A century of Communism achieved four main results: poverty, oppression, war, and mass death. So why does anybody still think collectivism is 'idealistic'?
Today marks the 100th anniversary of the October Revolution that set off the long global reign of terror of Communism. (For obscure reasons having to do with the outdated calendar used in Russia at the time, the October Revolution actually happened in November, and the Soviet Union traditionally celebrated it on November 7.) A century of Communism achieved four main results for the people who suffered under it: poverty, oppression, war, and mass death.
Countries taken over by Communists, from China and Russia to Cuba and Venezuela, were either plunged from relative prosperity into starvation or walled off for decades from the growing prosperity of capitalist countries—often right next door, enjoying all the same benefits of geography and culture. Think of the contrast between East and West Berlin, between Cuba and Chile, between mainland China and Hong Kong, between North and South Korea.
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Communist countries have imposed oppressive regimes telling everyone what to read, think, and say. Scientists could be sent to the gulag for teaching unapproved ideas about genetics. Dissidents have been sent to prison camps, tortured, harassed, locked in psychiatric wards, and simply murdered outright. Artists and intellectuals have fled by the hundreds, when they could, seeking asylum in non-Communist countries in search of the freedom to do their work.
Communism fueled dozens of brutal civil wars and insurgencies across the world. A list of countries synonymous with endless warfare during the late twentieth century—Vietnam, Cambodia, Angola, El Salvador, Afghanistan, and so on—all have one big thing in common: Communism. As a consequence, the end of the Cold War saw the biggest drop in the number of wars and deaths from war since the end of World War II, along with the creation of dozens of new democracies.
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Above all else, the history of Communism is a history of mass-scale horrors: the terror-famine in Ukraine, Stalin’s show trials and gulags, the mass starvation of China’s Great Leap Forward, followed by the anarchic terror of the Cultural Revolution, the Killing Fields of Cambodia—those are just the low points in a list that can go on and on. It is estimated that in the past 100 years, Communist regimes killed as many as 100 million people.
What’s With Our Mental Block on History? --->Read the rest from Robert Tracinski HERE at The Federalist and follow links below to related opinions:
Have 100 Years of Communism Taught Us Nothing?
'Refuse Fascism' Wants To Replace Trump With Stalin, Mao
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