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One of the historically remarkable settlements along the coastal stretch in Ilaje Local Government Area of Ondo State is Ayetoro, otherwise called the Holy Apostles Community. The town was a utopian Christian community where communism once fully held sway. There was joint ownership of properties; it tilted towards a classless society. HAKEEM GBADAMOSI, after a visit to Ayetoro, reports the peculiarities of the town and the challenges therewith.

Ayetoro was popularly known for its adoption and practice of communism in the late 1940s. The history of the community started when a group of militant Christians known as Omo Oba Jesu came into the coastal part of Ilaje in the southern part of the state. This group of Christian preachers called the Holy Apostles thus, on January 12, 1947, converged and established their church and a settlement called Ayetoro.

They reportedly had a unique way of communal relationship which was akin to communism as practiced by the early Christians in the Bible. In Ayetoro, these militant Christians ensured that there was the public ownership of all investments. At that early part, there was no individual ownership of property. Their peculiar way of life and place of settlement was initially opposed by some powerful rulers in Ilaje land.

It, however, took the intervention of the colonial authority through the secretary of Ondo Province who allowed them live as they deemed fit.

The people of Ayetoro were reputed for their commercial living and advanced technology in fishing, transportation, industry such as carpentry and furniture, shoe making, bakery, soap making, Textile and marine business.

The town was said to be so popular that it attracted the attention of Chief Obafemi Awolowo and the communist world in the 1950s, particularly the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Many students from Ayetoro were educated through a bilateral agreement with countries like West Germany, Hungary, Austria and the United Kingdom.

However, the decline in Ayetoros sense of communism began in the 1970s.

An octogenarian and one of the survivors of communism in Ayetoro, Pa Bankole Joshua, in an interaction with Nigerian Tribune spoke glowingly of the early days of communism in Ayetoro, just as he added that the people celebrated Ayetoros 70th founders day on January 15th, earlier this year.

He recalled that the community was uninhabitable before the first Christian militant, Zaccheus Okenla, received the call of the Almighty God and led others there.

Pa Joshua added that in the beginning there was no individual ownership of properties, no security challenges and the whole community worshipped in one church with the spiritual leaders being in control of all activities.

Speaking on the genesis of communism in Ayetoro, he said the spiritual leader then, Okenla, whom he described as intelligent, imaginative, and strong-willed received the inspiration on the style of governance from God through the Holy Spirit.

According to him, the adoption of communism was aimed at reducing the importance of family bonds and fostering of communal ownership of everything. Under Ayetoro communism, the traditional extended family was abolished and all activities organised along family lines were discouraged. By early 1950s, the whole settlement was spatially divided into female and male sections separated by a central board-walk raised on stilts.

He explained further that spouses lived separately saying about four or five women lived in one house in the female section while same applied to the men. Speaking about raising children, Pa Joshua said young children under the age of five were kept at a special section while their mothers worked in different departments until they retired home around 5pm.

He said different departments were created then and things were done together or uniformly. He listed the departments to include: textile, boat making, carpentry, shoe making, soap making and fishery which was the communitys major source of income.

He said fish were sold and the income used to develop the community, saying we had a central system; we ate together and whatever you needed would be catered to. But there was no right to private ownership; it was just collective ownership.

Children were usually assigned to foster parents whom they lived with from the age five or six. These foster parents were responsible for their training and behavior. Every man was regarded as a father to every child here. We saw ourselves as very civilized. People came from far and wide to understudy how we did things here. Christianity played a vital role as the church leaders whom we referred to as the Holy Apostles placed more emphasis on the role of the Holy Spirit in directing our affairs. Though communism is no longer fully practiced, it still plays out in our day to day activities.

Speaking on the state of communism in the town, one of the elders of the only church in the community, the Holy Apostles Church, Lawrence Lemamu affirmed that communism was not utterly eradicated as speculated by people but reformed to suit modern trends and to avert the circumstances that destroyed the system in Russia and other places where it was practiced.

Lemamu said as a matter of fact, the system was reformed to embrace individual responsibilities rather than a large whole feeding on the efforts of a few people. He said the traces of communism could still be felt in the church which is the only symbol of authority in the land: traditionally, spiritually and administratively.

