Communism, because there is only so much that envy can do to harm successful people.
"'The Black Book of Communism,'; a scholarly accounting of communism’s crimes, counts about 94 million murdered by the supposed champions of the common man (20 million for the Soviets alone), and some say that number is too low."
Forgetting the Evils of Communism: The amnesia bites a little deeper
By Jonah Goldberg, August 2008:
http://web.archive.org/web/20090228095645/http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZmY0MjI1MDgyYjg1M2UwNDMzMTk2Mjk5YTk0ZTdlMWE=
Mao’s Great Leap Forward ‘killed 45 million in four years’
Arifa Akbar
17 September 2010
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/maos-great-leap-forward-killed-45-million-in-four-years-2081630.html
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The Legacy of Mao Zedong is Mass Murder
Feb 2nd, 2010
http://www.heritage.org/asia/commentary/the-legacy-mao-zedong-mass-murder
And the 'paradise'? In never comes with communism - incentives that work to enslave and demoralize... except for 'elites' - and for them? Incentives to become thugs.
It's a loser.
[Cambodia] ‘Killing Fields’ harvest of injustice: 1.7 million killed
____________________________________
Andrew Stuttaford
May 7, 2003
We will never know how many Ukrainians died in Stalin's famines of the early 1930s. As Nikita Khrushchev later recalled, "No one was keeping count." Writing back in the mid- 1980s, historian Robert Conquest came up with a death toll of around six million, a calculation not so inconsistent with later research (the writers of The Black Book of Communism (1999) estimated a total of four million for 1933 alone).
Four million, six million, seven million, when the numbers are this grotesque does the exact figure matter? Just remember this instead:
The first family to die was the Rafalyks -- father, mother and a child. Later on the Fediy family of five also perished of starvation. Then followed the families of Prokhar Lytvyn (four persons), Fedir Hontowy (three persons), Samson Fediy (three persons). The second child of the latter family was beaten to death on somebody's onion patch. Mykola and Larion Fediy died, followed by Andrew Fediy and his wife; Stefan Fediy; Anton Fediy, his wife and four children (his two other little girls survived); Boris Fediy, his wife and three children: Olanviy Fediy and his wife; Taras Fediy and his wife; Theodore Fesenko; Constantine Fesenko; Melania Fediy; Lawrenty Fediy; Peter Fediy; Eulysis Fediy and his brother Fred; Isidore Fediy, his wife and two children; Ivan Hontowy, his wife and two children; Vasyl Perch, his wife and child; Makar Fediy; Prokip Fesenko: Abraham Fediy; Ivan Skaska, his wife and eight children.
Some of these people were buried in a cemetery plot; others were left lying wherever they died. For instance, Elizabeth Lukashenko died on the meadow; her remains were eaten by ravens. Others were simply dumped into any handy excavation. The remains of Lawrenty Fediy lay on the hearth of his dwelling until devoured by rats.*
And that's just one village -- Fediivka, in the Poltava Province.
We will never know whether Walter Duranty, the principal New York Times correspondent in the U.S.S.R., ever visited Fediivka. Almost certainly not. What we do know is that, in March 1933, while telling his readers that there had indeed been "serious food shortages" in the Ukraine, he was quick to reassure them that "there [was] no actual starvation." There had been no "deaths from starvation," he soothed, merely "widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition." So that was all right then.
But, unlike Khrushchev, Duranty, a Pulitzer Prize winner, no less, was keeping count -- in the autumn of 1933 he is recorded as having told the British Embassy that ten million had died. ** "The Ukraine," he said, "had been bled white," remarkable words from the journalist who had, only days earlier, described talk of a famine as "a sheer absurdity," remarkable words from the journalist who, in a 1935 memoir had dismayingly little to say about one of history's greatest crimes. Writing about his two visits to the Ukraine in 1933, Duranty was content to describe how "the people looked healthier and more cheerful than [he] had expected, although they told grim tales of their sufferings in the past two years." As Duranty had explained (writing about his trip to the Ukraine in April that year), he "had no doubt that the solution to the agrarian problem had been found".
Well, at least he didn't refer to it as a "final" solution.
