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Of all the plagues to ravage humanity, from the Black Death to cancer, one of the deadliest has been a virulent idea that has claimed millions of souls.

Except that the idea, communism, denies the existence of a soul, and its adherentsnormally punishthose that would say otherwise. The brutal brainchild of Karl Marx, the Communist Manifesto, promised utopia on Earth. All one needed to do was overturn society and throw off the ruling class through violent revolution. The road to paradise was red, built on a new social order built by destroyingtraditional beliefs, social structures, property ownership, and governance.

Adolf Hitlers Holocaust is a familiar horror, but the grim death counts from communist revolutions in Russia and China both far exceed his genocidal efforts. While Hitler targeted the Jews, the communists targeted all religions, and entire classes of society.

Some lay-Marxists have described the waves of killing that followed communist revolutions as aberrations. In fact, these deaths are systematic outputs of successful communist revolutions, prescribed solutions to the inequities of capitalism and entrenched beliefs and practices. For this reason, communist revolutions have been followed by unprecedented killing.

According to Stphane Courtoiss The Black Book of Communism, Communism is responsible for 100 million deaths, a number total that far exceeds Nazism, which left 16 million deadand it eclipses the 20th century death tolls of lung cancer, diabetes, and homicides.

In carrying out this ideology, 20th century political regimes headed by dictators such as Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin were responsible for a swift destruction of human life never seen before in history.

The most murderous of several 20th century dictators was Chinas Mao Zedong according to most estimates. Maos estimated death toll ranges from 60 million to 80 million, which surpasses the lives claimed by World War I (37 million) and possibly World War II (66 million). The makeup of these 60 million plusdeaths includesbut is not limited tocivil wars, landlords that were slaughtered under the communist land reform policy, and red guards during the Cultural Revolution that tortured and killed supposed class enemies.

Courtois tabs Russian dictator Joseph Stalins death total at 20 million, though this number fluctuates from 10 to 60 million depending on the source. Stalin, the infamous author of the quote one persons death is a tragedy, one million deaths is a statistic, threw into concentration camps and persecuted millions of unloyal citizens. He also executed intellectuals and political figures deemed a threat to his power to establish himself as Russias sole authority. He was even able to make these people disappear by removing their photos and records from history. At 20 million, Stalins death total beats out the 20th century death counts of pancreatic cancer (17 million), HIV/AIDS (12.5 million), and epilepsy (10 million).

One of the most common ways communists kill and forever break the will of the citizens in their peoples republics has been starvation.

Maos Great Leap Forward was pitched as a way to modernize Chinas economy. It took communities of laborers from the farms and forced them to smelt metals such as iron and steel in backyard furnaces. This removal of labor from food production eventually resulted in Chinas great famine, which experts estimate took 30-40 million lives.

In Ukraine, collectivization and soviet industrialization brought about the Holomodor, a famine that caused between 2.5 to 7.5 million deaths.

Those who have escaped North Korea often tell governmentsthat send food aid there that if they truly want to help step theperpetual famine there, it would be better to send animal feed since it is more likely to reachthose that actually need it.

While Russia and China top the death count, the tolls in other communist countries were similarly tragic.

In Cambodia, Pol Potwho was previously a member of the French Communist Party, attempted to create his version of an utopian Communist society by driving millions from citiesto rural areas to do manual labor. This was a common practice after communist revolutions in other countries also, as was his killing of educated members of society such as lawyers, doctors, and philosophers, whom he called the root of all capitalist evil.

During his reign from 1975-1979, about 1.5-2 million of a total population of 7 million Cambodians were killed, whether from direct slaughter or famine due to intense labor and food shortages in the fields. A similar proportion of the U.S. populationwould be equivalent to the populations of California and Texas.

Another two million were murdered bycommunists in North Korea andEthiopia.

While ruling under the guise of freedom and prosperity for all, communist regimes have instead caused misery and destruction in every nation wherethey have taken reign. Through regimes in Europe, Asia, and Africa, communism has claimed a total of 100 million lives in under 100 years, making it an unprecedented ideological killer.

Communism is estimated to have killed around 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.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Epoch Times.

Excerpt from:
Communism: The Leading Ideological Cause of Death in the 20th Century - The Epoch Times

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SAN JOSE Some supporters draped yellow flags of the former South Vietnamover their shoulders while others joined hands and held back tears as San Jose became the first Bay Area city to ban the flag of the communist Socialist Republic of Vietnam on cityflagpoles.