He noted that the increase in human population was another factor that led to reforms in the communal system, saying that providing for the teeming population became a huge task which could not be met by the leaders.

According to him, the people of the community still jointly carried out some projects for the wellbeing and welfare of the people. The NDDC sunk a borehole for the community without completing the project but through communal effort, we finished it and water runs in almost every home in Ayetoro. Aside this, we renovated our old bakery and started production again. The loaves of bread we consume are produced by our people while we use the profits from the proceeds to develop our land.

To make life more comfortable for our people, each house in the community enjoys at least four hours of uninterrupted power supply every day of the week. At weekends, we supply electricity from morning till evening. We have been doing this since the days of communism. We dont depend on government for this, he said.

Lemamu lamented that those who were sponsored through communal efforts to acquire western education turned against the system when they returned home.

According to him, the educated elite saw themselves as more superior to the people who worked for their academic training. They considered the old tradition and system of the community as barbaric, archaic and evil. This affected us a great deal. They insisted that we embrace capitalism and not communism. Today, each family is responsible for the education of their wards or children. It is no longer through communal efforts.

A member of Ayetoro youth congress, Emmanuel Aralu, noted that those who turned against the tradition of the people were driven by selfish motives meant to destroy the traditional practices of the people under the guise of bringing civilisation to them.

This people, since they had acquired foreign education through communal sponsorship and attained influential status, they chose to fight the communitys governance establishment. Our community is educationally backward. The only secondary here is Happy City College which was established during the days of Obafemi Awolowo. Today, the school is nothing to write home about, he said

Aralu frowned on the neglect of the community by subsequent governments in the state. We have cried to government for help on the frequent occurrence of ocean surge which usually damage our homes but succeeding governments are insensitive to our plight. Some members of elite from this town are also not helping matters by using the embankment project of the government to siphon money into private pockets. We have not felt the impact of this embankment project. Our homes are daily flooded while some of them are interested in the oil deposit in the community, he said.

Leadership crisis

Lemamu said the peace in the land was disrupted by some members of the educated elite who wanted to change the style of living of the people after the demise of the last ruler of the community. He said leaders in the past were chosen after prayers were offered to the Holy Spirit, just as he insisted that the tradition would be maintained.

He explained that the kingship crisis reached its climax early last year when the whole community was preparing for its founders day anniversary. He recalled that on the eve of the anniversary, gunboats loaded with security personnel invaded the community with the aim of scuttling the anniversary.

According to him, it has been the usual custom of the entire community to hold a procession round the community in their white garments. This was however disrupted by the security men.

He accused some members of the towns elite group who wanted to forcefully install a leader.

They wanted to install a leader not chosen by the Holy Spirit. They raised the false alarm that the celebration would be marred, all in the name of scheming to install the next king after the demise of the fifth Ogeleyinbo, Oba Guard Asogbon on February 12, 2015. This people broke into the church and forcefully took all the paraphernalia of authority. That action was a taboo against the custom and tradition of the community. Since the time of our forefathers, no election has been conducted to choose the any king; therefore, the whole community rejected the moves by this people.

This led to closure of the only church in the land but the people of the community usually converge on the open street for their weekly church service. The first time the church was locked, the community resorted to the City Hall, which we built through communal effort. But we were prevented from using the City Hall by this people who brought security operatives to the holy land for the first time in 2016.

Since the days of our fathers, Ayetoro was the only community without a police post and yet, the peace of the community was never breached. Now they have brought mobile policemen to our community and we are restricted in our own land and from our properties. But we will continue to live as communally as we used to, Lemamu said.

See the article here:
Ayetoro: Once upon a communist town - NIGERIAN TRIBUNE (press release) (blog)

History tells us that when the Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991, Russian communism collapsed.

Boris Yeltsin was elevated to president upon the resignation of Mikhail Gorbachev on Christmas Day and a new era of dtente began between Russia and the U.S. after 44 years of cold war. For more than 20 years the U.S. and Russia were on mostly friendly terms; so friendly, in fact, that in 1996 a group of Bill Clinton campaign operatives helped save Yeltsins political career.