As the years passed, and the extent of the famine and the other, innumerable, brutalities of Stalin's long tyranny became increasingly difficult to deny, Duranty's reputation collapsed (I wrote about this on NRO a couple of years ago), but his Pulitzer Prize has endured.
Ah, that Pulitzer Prize. In his will old Joseph Pulitzer described what the prize was designed to achieve: "The encouragement of public service, public morals, American literature, and the advancement of education."
In 1932 the Pulitzer Board awarded Walter Duranty its prize. It's an achievement that the New York Times still celebrates. The gray lady is pleased to publish its storied Pulitzer roster in a full-page advertisement each year, and, clearly, it finds the name of Duranty as one that is still fit to print. His name is near the top of the list, an accident of chronology, but there it is, Duranty, Times man, denier of the Ukrainian genocide -- proudly paraded for all to see. Interestingly, the list of prizewinners posted on the New York Times Company's website is more forthcoming: Against Duranty's name, it is noted that "other writers in the Times and elsewhere have discredited this coverage."
Understandably enough, Duranty's Pulitzer is an insult that has lost none of its power to appall. In a new initiative, Ukrainian groups have launched a fresh campaign designed to persuade the Pulitzer Prize Board to revoke the award to Duranty. The Pulitzer's nabobs do not appear to be impressed. A message dated April 29, 2003 from the board's administrator to one of the organizers of the Ukrainian campaign includes the following words:
The current Board is aware that complaints about the Duranty award have surfaced again. [The campaign's] submission…will be placed on file with others we have received. However, to date, the Board has not seen fit to reverse a previous Board's decision, made seventy years ago in a different era and under different circumstances.
A "different era," "different circumstances" -- would that have been said, I wonder, about someone who had covered up Nazi savagery? But then, more relevantly, the Pulitzer's representative notes that Duranty's prize was awarded "for a specific set of stories in 1931," in other words, before the famine struck with its full, horrific, force. And there he has a point. The prize is designed to reward a specific piece of journalism -- not a body of work. To strip Duranty of the prize on the grounds of his subsequent conduct, however disgusting it may have been, would be a retrospective change of the rules, behavior more typical of the old U.S.S.R. than today's U.S.A.
But what was that "specific set of stories?" Duranty won his prize "for [his] dispatches on Russia especially the working out of the Five Year Plan." They were, said the Pulitzer Board "marked by scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgment and exceptional clarity. ..."
Really? As summarized by S. J. Taylor in her excellent -- and appropriately titled -- biography of Duranty, Stalin's Apologist, the statement with which Duranty accepted his prize gives some hint of the "sound judgment" contained in his dispatches.
""Despite present imperfections," he continued, he had come to realize there was something very good about the Soviets' "planned system of economy." And there was something more: Duranty had learned, he said, "to respect the Soviet leaders, especially Stalin, who [had grown] into a really great statesman.""
In truth, of course, this was simply nonsense, a distortion that, in some ways bore even less resemblance to reality than "Jimmy's World," the tale of an eight-year-old junkie that, briefly, won a Pulitzer for Janet Cooke of the Washington Post. Tragic "Jimmy" turned out not to exist. He was a concoction, a fiction, nothing more. The Post did the right thing -- Cooke's prize was rapidly returned.
After 70 years the New York Times has yet to do the right thing. There is, naturally, always room for disagreement over how events are interpreted, particularly in an era of revolutionary change, but Duranty's writings clearly tipped over into propaganda, and, often, outright deception, a cynical sugarcoating of the squalor of a system in which he almost certainly didn't believe. His motivation seems to have been purely opportunistic, access to the Moscow "story" for the Times and the well-paid lifestyle and the fame ("the Great Duranty" was, some said, the best-known journalist in the world) that this brought. Too much criticism of Stalin's rule and this privileged existence would end. Duranty's "Stalin" was a lie, not much more genuine than Janet Cooke's "Jimmy" and, as he well knew at the time, so too were the descriptions of the Soviet experiment that brought him that Pulitzer.
And if that is not enough to make the Pulitzer Board to reconsider withdrawing an award that disgraces both the name of Joseph Pulitzer and his prize, it is up to the New York Times to insist that it does so.
*From an account quoted in Robert Conquest's The Harvest of Sorrow.