Councilman Tam Nguyen, who fled communism in his native Vietnam when he was 19 and proposed the idea, got emotional when the unanimous vote was cast after a lengthy debate late Tuesday night.

It shows we understand the pain of our community, Nguyen said after the City Council meeting. It gives us a chance to heal. We are no longer oppressed. We are really free now and we can sleep at night.

Thehighly charged debate Tuesday pitted two factions of the citys Vietnamese-American community against each other: Older generations ofVietnamese refugeeswho escaped communism and younger immigrants who identify with their countrys current national flag.

San Jose ceremonially raises cultural flags on its flagpoles at City Hall throughout the year. Although no requests were made to fly the Vietnamese flag, city leaders aimed to curb the possibility. Nguyen said the Socialist Republic of Vietnam flag red with a gold star symbolizes oppression and bloodshed. Some compared it to raising the Nazi flag.

We speak up on behalf of those who have lost their lives, said San Jose resident Khanh V. Doan, a U.S. Army veteran. Please do not allow that bloody flag to exist in this city. It is our nightmare.

Daniel Nguyen, another San Jose resident, saidVietnamese people lost our country, lost our husbands, our wives and children because of that communist flag.

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After hours of emotional testimony, the City Council approved Nguyens flag ban and reaffirmed the citys recognition of the Vietnamese Heritage and Freedom Flag as the official flag of San Joses Vietnamese-American community. Thats the yellow flag with three horizontal red stripes that represented the former Republic of Vietnam, the South Vietnam the U.S. backed in its battles against communist insurgents before it fell in 1975.

Its obvious the community still suffers very deep emotional wounds, said Mayor Sam Liccardo after the meeting. And to the extent we can help with that healing and still comply with the Constitution, we should do whatever we can.

Councilman Chappie Jones likened it to raising the Confederate flag, which he said represents lynching and pain. But a small group of Vietnamese residents said banning the communist flag sends the wrong message.

Many of us hate the communist regime but we are here to defend the American ideas, said San Jose resident Long Le. Will you ban the flag of Mexico next? Cuba? We do not support the communist flag but we support keeping San Jose free.

Nguyen said he got the idea to oppose the communist flag in San Jose from a similar measure in Westminster, a city of 90,000 in Orange County. Last year, city officials there adopted a policy to oppose displaying the communist flag anywhere in the city, though San Joses proposal is limited to city property.

Westminster Councilwoman Kimberly Ho, who supported San Joses measure onTuesday, said theSocialist Republic of Vietnam flag brings back a lot of hurtful memories.

Its just like the Nazi flag, Ho said. Would you fly the Nazi flag? Why would you not oppose it? It might be (Vietnams) flag, but once you step foot on our turf this is our home now. And they need to respect our flag.

See the article here:
San Jose council unanimously approves banning communist Vietnamese flag - Milpitas Post

Greg Mellen, Orange County Register 12:05 a.m. ET Jan. 26, 2017

Josef Cikmantory abandoned his Trabant after the family escaped East Germany, but acquired another years later that he keeps in display condition for car shows.(Photo: Bill Alkofer / TNS)

Santa Ana, Calif. Its been said that beauty is skin deep, but ugly is to the bone. The late and clearly not lamented communist-era East German Trabant was not only ugly but plug-ugly.

To say it looks like a clown car insults all the other clown cars.

Time magazine wrote of the Trabant, This is the car that gave communism a bad name.

But one mans eyesore is another mans amore. And when Josef Czikmantory sees his much-maligned Trabant gleaming in the Southern California sun, what he sees is freedom. What he sees is an escape from the yoke of Soviet-style socialism. What he sees is something beautiful.

It was a 1975 Trabant 601 that carried Czikmantory and his family from the Eastern bloc to the West in 1986, when freedom seemed an elusive and priceless commodity.

Since moving to the United States, Czikmantory has cashed in on the American dream, working, starting several businesses, buying a home and raising a family. He is also a regular participant in car shows and frequently partakes in Sunday drives with his wife.

Czikmantorys departure from Hungary was no Steve McQueen kind of great escape.

Rather it was a kind guard at the Austrian border who gave the nod to lift the gate.

He said, Good luck with your life, Czikmantory said. I was afraid to breathe. Then I got in my car and went putt-putt-putt across the border.

It wasnt until he was beyond machine-gun range that Czikmantory exhaled.

At a recent car show, Czikmantory explained his connection to the car to a woman wearing a T-shirt from the Kowabunga Van Klan of VW enthusiasts, who definitely knew a Thing or two about ugly.