Although his approval ratings were in a ditch, two-thirds of Russians considered him corrupt, and he trailed five candidates in the polls four months prior to the election, Yeltsin was reelectedwith the help of American campaign professionals operating in secret and cash from American companies.

In 2012, GOP Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, in a debate with President Barack Obama, first broached the neocon-inspired notion that Russia might be more our enemy than friend. Obama, establishment Democrats and the state propaganda mainstream media (apologies for the redundancy), laughed Romney off the stage and into the dustbin containing a litany of limp-wristed faux conservative neocon losers.

But Russia, led by Vladimir Putin, had/has every right to consider the U.S. an enemy. In 2011the Obama/Hillary Clinton State Department had funded if not instigated a protest movement against Putin in an effort to have him resign or get him defeated for reelection. Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators gathered across the country and called for his resignation.

Those arent the only elections in which America has meddled. And WikiLeaks just released documents showing CIA espionage in the 2012 French presidential elections.

Now fast forward to the 2016 campaign of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Clinton lackeys and the mainstream media (again, apologies for the redundancy) along with the neocon establishment wing of the Republican Party are all caterwauling nonstop about Trumps alleged ties to Russia and Russian hacking of the election.

But to recap, the only evidence of Russian hacking comes from Crowdstrike, the Democrat National Committees cybersecurity firm, which has ties to the Council on Foreign Relations. American intelligence agencies were not allowed by the DNC to probe their servers, not that they can be trusted to tell the truth.

To clarify, the neocon wing includesCFR members and their servants and cronies(Republicans and Democrats); the Bush crime family cabal; and the leaders of the anti-Trump movement like Insane John McCain, his lapdog Lindsey Graham, William Kristol of the Zionist propaganda rag Weekly Standard; and former joke presidential candidate Evan McMullin (a former CIA agent). All of them are pushing for war with Russia because Russia stands in the way (in Syria, and alongside Iran) of complete U.S. hegemony over the Middle East.

The neocon wing are descendants of the Trotskyites and Wall Street moguls who funded both sides of the Russian Revolution for profit and exported socialism/communism to Russia.

Both Kristol and McMullin along with other neocons have openly called for a coup against Trump by the Deep State. Coups are said to occur in communist/Marxist/socialist backwaters, not republics. Yet there is an active coup underway against Trump.

Peopleare so nave. Communism is not dead in Russia. It is not dead in Europe. It is not even dead in the United States. Communism is alive and well worldwide.

Communism is only a cover word or disguise for state capitalism or monopoly capitalism and police state power. With only very small variations the entire world is on this system.

Russian communism gets the bad name because it has been used since World War II by the ruling oligarchy and their military-industrial complex to keep the American people in constant fear and political manipulation. More importantly, Russian communism has been used as a decoy to keep the American people and the world from seeing American communism.

Russian communism was exported to Russia from the U.S. (See Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, by Antony Sutton). But in the United States, communism was incubated, concealed and sold as democracy.

Bureaucratic tyranny, a ruling oligarchy and Deep State power areas nefarious in the United States as in any so-called communist country. It is just more sophisticated and the media plus the public school system has sold the U.S. brand of communism as democracy.

When the U.S. spying apparatus is unleashed unrestrained on the American people and even people running for president you are de facto living in a communist police state.

When the federal government, or as we call it, the state, can create money and pay it to you for goods and your labor, you are a slave. You may be a happy slave, but you are indeed a slave to the money creators.

This system is iron-fisted totalitarianism because it is backed by police power. Every countryin the world is on this money creation system backed by police power.

Police power is the power of the state to place restraints on the personal freedom and property rights of persons (individuals) for the protection of the public safety, health, and morals (Blacks Law Dictionary).

This says that public policy is the federal governments monopoly of police power to manipulate, restrict or extinguish human liberty and property for the benefit of the state. This includes legislating social relationships and even morality.

Here are the 10 planks of communism:

These planks are supported by both major political parties.

Russian communism anyone? What a joke. Focus on American communism.