** On another occasion (a dinner party, ironically) that autumn Duranty talked about seven million deaths.
http://www.nationalreview.com/stuttaford/stuttaford050703.asp
The Ukrainian Famine was dreadful famine premeditated by the Soviet Union, headed by Joseph Stalin during 1932-1933, as a means to undermine the nationalistic pride of the Ukrainian people. It served to control and further oppress the Ukrainian people by denying them the basic vital essentials they needed to survive. The Ukrainian Famine is also known as Holodomor, meaning "death by hunger."
The Communist Regime sought to eliminate any threat from Ukrainian nationalists, whom they feared had the potential to form a rebellion and to seek independence from the Soviet Union. More than 5,000 Ukrainian intellectuals were arrested and later were either murdered or deported to prison camps in Siberia. These individuals were falsely accused of plotting an armed rebellion; however it was very clear that Stalin's intentions were to eliminate the leaders of Ukrainian society, to leave the masses without any guidance or direction.
-snip-
It was estimated that about 25,000 Ukrainians were dying every day during the Famine. Desperation and extreme hunger even lead to cases of cannibalism and consequentially thousands were arrested for this act.
Despite many Ukrainian Communist leaders' objections to Stalin and his decrees, Stalin continued to raise grain quotas, which led to worsening of the famine. Many Communists blame the orchestrated famine on an unsuccessful harvest and crop yield, failing to acknowledge the crimes perpetrated by the Soviet government and authorities. It is estimated that more than 10 million people died as a result of violent executions, deportation, and starvation.
-snip-
http://www.unitedhumanrights.org/genocide/ukraine_famine.htm
communists are just democrats in a hurry, wi guns...> Stephens chose to focus on Stalinism as his means of discrediting communism <
And rightly so. Wouldn’t it be appropriate to focus on Hitler’s crimes as a means of discrediting Nazism?
Just show the 100+ million dead by communism.
I waded into the comments section. One fellow that stood out particularly was one who said he did not want to hear anything about the deaths that took place under Communism until people began discussing all of the deaths that took place in India under the British (particularly during the 1890s) as well as the genocide of Native Americans when the Europeans arrived.
From a Revelation perspective, I wonder if communism is one of the three unclean spirits that Revelation 16:13-14 speaks of.
It and its children, the ever evolving variants of the original malware, have laid waste to the Eastern half of Europe and much of Asia, along with the entire second half of the 20th century.
From that same Revelation perspective, perhaps the other two evil spirits that arose from the sea of humanity during that same time were the fascists and the nazis.
Together, those two laid waste to the western half of Europe and the entire first half of the 20th century.
And then, in spite of the West collectively and continuously being at war against the communism malware and its children for the entire second half of the 20th century, the evolved variants of the communism malware have none the less found fertile ground in the West.
And as per Revelation and Fatima, this malware has convinced US and the rest of the West to each cut ourselves loose from the Creator and go our own way, to create our world in our own worldly image, thus revealing the true identity of the communism malware’s original programmer.
Further proof is that all of the powers that be over US acquire and maintain their power and rule by deception, more often than not by acquiring something with a good reputation and then using it against those who trust it by infecting them with the latest variant of the communism malware.
There is hope, though. We do have a way to protect ourselves, our neighbors and our nation from this evil malware and restore health and function as things were meant to be.
Just like you need to have an antivirus program running on your computer and you must also download the latest updates every day to protect your computer from every manner of evil, you must also be running the full Armor of God antivirus and total security protection on your inner mental/emotional computer to keep you safe from every manner of evil.
Not only that, but you make sure you’re receiving the Daily Bread downloads and that you always have the OEM’s full Armor of God total security software constantly running in the background of your consciousness.
It’s the ONLY way to be safe, sane and at peace in this world...and the next.
There are “conservatives” and “patriots” who are totally committed to suppressing all discussion of certain crimes, and to shielding certain criminals.
Democrats pay people to be on social media and to comment on news websites, message boards and lots of other places. I seriously doubt they have a lot of real support.
The problem is, not one of the three is a human society. Ants, bees, and termites. While there probably isn't an insect version of Marx or Engles, those societies mirror the values of communism.
All resources are directed towards the success of the community. There is centralized control of all the resources. And nothing is owned by individuals. In fact, in those societies, there are no individuals. If you think about it, those insect societies are perfect representations of communism.
Mark