Posted on 05/20/2021 8:34:30 AM PDT by Jan_Sobieski
in June 1996 that I picked up a book that, for all intents and purposes, changed my life: R.J. Rummel’sDeath by Government (Transaction, 1994). After purchasing the book, I devoured it on a flight from Houston to Indianapolis. Every anti-Communist thought my mother had so rightly drilled into me as a child, every viewing of The Killing Fields (the work of art that inspired my entrance essay for and into the University of Notre Dame), and every Goldwater-esque aspect of my very soul seemed justified by the very existence of Death by Government. All my firms were confirmed.
Through this book, I came to what I regard as an inescapable but not well-accepted idea: state-sponsored murder is and was the primary fact of the twentieth century. Not the rise of democracy or the liberation of peoples as I was taught in high school, college, and graduate school, but the devastating horrors of the gulag, the holocaust, and the killing fields. Further, it gave truth to the proposition that no matter how bad war is, it’s not the greatest killer. Indeed, the bloody statistics of the twentieth century clearly bear this out…
(Excerpt) Read more at intellectualtakeout.org ...
Democide is a political decision implemented by Government agents for the purpose of depopulation of a particular group. In the 20th Century, Socialist regimes were almost exclusively the implementors of Democidal policies, although Islam can also take some credit.
Now that the entire world is living a socialist utopia, it’s still the dreaded capitalist bourgeoisie (conservatives) that threaten this hegemony, but rather than call them by this Marxist Pejorative and shoot us outright, the socialists use Climate Change as the method of destroying us. The useless eaters, gas guzzlers, and overpopulators are the greatest “contributors” to “climate change.” By destroying our livelihood (businesses, petro mobility, food production, and jobs) they get the upper hand.
COVID-19 gives them a different kind of shot at us. Is it any wonder that many of us believe these “emergency vaccines” are further population reduction stratagems? Especially given the fact that previous Coronavirus Vaccine Studies resulted in ADE in test subjects.
Only 22 seconds after your post, “tbw2” created this very frightening and related post. This is how they will use the banks to destroy us. The banks will require an audited Social Scorecard from every business customer and eventually a Social Score from every consumer customer.
Banks’ Climate Pledges Would Downgrade Non-Woke Businesses to 2nd-Tier Economy, Experts Say
The Epoch Times, 05/19/2021, by Petr SvabThe companies are promising they will give preferential treatment to clients that run their operations in a “sustainable” manner.
That means clients will have to implement policies that, in the banks’ view, reduce carbon emissions or promote a number of other goals, such as “gender equality” and “racial equity.” Clients that don’t support carbon reductions should face penalties such as “exclusion” and “divestment,” according to the guidelines of the United Nations-backed Net-Zero Banking Alliance, which counts dozens of major banks among its members.
One of the most interesting things I read on this was the works of religious scholar Alec Ryrie.
His thesis is that the carnage of the 20th century reshaped western morality. There is a reason all arguments eventually devolve into talking about Hitler. The Nazis have become the negative moral standard we measure against.
The result of this is antisemitism and appeasement, standard beliefs pre-war, became unforgivable sins. What were sins before such as divorce and homosexuality are disappearing as any infringement on individual choice is seen as wrong.
The book is $35 on Amazon. What it means is that no one will read it other than the intellectuals who make a living studying this stuff. 520 pages doesn’t help either. We are doomed for not studying history so $35 + shorter attention spans play into the hands of the manipulators of the id.
‘I devoured it on a flight from Houston to Indianapolis.’
520 pages read on a 2hour+ flight. Only the smartest amongst us can read that fast and absorb it. But then the subject of individual genocides is dry reading. I read half of Solginitzen’s(sic) book. Same with Anne Applebaum’s. The subject gets boring after awhile so if the 20th century was the worst the remaining 80 years in this century will dwarf the last one.
“We are doomed for not studying history”
No doubt. I graduated from high school in 1969. Even then the atrocities and many genocides of the first half of the 20th century were not taught.
“Through this book, I came to what I regard as an inescapable but not well-accepted idea: state-sponsored murder is and was the primary fact of the twentieth century. Not the rise of democracy or the liberation of peoples as I was taught in high school, college, and graduate school, but the devastating horrors of the gulag, the holocaust, and the killing fields. Further, it gave truth to the proposition that no matter how bad war is, it’s not the greatest killer. Indeed, the bloody statistics of the twentieth century clearly bear this out…”
HOWEVER, grandpa went back to Russia in 1969 for a visit to those of his siblings who were still alive...and then he found out the truth - that his father had been mercilessly beaten many times by the NKVD (predecessor of the KGB) for the “crime” of renting out part of his home. You see, when the Communists came, they stole everything that my great GF had worked for over the course of his life - a water delivery business with dozens of horses and carts and employing about 50 people, and 14 houses that he had literally built with his own hands (and those of his older sons) to rent out. All that he was allowed to keep was the home that he lived in. So, being sick and not having any income or assets, in 1930s Ukraine (where that bastard Stalin had engineered a genocidal famine), great grandpa was desperate for money to buy food for himself, his wife and other family living there. Somebody, whether one of the renters who didn’t want to pay or someone else, informed on him. He got the proverbial knock on the door in the middle of the night, and was dragged away to prison and many beatings. He was released a bit later, very much worse for wear. Several months later, in 1937, he was dragged away again for no apparent reason (though one of my father’s cousins, who was then a young boy, related that it was because his grandfather was more openly practicing his Judaism - the truth is that I will never know), and they beat him so badly this time that they knew he would die shortly. My great GM got a knock on the door one night, opened it, and was greeted by having her husband unceremoniously thrown into the house like a sack of potatoes. He was very bloodied, and had such a severe head wound that he could not recognize anyone in his own family. He died a few hours later.