Related:

When an American politician really sought Russias help with an election

Purveyors of fake news warn of the dangers of fake news

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Read this article:
Russian communism vs. American communism - Personal Liberty Digest

The creators of the new film Bitter Harvest believe that audiences instinctively have a feel for what makes a Holocaust movie. But few in the West, they say, know much about the Holodomor, Stalins death-by-starvation pogrom against Ukraine in the late 1920s and 1930s that ultimately resulted in the deaths of millions.

Even less have seen it ever represented on film.

There are lot of people who think socialism and communism are a good thing, and those who have lived it and experienced it know how bad and monstrous it is, said producer Ian Ihnatowycz, whose ancestors escaped from Stalins purges to Canada while they still could. You can only enforce communism at the point of a gun because people resist.

Estimates of the death toll of the Holdomor are as high as 20 million to 25 million by the time of Stalins death in 1953.

Bitter Harvest opens on an idyllic Ukrainian village not long after the Russian Revolution, with people believing that Lenins reforms and the tossing out of the czars will bring a new dawn to the land. Young Yuri (Max Irons) dreams of moving to Kiev to become an artist and earn enough to marry his sweetheart Natalka (Samantha Banks).

But then Lenin dies, Stalin sweeps into power and, nearly overnight, institutes a despotic cloud over the entire Soviet empire.

Communism promised this great brotherhood of workers and society, and it was bogus, Mr. Ihnatowycz said. Stalin realized that food could be a weapon. In 1931-33, he decided to really clamp down on the technique of starving people into submission.

Most people in the West may know fleetingly of it but dont really know a lot of the history.

In the film Yuri is hurried away from his village when the Soviets begin reigning down terror. In Kiev he joins an upstart underground all the while painting. Bitter Harvest becomes by turns historical epic in the mold of David Lean, a melodrama and, at times, an action picture.

Like his producer, director George Mendeluks ancestors escaped the Ukrainian genocide. Mr. Mendeluk was born in Germany before he too migrated to Canada.

One of the things we want to offer is to educate as well as entertain, Mr. Mendeluk said of his film. I dont want people to lost sight that Ukraine isnt the little Ukraine that Russia always talks about. Russia evolved out of Ukraine. It has its own identity that precedes even the Russian identity.

Bitter Harvest shot much of its footage in Ukraine, often with Ukrainian actors and crew members. Many of them, the producer said, wept during the filming.

I asked once Why are you so emotional? They said [the scenes] remind us of stories told to them by their grandparents, Mr. Ihnatowycz recalled.

In 2014 Russian President Vladimir Putin annexed the disputed Crimean Peninsula. Messrs Mendeluk and Ihnatowycz see some unfortunate parallels with the Russian media apparatus of today and the state-sanctioned oppression of the time portrayed in Bitter Harvest.

Under Putin, the position is the famine was a hoax, Mr. Ihnatowycz said. Out come the deniers.

Mr. Mendeluk said some brave writers at the time of the Holodomor attempted to get the word out about the starvation, while other Soviet-controlled media referred only to widespread malnutrition.

Masters of euphemism, Mr. Mendeluk said.

Bitter Harvest, which opens Thursday in the District, will be showing in over 40 countries around the world, including many of the former Soviet republics. It opens in Ukraine Thursday as well.

And while tens of millions perished in Stalins Holodomor, Mr. Ihnatowycz notes that many, many more Ukrainians survived, as have their descendents.

It was awful, but the country lives on, he said. The country was left leaderless for three generations, but it did not die, and I think thats a true testament to the strength of the spirit and the capacity for love that all Ukrainians have.

Mr. Mendeluk hopes Bitter Harvest might also be the beginning of a future thriving film industry in his ancestral homeland.

Id like to foster a greater film industry in the Ukraine, but always showing Ukrainian culture and indomitable spirit, he said.

Read more:
'Bitter Harvest' shows Ukrainian genocide at the hands of Soviet starvation program - Washington Times

In February, Romania quietly passing a controversial executive order that would make it difficult to convict officials for corruption and abuses of power. This anti-corruption bill sent shockwaves throughout the country and thousands of Romanians protested. The executive order was quickly rescinded in response.

