently) Venezuela.
How do socialists escape the indictment that, in view of the historical record, they are purveyors of tyranny and mass murder? Many deny that Stalin, Mao, and the others were true socialists and, indeed, that socialism has never really been tried—a manifest absurdity. Senator Sanders and others claim that they are for something called “democratic socialism,” a popular and peaceful version of the doctrine, but that’s what Lenin, Mao, and Castro said until they seized power and immediately began to sing a different tune. Democracy and diversity are what they say when out of power; tyranny and authoritarianism are what they practice once in power. That is the tried-and-true technique of all socialist movements.
The late R. J. Rummel, a noted scholar of political violence and totalitarian movements, coined the term “democide” to describe large-scale government killings for political purposes—in other words, politically motivated murder. While communists and socialists have not had a monopoly on democide, these movements (Rummel says) have been responsible for far more political killings in the modern era than any other political movement or form of government.
He concludes that
“[i]n sum the communists probably have murdered something like 110 million, or near two-thirds of all those killed by all governments, quasi-governments, and guerrillas from 1900 to 1987. Of course the total itself is shocking. It is several times the thirty-eight million battle-dead that have been killed in all this century’s international and domestic wars. Yet the probable number of murders by the Soviet Union alone—one communist country—well surpasses this cost of war.”
Rummel suspects that the estimate of one hundred ten million killed may be too low, and in fact that the death toll from socialist democide in the twentieth century may be as high as 260 million.
.... (horrifying country-by-country details omitted) ....
In socialist movements, as Hayek pointed out, there is a tendency for the most brutal and unscrupulous people to rise to the top because they are the types who are willing to take the necessary steps to seize power and who prize the kind of absolute power that socialism promises. Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot—these were not the kinds of people one might have encountered in faculty lounges or middle-class town meetings. They were blackguards and thugs one and all, thuggishness being the key attribute for rising to the top in a movement in which power went to those willing to experiment with the most extreme measures.
Socialist policies, moreover, are always going to fail because it is impossible for central planners efficiently to allocate capital, goods, and services across a large economy. Socialism, after all, was always a political doctrine and never a plausible economic theory. When there arose shortages of food or housing or military equipment—when socialist policies failed—leaders were faced with a choice of admitting failure and abandoning the socialist path or doubling down on their policies and preserving their power. It was in their nature to choose the latter course, and thus to press forward with more extreme measures, which typically involved the identification of scapegoats and counter-revolutionary elements as causes of failure. From here it was but a few steps to the catastrophic outcomes described above: show trials, terror famines, mass starvation, cultural revolutions, “killing fields,” and democide.
To return to the question posed at the beginning: is socialism a hate crime? The record speaks for itself: socialism is a hate crime, a doctrine of tyranny, mass murder, and human suffering on a vast scale. ....
We need to instantly arrest and imprison socialists and communists on the slightest pretext for every little crime on the books. We need to fire them en masse and harshly prosecute them for felony fraud in having lied to employers to obtain their ill-gotten positions. We need to permanently ban them upon pain of arrest for trespassing from restaurants and laundromats and grocery stores and every kind of private businesses. We need to evict them from their homes and forcibly confiscate their belongings to be sold as paltry compensation to survivors of the pure evil of totalitarian leftism.
We need in every way to make socialists and communists as utterly miserable as they would make us utterly miserable or simply dead in their nightmare world. Only total war against them and their filthy minds will save us from the same fate as the starved, terrorized, and murdered millions in the old Soviet Union and Red China and North Korea and Cambodia and Vietnam and on and on. Instead of permitting the communist boot to stamp forever on the human soul, a risen army of decent Americans who understand the meaning of the Second Amendment will defeat the strutting leftists and utterly destroy their indescribably vile ideology of greed and terrorism and murder.
For the true believer all of that is just irrelevant. Men such as Stalinist historian Eric Hobsbawm continue to hold to the fantasy:
in a 1994 interview on BBC British television with Canadian author and politician Michael Ignatieff (whose grandfather and great-grandfather were ministers of the Czar prior to the Bolshevik Revolution), he shocked viewers when he said that the deaths of millions of Soviet citizens under Stalin would have been worth it if a genuine Communist society had been the result.[3][42][43] Hobsbawm argued that, “In a period in which, as you might imagine, mass murder and mass suffering are absolutely universal, the chance of a new world being born in great suffering would still have been worth backing” but, unfortunately, “Soviet Union was not the beginning of the World Revolution”.
The following year, when asked the same question on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, that is if “the sacrifice of millions of lives” would have been worth the future communist society, he replied: “That's what we felt when we fought the Second World War”,[4] repeating what already said to Michael Ignatieff, “now people says we shouldn't had World War II” because of the massive number of deaths, but in fact, at the time, “very few people ended up by saying ‘we think it was wrong [to fight] in World War II’”, as World War II was worth fighting.
Hobsbawn died in 2012 still unrepentant and the true believers still lurk about as they form a cheering section for each new iteration of the socialist hell state.
Socialism/communism is a smokescreen.
It is used by people who want wealth and power.
They use it to justify stealing from people.
They enlist other thieves to join their cause by promising them a cut of the stolen goods.
By themselves, the socialist/communist leaders can’t achieve anything. They just don’t have the power.
But, look at Venezuela. They voted for socialism. Twice.
Now they have almost no food, medicine, water or electricity.
Every American journalist and university instructor needs to be forced to spend a year in Venezuela.
Reality, experiencing the reality of socialism, clears up the smokescreen of socialism/communism.
I don’t think you all are aware of the depth of indoctrination of college kids. My nephews are in love with Bernie Sanders. They are in college and I believe that generation is lost. Americas future is dim. We are an idiocracy. Pass the brawndo please. Its got electrolytes.
I don’t think you all are aware of the depth of indoctrination of college kids. My nephews are in love with Bernie Sanders. They are in college and I believe that generation is lost. Americas future is dim. We are an idiocracy. Pass the brawndo please. Its got electrolytes.
How old are you? Did you live through the '60s? Do you really think young people today are more left-wing than they were back then?
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