Lets say there is Chevy guy. He loves all things Chevy. Imagine he is in gulag, says Czikmantory. Then he gets his hands on piece of (junk) Pinto. And he gets away in that car. What then will be his favorite car?

The rhetorical question hews pretty close to Czikmantorys life story minus Chevys, Pintos and gulags.

In 1985, Czikmantory, who is from Transylvania in Romania, was near the top of the social ladder in Hungary. Yet the ambitious, imaginative young family man felt imprisoned by communism. Sure, he was a mechanical engineer and valued at his plant as a kind of machine whisperer. He had the Trabi, a status symbol and highly prized in the Soviet bloc despite all its shortcomings. He had a condo, a good salary and a wife and his 10-year-old son, Akos. He was only 35 but had climbed just about as high as he could in his country.

And it chafed.

I thought, OK, its over, he said. I thought, I can do more and better.

But not in Hungary. Not in a Soviet-style country.

Czikmantory says he tried about 10 times unsuccessfully to part the Iron Curtain.

Until the guard overlooked his lack of proper paperwork and allowed the family to leave.

The little Trabi didnt make it far into the West. After Czikmantory crossed into Austria, he was told he needed car insurance.

So, as many Germans would do later when the Berlin Wall came down, he did the only sensible thing. Czikmantory parked the car in front of a trash container and walked away.

Czikmantory said his family slept on park benches in Vienna on their first night of freedom.

In the U.S., Czikmantory was able to parlay his mechanical wizardry and entrepreneurial spirit into building several small businesses, including Josef Czikmantory Enterprise Ltd., which he now owns. He even designed and built parts for Elon Musks SpaceX company.

Czikmantory didnt necessarily miss his old Trabi. But over the years a certain sentimentality built up.

About 12 years ago, Czikmantorys son, Akos, said his father called him to look at a Trabi up for sale, one of only about 200 in the U.S.

However, after they looked at the car, for which Akos said the seller wanted $4,000, they passed, because it had a number of problems.

So we went home, Akos said. Then I looked on eBay and there was one for $850. So I bought it for my Dad.

Akos and his father both joked that the price was outrageous for a car many former owners literally couldnt give away. Many Trabants can be found moldering in fields in Europe where farm animals have learned the Duroplast siding was actually edible.

After buying the car, Czikmantory paid about $2,000 to ship it from Europe and has since put in another $5,000 to paint it white, the color of the car he escaped in, apply undercoat, overhaul the two-stroke engine and make other improvements.

Wherever he goes, the car is a head-turner, due in part to its amazingly loud rattle and belching smoke clouds. And the IRN CRTN license plate.

Read or Share this story: http://detne.ws/2jruc8i

Read the original post:
Trabant: The car that gave communism a bad name - The Detroit News

China says Western democracy has reached its limits and has started to deteriorate (alluding to Donald Trumps victory without saying so). Global Communism will take its place, with China supplying new universal values.

When I have referred to still-Communist China, some readers have said, in effect, are you kidding? China has become capitalist, what with all of their entrepreneurs and wealth-building. But orthodox Marxism teaches that societies must go through a capitalist phase in order for socialism to emerge. The problem with the Soviet Union and Maos China is that they attempted to go from a feudal economy straight to socialism, which cant really work. Capitalism and with it Western democracy will eventually fall from theirinternal contradictions.

China has come up with a style of Communism that is working, pragmatically. It is centered on economic growth, but state ownership and, what is just as effective, state control of the means of production continues.

Whats new here is Chinas plan to export not just its goods but its ideology around the world. The Communists still think they will bury us.

From China Slams Western Democracy as Flawed, Bloomberg:

Democracy has reached its limits, and deterioration is the inevitable future of capitalism, according to the Peoples Daily, the flagship paper of Chinas Communist Party. It devoted an entire page on Sunday to critiquing Western democracies, quoting former Chairman Mao Zedongs 1949 poem asking people to range far your eyes over long vistas and saying the ultimate defeat of capitalism would enable Communism to emerge victorious.

The unusual series of commentaries in the Peoples Daily mirrors Soviet efforts to promote an alternative political and economic system during the Cold War. The rise of anti-establishment, protectionist politicians like Trump, amid populist winds on several continents, has sent political parties scurrying to shore up their support, helping China to portray itself as relatively steady. . . .

