Posted on 11/04/2017 5:35:14 AM PDT by RoosterRedux
A century ago this week, communism took over the Russian empire, the world’s largest state at the time. Leftist movements of various sorts had been common in European politics long before the revolution of Oct. 25, 1917 (which became Nov. 7 in the reformed Russian calendar), but Vladimir Lenin and his Bolsheviks were different. They were not merely fanatical in their convictions but flexible in their tactics—and fortunate in their opponents.
Communism entered history as a ferocious yet idealistic condemnation of capitalism, promising a better world. Its adherents, like others on the left, blamed capitalism for the miserable conditions that afflicted peasants and workers alike and for the prevalence of indentured and child labor. Communists saw the slaughter of World War I as a direct result of the rapacious competition among the great powers for overseas markets.
But a century of communism in power—with holdouts even now in Cuba, North Korea and China—has made clear the human cost of a political program bent on overthrowing capitalism. Again and again, the effort to eliminate markets and private property has brought about the deaths of an astounding number of people. Since 1917—in the Soviet Union, China, Mongolia, Eastern Europe, Indochina, Africa, Afghanistan and parts of Latin America—communism has claimed at least 65 million lives, according to the painstaking research of demographers.
Communism’s tools of destruction have included mass deportations, forced labor camps and police-state terror—a model established by Lenin and especially by his successor Joseph Stalin. It has been widely imitated. Though communism has killed huge numbers of people intentionally, even more of its victims have died from starvation as a result of its cruel projects of social engineering.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
Both countries [Russia and China] continue to distrust what is perhaps most important about free markets and private property: Their capacity to give independence of action and thought to ordinary people [The Deplorables], pursuing their own interests as they see fit, in private life, civil society and the political sphere.
Mao and Uncle Joe and a few other select commie Dictator’s probably have a higher body count than all the other bloody regimes put together.
I believe the 65 million is an undercount.
Add 100MM to the number in the article to get closer to the right answer.
What doesn't need tweaking is the Left is in love with and supports both.
Bkmk
It is a massive, deliberate, propaganda-driven under-count!
The Soviet, alone, accounted for about 100-million during the purges of the 30's. Mao accounted for an additional 100-million or so during the 40;s and 50's.
Then throw in Cambodia, Ukraine, etc and, maybe, another 100-million can be accounted for.
Finally, the U.S. should be on this same list for the 100-million, or so, exterminated by the U.S. government since the 70's. (And continues even today...)
See post #11
To get the true picture, the comparison has to be to “socialism” rather than “communism”. The only thing separating Hitler from Stalin and Mao is that one was for socialism on a nation-by-nation basis (”national socialism”) and the others for socialism on an over-arching global basis (”international socialism”). But they were all socialists.
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