On November 7 the world will mark a grim anniversary: One hundred years since the small but devout faction of Marxists called the Bolsheviks lost a popular election. It was the last one Russia would see for 70 years. Instead of accepting the people’s will, the Bolsheviks overthrew that country’s fledgling provisional government. That revolution unleashed a nightmare: a vicious civil war, the mass killing of clergy and religious believers, the slaughter of businessmen and landlords, and the building of concentration camps, 20 years before Hitler. In a single day, the Bolsheviks were known to boast, they killed more dissidents than the Spanish Inquisition had in 300 years.

Find Tougher People

And that just describes what Lenin did. That was the first phase of the Soviet regime, which many leftists still try to present as a golden age, full of hope. Read this note from Lenin to his subordinates on August 11, 1918:

Comrades! The uprising by the five kulak volosts [regions] must be mercilessly suppressed. The interest of the entire revolution demands this, for we are now facing everywhere the “final decisive battle” with the kulaks. We need to set an example.

1. You need to hang (hang without fail, so that the people see) no fewer than 100 of the notorious kulaks, the rich and the bloodsuckers.
2. Publish their names.
3. Take all their grain from them.
4. Appoint the hostages — in accordance with yesterday’s telegram.

This needs to be done in such a way that the people for hundreds of versts around will see, tremble, know and shout: they are throttling and will throttle the bloodsucking kulaks.

Telegraph us concerning receipt and implementation.

Yours, Lenin.

P.S. Find tougher people.

Stalin’s Holocaust

When Lenin died, Russia found one, in the person of Joseph Stalin. Contrary to the wishful thinking of Western leftists, Stalin was a faithful Bolshevik, and an orthodox Marxist. His policies followed Lenin’s goals to their logical end: the extermination of religion, the persecution of ethnic minorities, and the seizure of all private land. According to genocide scholar R.J. Rummel, the number of people murdered in the Soviet Union during 70 years of Communism is probably 61,911,000. That’s about the number of people now living in California and Florida. All shot, starved, frozen, beaten or worked to death in pursuit of “utopia.”

According to genocide scholar R.J. Rummel, the number of people murdered in the Soviet Union during 70 years of Communism is probably 61,911,000. That’s about the number of people now living in California and Florida. All shot, starved, frozen, beaten or worked to death in pursuit of “utopia.”

Add in the revolutions inspired and aided by the Soviets, and you have to compute the 77 million who died under Mao in China. Then look at Cambodia, Vietnam, Cuba, Korea, and the Chinese “one-child policy,” with its millions of forced abortions. And think of this: As you read this, tens of thousands of human beings just like you and me starve in concentration camps in North Korea.

As Stalin once quipped, the death of one person is tragedy. The death of millions is just “a statistic.” So it makes sense to try to grasp this immense human tragedy using faces and names. Read labor camp survivor Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s masterwork of historical memory The Gulag Archipelago for some of those names and stories. Then visit the Victims of Communism Foundation for first-person testimonies of survivors.

The Schindler’s List of Communism

Or watch a powerful film. It dramatizes the artificial famine that Stalin inflicted on Ukraine in his quest for Marxist equality in farming. That resulted in between four and twelve million deaths, and caused the outbreak of cannibalism within families. The New York Times denied that the famine was even happening. Its reporter on the spot, Walter Duranty, was a Communist sympathizer and Stalin’s personal friend. Duranty won a Pulitzer for his coverage, which the Times has never returned.

Famine 33 (1991) is the first movie made in Ukraine after the fall of the Soviet Union. This Schindler’s List of the Communist holocaust opened in two theaters in the U.S. It played for a couple of weeks. I rushed out and saw it, and ordered a copy from Ukraine. I showed the film to a college class I taught at the end of our course on modern thought. “Ideas have consequences,” I told them. “And these are the consequences of Karl Marx’s thought.”

It’s now on Youtube with English subtitles. If you know any young people who sport a Che Guevara t-shirt or otherwise flirt with the most poisonous political idea in history, sit them down and show them this movie.
 

 

The Times‘ Agitprop Never Ends

The New York Times is back on the job. It has been preparing us for the Bolshevik anniversary with a whitewash. As Commentary editor Sohrab Ahmari points out:

Among its 35 “Red Century” opeds the NYT hasn’t run an account of the gulag or Christian persecution under Communism https://t.co/Oxmk7B1X2U

— Sohrab Ahmari (@SohrabAhmari) October 18, 2017

Imagine a 35-part series on fascism and Nazism that never mentioned the Holocaust. You might start to wonder what the editors of that newspaper were up to. 

Tomorrow, I’ll lay out Marx’s basic philosophical errors, and the seductive appeal of Marxism to a certain kind of person.