This was the largest uprisingin nearly 30 years, but Romania has a long and storied history with battling corruption. The country, along with most of Eastern Europe, aligned with the Soviet Union and adopted a centralized economy, meaning price controls and all production wascontrolled by the state. This system is highly corruptible, as businesses were only able to function by offering bribes and kickbacks to politicians.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, many countries adopted democratic institutions, but they failed to get rid of corrupt individuals and practices. So does communism breed corruption?

Learn More:

DW: Romania decriminalizes official misconduct amid mass protests

RFERL:Corruption Is The New Communism

New York Times:In Romania, Corruption's Tentacles Grip Daily Life

More here:
How Communism Breeds Corruption - Seeker - Video - Seeker

People naturally look for a path to follow. During times ancient and modern, human beingshave looked for a way forward to become healthier, happier, and better in all ways.

Communism is not a path that offers a way forward. A path can be judged by its fruits, and by the character of its leading figures.

Communism has been tried for more than 100 years by hundreds of millions of people, and the results are always the same: Its fruits are death, destruction, and despair.

Its leading figures were cynical and sly men who masked their hatred of humanity with high-sounding words. By any measure, they were as dark and sinister as could be.

It was at the crossroads of history, with the rise of industrialization and the decline of monarchs, when mankind was offered a Faustian bargain: Abandon your traditions and morals, and enter a new age. The promise was heaven on earth, and the cost was to partake in a movement to destroy morals and religious beliefand to destroy anyone who stood against this new future.

Karl Marx. (Creative Commons/Wikimedia)

The ideas of communism, and the various schools of thought at its foundations, had already seeped deeply into the societies of Europe ahead of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia. Its provocateurs presented it as a way out of the suffering of this worldwith dreamy tales of an end to poverty and hunger, and a future of earthly delights.

Behind the offer were other intentions, however, and these are made clear with a look at the histories of Karl Marx and others credited with laying the foundations of communism.

In his early poem Invocation of One in Despair, Marx wrote about his will to create a new system.

So a god has snatched from me my all In the curse and rack of Destiny. All his worlds are gone beyond recall! Nothing but revenge is left to me! I shall build my throne high overhead, Cold, tremendous shall its summit be. For its bulwarksuperstitious dread, For its Marshallblackest agony.

Who looks on it with a healthy eye, Shall turn back, struck deathly pale and dumb; Clutched by blind and chill Mortality May his happiness prepare its tomb.

Marx had many similar writings, many of which suggest his goal in using communism was never to help humanity, but instead to enact a sort of vengeance against heaven.

In Marxs 1839 play Oulanem, believed to be a backward pronunciation of Emmanuel, an alternative biblical name for God, he begins with Ruined! Ruined! My time has clean run out! The clock has stopped, the pygmy house has crumbled. Soon I shall embrace eternity to my breast, and soon I shall howl gigantic curses at mankind. If there is a Something which devours, Ill leap within it, though I bring the world to ruinsthe world which bulks between me and the abyss, I will smash to pieces with my enduring curses.

In The Making of Modern Economics, Mark Skousen writes that a pact with the devil is a central theme in Oulanem, and the play reveals a number of violent and eccentric characters. Skousen notes that Marxs fixation with self-destructive behavior was prevalent through most of his life.

Just like his character Oulanem, Marx in his writings shows a desire to not only destroy himself, but a desire to destroy humankind along with him.

In his 1841 poem The Player (also translated as The Fiddler), Marx writes, Look now, my blood-dark sword shall stab/Unerringly within thy soul./God neither knows nor honors art./The hellish vapors rise and fill the brain/Till I go mad and my heart is utterly changed. He continues, See this swordthe Prince of Darkness sold it to me, and, ever more boldly I play the dance of death.

A Khmer Rouge soldier waves his pistol and orders store owners to abandon their shops in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, on April 17, 1975 as the capital fell to the communist forces. (AP Photo/Christoph Froehder)

An analysis of the above poem from Robert Payne, in his 1968 book Marx, states, Marx is here celebrating a satanic mystery, for the player is clearly Lucifer or Mephistopheles, and what he is playing with such frenzy is the music which accompanies the end of the world.

He continues, Marx clearly enjoyed the horrors he depicted, and we shall find him enjoying in very much the same way the destruction of whole classes in the Communist Manifesto. He was a man with a peculiar faculty for relishing disaster.