Chinas rising wealth has brought greater global presence, but thats not enough, said Zhang Ming, a political science professor at Renmin University in Beijing. The Communist leaders want that someday China will matter globally for the nature of its political system and create its own universal values.. . .

The Peoples Daily also used Trumps inauguration weekend to tout the benefits of Chinas political system. The emergence of capitalisms social crisis is the most updated evidence to show the superiority of socialism and Marxism, it said.

Western style democracy used to be a recognized power in history to drive social development. But now it has reached its limits, said another article on the same page. Democracy is already kidnapped by the capitals and has become the weapon for capitalists to chase profits.

Illustration from Andrew Kitzmiller, Creative Commons

Read more:
China pushing Communism to replace failing Democracy - Patheos (blog)

In case you were busy with the inauguration, the world dodged a bullet Friday. There was a dark cloud of mystery over whether China would achieve its target of at least 6.5% GDP growth for 2016.

If growth had been announced at 6.4% or, heaven forbid, 6.3%, the consequences for global markets would have been terrible indeed. (Note: 6.2% GDP growth was impossible, as the scale started at 6.3%).

Apartment blocks are pictured on a hazy day in Wuqing district of Tianjin, China, December 10, 2016. REUTERS/Jason Lee.

Thankfully, GDP growth came in at 6.7% year-on-year in the first quarter, 6.7% in the second quarter, 6.7% in the third quarter, and a blistering 6.8% in the fourth quarter. The crushing tension of not knowing the results ahead of time (because how could we?) has been resolved. The credit for this accomplishment goes to:

In 2016, faced with complicated domestic and international environment, under the leadership of the Central Party Committee headed by General Secretary Xi Jinping as the core, the whole country has carried forward the overall plan for promoting all-round economic, political, cultural, social and ecological progress as well as the Four Pronged Comprehensive Strategy in a coordinated way, adhered to the general work guideline of making progress while maintaining stability, followed the new vision of development, insisted on supply-side structural reform as the mainline, appropriately expanded the aggregate demand, advanced reforms, properly responded to risks and challenges and shaped good social expectations.

A bonus: the secondary goal of getting 100 words into a single sentence was also met.

Investment growth plummeted by an entire tenth of a point in the fourth quarter versus the first three. Retail sales saw the same growth in the fourth quarter as the first three. Consumer inflation did, too. Rail freight showed variability, falling over 7% in the first half then recovering to end less than 1% lower for 2016. The industrial production the rails were first not carrying, then were carrying, showed 6% gains throughout 2016.

The nationwide per capita disposable income of residents grew 6.3% in real terms. The gain for urbanites was 5.6%, for rural citizens 6.2%. Since there is nothing at all odd about any of these numbers, we can embrace as accurate disposable income23,821 yuan, which is less than $3,600 at the average exchange rate for 2016. The closest American equivalent to this figure shows a result ofover $43,000. The anti-China liars who believe the Chinese governments number is understated here (due to unreported income) see the true ratio of the two as only about 1:9, instead of the plainly correct 1:12. China raises the average of global GDP growth. This is very nice for China; it has no inherent benefit to everyone else. For everyone else, China runs a trade surplus, which by definition reduces the GDP of its trade partners as a group. Those who do not understand China properly might also misperceive the money supply situation. The stock of broad money M2 was 155 trillion yuan at the end of last year, over $22.3 trillion. This is $9 trillion more than the US M2 figure, a remarkable achievement given how much poorer Chinese are than Americans. Moreover, the gap in M2 was only $4 trillion as recently as 2011, showing the amazing progress China has made in extending its lead.

Chinas role goes beyond boasting M2 now larger than the US and Japan combined. China certainly does as much to keep global growth stable as any reasonable person could expect. It is said by others to contribute the most to global GDP growth. China raises the average of global GDP growth. This is very nice for China; it has no inherent benefit to everyone else. For everyone else, China runs a trade surplus, which by definition reduces the GDP of its trade partners as a group. Since it runs the largest trade surplus, China can in fact be seen as the biggest inhibitor of the rest of the worlds GDP. President Trump, among others, may want to decline this particular contribution.

Any sarcasm detected would be partly directed at Chinas official numbers and partly at various colleagues in the China economy and finance field commenting on the numbers. While official GDP growth slowed, in perfectly orderly fashion, Chinas macroeconomic performance is in fact generally stronger than a year ago. But the country is very far from being rich, and already massively overleveraged.

Excerpt from:
China's 2016 economic data, or who says communism isn't funny ... - American Enterprise Institute