"We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good."
-- Hillary Clinton, San Francisco -- on behalf of Sen. Barbara Boxer.
Posted on 10/25/2004 1:15:11 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
In The Red Terror in Russia, published in Berlin in 1924, the Russian historian and socialist Sergei Melgunov cited Martin Latsis, one of the first leaders of the Cheka (the Soviet political police), as giving the following order on 1 November 1918 to his henchmen: "We don't make war against any people in particular. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. In your investigations don't look for documents and pieces of evidence about what the defendant has done, whether in deed or in speaking or acting against Soviet authority. The first question you should ask him is what class he comes from, what are his roots, his education, his training, and his occupation."
Lenin and his comrades initially found themselves embroiled in a merciless "class war," in which political and ideological adversaries, as well as the more recalcitrant members of the general public, were branded as enemies and marked for destruction. The Bolsheviks had decided to eliminate, by legal and physical means, any challenge or resistance, even if passive, to their absolute power. 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. Sometimes the Bolsheviks subjected these people to genocide. The policy of "de-Cossackization" begun in 1920 corresponds largely to our definition of genocide: a population group firmly established in a particular territory, the Cossacks as such were exterminated, the men shot, the women, children, and the elderly deported, and the villages razed or handed over to new, non-Cossack occupants. Lenin compared the Cossacks to the Vendee during the French Revolution and gladly subjected them to a program of what Gracchus Babeuf, the "inventor" of modern Communism, characterized in 1795 as "populicide."
The "dekulakization" of 1930-1932 repeated the policy of "de-Cossackization" but on a much grander scale. Its primary objective, in accordance with the official order issued for this operation (and the regime's propaganda), was "to exterminate the kulaks as a class." The kulaks who resisted collectivization were shot, and the others were deported with their wives, children, and elderly family members. Although not all kulaks were exterminated directly, sentences of forced labor in wilderness areas of Siberia or the far north left them with scant chance of survival. Several tens of thousands perished there; the exact number of victims remains unknown. As for the great famine in Ukraine in 1932-33, which resulted from the rural population's resistance to forced collectivization, 6 million died in a period of several months.
Here, the genocide of a "class" may well be tantamount to the genocide of a "race"--the deliberate starvation of a child of a Ukrainian kulak as a result of the famine caused by Stalin's regime "is equal to" the starvation of a Jewish child in the Warsaw ghetto as a result of the famine caused by the Nazi regime. Such arguments in no way detract from the unique nature of Auschwitz--the mobilization of leading-edge technological resources and their use in an "industrial process" involving the construction of an "extermination factory," the use of gas, and cremation. However, this argument highlights one particular feature of many Communist regimes--their systematic use of famine as a weapon. The regime aimed to control the total available food supply and, with immense ingenuity, to distribute food purely on the basis of "merits" and "demerits" earned by individuals. This policy was a recipe for creating famine on a massive scale. Remember that in the period after 1918, only Communist countries experienced such famines, which led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands, and in some cases millions, of people. And again in the 1980s, two African countries that claimed to be Marxist-Leninist, Ethiopia and Mozambique, were the only such countries to suffer these deadly famines.
A preliminary global accounting of the crimes committed by Communist regimes shows the following: The execution of tens of thousands of hostages and prisoners without trial, and the murder of hundreds of thousands or rebellious workers and peasants from 1918 to 1922; The famine of 1922, which caused the deaths of 5 million people; The extermination and deportation of the Don Cossacks in 1920; The murder of tens of thousands in concentration camps from 1918 to 1930; The liquidation of almost 690,000 people in the Great Purge of 1937-38; The deportation of 2 million kulaks (and so-called kulaks) in 1930-1932; The destruction of 4 million Ukrainians and 2 million others by means of an artificial and systematically perpetuated famine in 1932-33; The deportation of hundreds of thousands of Poles, Ukrainians, Balts, Moldovans, and Bessarabians from 1939 to 1941, and again in 1944-45; The deportation of the Volga Germans in 1941; The wholesale deportation of the Crimean Tatars in 1943; The wholesale deportation of the Chechens in 1944; The wholesale deportation of the Ingush in 1944; The deportation and extermination of the urban population in Cambodia from 1975 to 1978; The slow destruction of the Tibetans by the Chinese since 1950.