Payne noted, There can be very little doubt that those interminable stories were autobiographical. He had the Devils view of the world, and the Devils malignity. Sometimes he seemed to know that he was accomplishing works of evil.

However bizarre Marxs early writings were, his stated claims and goals were not far from the reality of what he created: a system that in a single century took an unprecedented number of lives. Estimates vary, but according to combined research from experts, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Jung Chang, and Jon Halliday, and numbers collected by The Black Book of Communism, published by Harvard University Press, the number is close to 150 million deaths.

What Marx and Friedrich Engels set forth in The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848, was an ideology based in struggle that, according to its own words, abolishes all religion, and all morality. They regarded their beliefs as being absolutethe end of human progressand set forth a proposal that all other beliefs should be destroyed through violent revolution.

They based their version of communism in the concept of dialectical materialism: the absolute idea that all development comes through struggle and that life is nothing more than matter. An effect of this belief has been a disregard for human life under all communist leaders.

In 1906, Vladimir Lenin wrote in Proletary magazine that his interest was armed struggle, aimed at assassinating individuals, chiefs, and subordinates in the army and police, and to also seize money from governments and individual people.

After taking power in 1917, Lenin followed through on these concepts. Tens of thousands of people were arrested for opposing the new regimemany of whom were tortured and executed en masse.

Children during a Stalin-era famine in Ukraine. The famine, known as the Holodomor, took place between 1932 and 1933. (Public Domain)

Lenin and his followers decided to eliminate, by legal and physical means, any challenge or resistance, even if passive, to their absolute power, according to The Black Book of Communism, published in 1999.

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, it states.

Lenin also forbade private property, and peasants throughout Russia had their food seized by the state. Lenin set strict quotas on how much was to be confiscated, and when he saw the numbers go unmet, he ordered that even seeds should be seized.

With peasants unable to plant new crops, and without a surplus of food for the winter, a famine swept Russia between 1921 and 1922, which according to the Hoover Institute killed between 5 million and 10 million people.

Lenin was overjoyed. According to The Black Book of Communism, one of his friends later recalled that Lenin had the courage to come out and say openly that famine would have numerous positive results, since he claimed it would bring about the next stage more rapidly, and usher in socialism, the stage that necessarily followed capitalism.

Famine would also destroy faith not only in the tsar, he added, but in God too.

Soviet historian Richard Pipes wrote in his book The Unknown Lenin that Lenin brought about the famine intentionally. He stated, For humankind at large, Lenin had nothing but scorn.

Peasants stand in front of human remains. Cannibalism was widespread during the Russian famine between 1921 and 1922. (Creative Commons/Wikimedia)

He said Lenin had almost no interest in the lives of individual people, and he treated the working class much as a metal worker treated iron ore.

History repeated itself under Josef Stalin, following the death of Lenin on Jan. 21, 1924. Stalin began his 29-year rule of the Soviet Union by consolidating his power and having his rivals arrested or executed.

In 1929, Stalin launched a program under the collectivism banner, to take not only the belongings from farmers, but to also seize their land and destroy their ability to sell produce. He sent the Red Army to confiscate their belongings, including their farming equipment.

A famine again swept the country. In Ukraine, between 7 million and 10 million people were killed, according to United Nations estimates published in November 2003. In Kazakhstan, an estimated 1.5 million people starved, according to the Wilson Center. Meanwhile, farmers who opposed Stalins collectivism program were labeled kulaks, and tens of thousands were rounded up and executed. Stalin also used this opportunity to strike out at enemies of his revolution, which included priests and devout religious believers.

Joseph Stalin (Public Domain)

As did Lenin, Stalin later declared the program a success. Through these movements and others that followed, Solzhenitsyn, a renowned Russian novelist and historian, estimated that Stalin killed 60 million to 66 million people.

The bloody legacy of Stalin was only surpassed by that of Mao Zedong, head of the Chinese Communist Party. Under a similar program of collectivism, Mao started his Great Leap Forward in 1958, and through various means managed to also trigger a famine that in four years, according to Maos Great Famine by Hong Kong-based historian Frank Dikotter, killed at least 45 million people.