Yeah, that’s right: a broken old man sick with cancer, renting out a part of his home to feed himself and his family, was apparently such a mortal threat to Joseph Stalin’s power that he had to send his goons to murder him - and in a very cruel manner, at that. THIS is Communism, THIS is the Left! This is what they do - repeated over 100 million times across a century in countless fields, forests and cold, dank prisons drenched in blood. THIS is what the 21st Century ideological heirs of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Pol Pot and the Kim family will do to tens of millions of innocents here in this country...if they have the opportunity. America is not immune to the most evil impulses and actions of other nations - we are just as human as the Communists in those nations and the Nazis in Germany.
I, as an 8-year-old in 1969, witnessed my grandfather - whom I had always viewed as an incredibly tough man who had dealt with all that life threw at him and not just survived, but prospered - crying like a baby as he related this story to my father after he returned. Of course, being 8, I really didn’t know what was going on at the time - it is only decades later when researching my family history, and having had discussions with one of my father’s cousins who came to this country after Communism fell in the early ‘90s that I truly understood that incident and the reason for grandpa’s pain. To say that this incident made an impression on me is a considerable understatement - I relive it many times each week (especially now that Communism appears to have followed my family to this country). It is the motivation for me having studied Communism and its sister ideologies (including Nazism - YES, it is a LEFTIST ideology!) since my teen years. I KNOW these people - whether they lived 100 years ago in Russia, or 80 years ago in Germany, 60 years ago in Cuba, or now living in their mother’s basement in one of the disgusting blue hive cities in our own country - I KNOW THEM AND THEIR METHODS. These people, whatever label they give their ideology, whatever flag they fly, whatever justification they use as a crutch (for themselves or everyone else) and whatever high-sounding goals they CLAIM to favor, are all cut from the same evil cloth: they are out to control everybody else to serve themselves, and they want to destroy, in any and every way possible, anyone who opposes them in any way. For absolute certain, gulags and ditches in the forest are coming to the United States if people like this ever get control...and I am not optimistic. It is not that their ideology sounds that attractive (except to the ignorant), much less that it succeeds at its claimed goals (it fails miserably, in all places and times, and in all cultures, because it is completely counter to human nature and CANNOT succeed in ending misery and producing prosperity, it can only fail); what worries me is their insatiable lust for power. They are very much like the Terminator in the Schwartzenegger movies - they will not ever stop, no matter what, until they are destroyed. Given how Communists and their sympathizers and lap dogs in education and the media have dumbed down and kept ignorant so many people, I have serious doubts about whether our society has the knowledge or the willpower to defeat Communism here at home. I fear greatly for my family’s future, and often wonder if the latter portion of my life will mirror the misery of my great GF’s life.
But I’m not giving up - this time, unlike a century ago in Russia, we know what to expect, not the least of the reasons being books like “Death By Government” and the “Gulag Archipeligo.” Unlike my GF back then, there is no other place of permanent refuge - oh, you could go to some remote area in South America and be fine...for a few years. But these people and their sick desire for power over others knows no boundaries, and suffers no opposition. They will follow free people literally to the ends of the Earth...unless we stop them, now and in the near future. I will fight, in every way necessary, no matter how old I am, because there is no choice - slavery is NOT a choice, and Communism and all Leftist ideologies are nothing more or less than slavery masquerading as an ideology promising paradise. Unless you are at the top of such a system (which necessarily requires that you be among the most evil people to have ever lived), Communism and Leftism = slavery. Stripped of all the high-sounding BS labels and jargon, it is really that simple. So, like millions or billions before us, we are facing a choice - fight for our liberties and our dignity as human beings, or surrendering to the long night of slavery because you lack the courage to fight for the only thing that is important: your future and that of your progeny.
Learn the lesson of this an similar books, learn the lesson of billions enslaved by this sick ideology - you have to fight it and defeat it, or it will destroy your nation, your family and you. The choice is simple, even if developing the fortitude needed to do what is necessary is not. This is where the rubber meets the road - this is about the most stark case of Good vs. Evil that has ever been seen in history. Make the right choice, and leave your family a legacy of freedom.
“...The more arms we have, the less likely they can get all of us.”
On the other side of my family, my mother’s, about 70 people were murdered by the Nazis in Poland. A very few on my father’s side were. But not a single one of them possessed any firearms, which enabled the Nazis to transport them to camps and do literally anything that they wanted to do to them. Such is the nature of power coupled to an evil morality, especially in the modern industrial age.
Suffice it to say that in light of the experiences on both sides of my family in Europe in the last century, I am not similarly vulnerable. It may well be that some tyrannical regime attempts something similar here at some point in the future, and I and my present family will be similarly victimized...but this time it will definitely NOT be for free.
I read this book when it first came put. It changed my perspective forever.
It is available on interlibrary loan for free
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.