No list of the crimes committed in the name of Leninism and Stalinism would be complete without mentioning the virtually identical crimes committed by the regimes of Mao Zedong, Kim Il Sung, and Pol Pot.
A BTT for a truly grim read. It's a big book, and at some point you start to go numb reading about that much human tragedy, just as the people who perpetrated it did.
bump
In a sane world, this would be required reading for every college freshman...maybe not all of it, but certainly segments.
As he has learned through his life experience, killing people with high incomes outright is like killing the goose that laid the golden eggs.
It is better to keep the bourgeoisie alive and milk them with higher and higher taxes than to kill them.
An indispensable volume, right up there with Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago and the works of Robert Conquest.
Yup. A grim read, indeed. Should be a required read in High School, though, in my humble opinion.
I'd add R.J. Rummel to your list.
You could probably make a much longer list for Islam. The massive killing of christians at the start of the 20th century in Turkey and the world ignoring it gave Hilter the belief he could do the same thing to the jews.
Bet they disarmed the victims before they came to kill and steal from them...
This work should be required reading for most mushheads in college as well as another poster says - in high school.
As the years go by, and fewer and fewer people remember first hand what was done in the name of Communism/Marxism/and all the rest of the perverted branches of totalitarianism, it is works such as this that will keep the horrible memories alive.
It is important to note how Islam uses many of the same violent techniques as well as psychological subterfuges to manipulate those they seek to take over. It is no wonder that Communists and Islamists have cooperated so well for so long.
An indispensable volume, right up there with Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago"
Ditto on that.
I recommend everyone pick up the abridged version on Amazon.
It is a must read for every American. Once you see what the communists did to people, the nazis will seem like misguided boyscouts.
Did I miss something? Was this posted in the context of the current fight to keep Kerry out of the White House or is it just a morbidly interesting bit of history?
Generally FReepers believe the 'rats are the political party most likely to engage in this sort of behavior - for the common good, you understand. Every 'rat victory is a victory for those who committed the crimes detailed in the book. Welcome to Free Republic.
A grim chapter in human history that has been largely swept under the rug and denied by major newspapers (especially the NY Times), media, and Hollywood. According to R.J. Rummel's excellent statistical estimates, various Communist regimes have slaughtered some 120 million indivduals since 1918, a number that dwarfs all others by far. This number doesn't even count abortion, a favorite industry of all leftists, including Communists. Yet to hear the left tell it, the worst genocides of all time were carried out by Christianity.
Just last year, the excreable "Pinch" Sulzberger, owner of the NY Times, went to great lengths to oppose the rescinding of a Pulitzer Prize awarded to the journalistic fraud Walter Duranty in 1933. Duranty fabricated stories from his Moscow apartment and covered up the purges of Stalin and the execution by famine of millions of Kulaks under Stalin's henchman Lazar Kaganovich. The only significant Hollywood film about the Soviet regime was "Reds", a 1980s hagiography of the American Marxist John Reed. The Communist Party of the USA, by the way, has endorsed John Kerry for President. That should tell aby rational person all they need to know about him.
"We cannot fight communism all over the world. I think we should have learned that lesson by now." - John Kerry, Senate Testimony, April 1971
Freeper Alert: Sen. KERRY / Communist Vietnamese Killing Off Christains in Central Highlands...
What is bourgeoisie?
Bourgeois being literally French for "city-dweller" but in practice meaning a member of the middle-class - someone who holds a decent private job or owns a business, etc.
For a communist this means the "employer class" whether or not they were employers.
In Russia the kulaks were the agrarian equivalent.
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