Cannibalism was also common during this famine. Materials uncovered by Chinese and Western scholars, and by The Washington Post in 1994, give glimpses into what took place: In Damiao commune, Chen Zhangying and her husband Zhao Xizhen killed and boiled their 8-year-old son Xiao Qing and ate him; and, In Wudian commune, Wang Lanying not only picked up dead people to eat, but also sold two jin [2.2 pounds] from their bodies as pork.

Just like Stalin and Lenin, Mao excused these deaths, according to research from religious author and historian Harun Yahya. Mao and his supporters regarded the famine as punishment for villagers not being sufficiently obedient to the Chinese Communist Party.

Communist Party cadres hang a placard on the neck of a Chinese man. The words on the placard states the mans name and accuse him of being a member of the black class (Public Domain)

Just a year prior to the Great Leap Forward, in 1957, Mao held his Hundred Flowers campaign, when he invited intellectuals to present their criticisms of his regime, then used their criticisms as admissions of guilt. According to Red Holocaust by Steven Rosefielde, Mao labeled the estimated 550,000 intellectuals as rightists and then had them humiliated, fired, imprisoned, tortured, or killed.

In Mao: The Unknown Story, authors and historians Chang and Halliday show Mao was responsible for at least 70 million deaths.

Under communist regimes, and its ideology of struggle, people were turned against each other. Children reported on their parents, students beat and tortured teachers, young people were turned against the elderly, and neighbors were turned against neighbors.

One of Marxs partners in the First International, Mikhail Bakunin, wrote, The Evil One is the satanic revolt against divine authority, revolt in which we see the fecund germ of all human emancipations, the revolution. Socialists recognize each other by the words In the name of the one to whom a great wrong has been done,' according to Marx and Satan by Richard Wurmbrand.

In this revolution we will have to awaken the Devil in the people, to stir up the basest passions, Bakunin wrote. Our mission is to destroy, not to edify.

This concept was seen clearly in the effects of communism, as it worked by first breaking peoples spirits through famine, jarring them with public executions and harassmentall of which worked to turn people away from their morals and beliefs.

A man and woman with body parts of children in front of them. A famine in Russia between 1921 and 1922 is estimated to have killed 5 to 10 million people. (Public Domain)

According to The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism, 19181924 by Bruno Cabanes, this was seen immediately after Lenin took power.

These peasant wars unleashed demons on both sides: the Communists against the hoarders and enemies of the people; the villagers against all symbols of collectivization, Cabanes wrote.

During the famine under Stalin, there were cases of people cannibalizing human corpses, and of people kidnapping children to cannibalize. An infamous image from this time shows a Russian couple standing over the bodies of children they had partially eaten.

Similar acts of cannibalism were recorded under Maos Great Leap Forward, and Mao took the acts of turning people against one another a step further with additional social movements. Under his Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, children beat their own parents, students stopped and questioned people on the street about the teachings of Maoand subsequently beat them for incorrect answersand teachers, landlords, and intellectuals were hunted and publicly shamed or worse by Maos Red Guards.

Mao branded himself as being superhuman, with posters and portraits of him hung throughout China.

The Cultural Revolution destroyed or damaged vast quantities of the physical components of traditional culture, such as artwork, temples, museums, and written works. It also left a spiritual void, as the Chinese people lost connection with their own history and the legacy of 5,000 years of Chinese civilization, with its rich traditions of Buddhism and Daoism.

Mao Zedong in Yanan in the 1930s. (Creative Commons/Wikimedia)

Michael Walsh, author of The Devils Pleasure Palace, noted in a phone interview that Marxs writings mirror the story of Lucifer in John Miltons Paradise Lost, in which, realizing he cant defeat God, he comes up with an alternative plan for vengeance by destroying the creations of God.

Its that notion of transcendence that communism plays on, but never succeeded at. It wants death, and it creates death. Death is the end of every communist system, and it is the goal of Satan, Walsh said.

What communism is, is a revenge of the losers. It plays on peoples aggrievement and their want for revenge, he said. Marx was the biggest loser ever. He was a bum who preyed on his friends. He was insane. Its a cult of insanity, of aggrievement and vengeance.

Walsh said the values at the heart of religion are something shared in nearly all societies throughout historyand that communism played on this same innate root to manipulate humankind. Everybody wants to be the hero of their own narrative, he said.

[Communism] uses less admirable traits in humanity, like jealousy, to engage you in revolutionevery young person wants to be a revolutionary against the established orderin order to get what you want, Walsh said. If it says from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs, suddenly nobody has any abilities and everybody has lots of needs. Thats the flaw in the argument.

Tibetan woman being condemned in a communist struggle session in 1958. (Creative Commons/Wikimedia)

Communism capitalized on humankinds desire for higher purpose, and did so by destroying religion and placing itself at the helm instead.

According to The White Nights by Dr. Boris Sokoloff, in October 1919, Lenin visited the scientist Ivan Pavlov, known for his conditioned reflex experiments on animals, and Lenin borrowed these animal training methods to likewise train people under the Soviet education system.

Sokoloff wrote the belief was that by conditioning his reflexes, man can be standardized, can be made to think and act according to the pattern required. Lenin said in place of individualism, I want the masses of Russia to follow a Communistic pattern of thinking and reacting.

Wherever the ideas of communism have been adopted, traditional religions have always been among their first targets for destruction. This held just as true under the Soviet Union, which suppressed the Russian Orthodox Church and Catholicism, as it does today under the Chinese Communist Party, which suppresses Western religions as well as Buddhism and Daoism.

The Black Book of Communism gives unofficial estimates of the death tolls from communist regimes elsewhere, including 1 million in Vietnam, 2 million in Cambodia, 1.7 million in Africa, 1.5 million in Afghanistan, 1 million in Eastern Europe, and 150,000 in Latin America. It estimates international communist movements and parties not in power were responsible for close to 10,000 deaths.

Buddhist statues are set on fire during the Culture Revolution. (Public Domain)

In Marx and Satan, Wurmbrand proposed a question, one raised by many: After religion and culture are destroyed, what is left? The simple answer is that whats left is a people stripped of their ability of self-control, and with that, their ability of self-governance. It creates people who look to no higher power than that of their state leaders and who see no higher ideals than those of the state. The people then become dependent on the state.

This abandonment of morals was also at the foundation of the brutality of the communist leaders and their devout followerswithout a belief in a soul, in the traditional ideas of good and evil, or the ideas of a heaven or a hell, their only ambition was the ambition of the party, and the ideas of right and wrong were boiled down to supporting or opposing the revolution. Without a belief that good and evil have consequences, the leaders and supporters of communism have carried out atrocity after atrocity.

Vladimir Lenin. (Public Domain)

Later in his life, Lenin was credited as saying, as Wurmbrand notes, The state does not function as we desired. How does it function? The car does not obey. A man is at the wheel and seems to lead it, but the car does not drive in the desired direction. It moves as another force wishes.

Lenin later went mad, but he had a moment of clarity on his deathbed, according to Wurmbrand, when he told his wife, I committed a great error. My nightmare is to have the feeling that Im lost in an ocean of blood from the innumerable victims. It is too late to return. To save our country, Russia, we would have needed men like Francis of Assisi [a Catholic saint]. With 10 men like him, we would have saved Russia.

There was a grim joke among readers of the Soviet Unions state-controlled newspaper Pravdathe name means truththat reveals an underlying theme: The only thing thats true in todays newspaper is the date.

Communism has proved to be a grand deception, a con job in human history.

The theory is bad, and every implementation of the theory has been destructive to life and morality, starting with the Paris Commune, gathering speed with the Soviet Union, and continuing today in China.

After more than 140 years of communism in practice, we can certainly judge communism by its fruits, rather than by what it claimed it would do.

No rational human beingwould follow such a path.

Humanity can breathe freely when Marxs evil specter of communism, sooner or later, leaves the planet.

Communism is estimated to have killed at least 100 million people, yet its crimes have not been compiled and its ideology still persists. Epoch Times seeks to expose the history and beliefs of this movement, which has been a source of tyranny and destruction since it emerged.

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Communism: The Dead-End Path - The Epoch Times