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Bones of tortured prisoners. Kolyma Gulag, USSR (Nikolai Nikitin, Tass).(NA)

NOTE: The following post is largely adapted from last year's November 7 post on the same subject.

Since 2007, I have advocated designating May 1 as an international Victims of Communism Day. The May 1 date was not my original idea. But I have probably devoted more time and effort to it than any other commentator. In my view, May 1 is the best possible date for this purpose because it is the day that communists themselves used to celebrate their ideology, and because it is associated with communism as a global phenomenon, not with any particular communist regime. However, I have also long recognized that it might make sense to adapt another date for Victims of Communism Day, if it turns out that some other date can attract a broader consensus behind it. The best should not be the enemy of the good.

As detailed in my May 1 post from 2019, November 7 is probably the best such alternative, and in recent years it has begun to attract considerable support. Unlike May 1, this choice is unlikely to be contested by trade unionists and other devotees of the pre-Communist May 1 holiday. While I remain unpersuaded by their objections on substantive grounds, pragmatic considerations suggest that an alternative date is worth considering, if it can sidestep objections and thereby attract broader support.

The November 7 option is not without its own downsides. From an American standpoint, one obvious one is that it will sometimes fall close to election day, as is the case this year. On such occasions, a November 7 Victims of Communism Day might not attract as much attention as it deserves, because many willunderstandablybe focused on electoral politics instead. Nonetheless, November 7 remains the best available alternative to May 1; or at least the best I have seen so far.

For that reason, I amonce againdoing a Victims of Communism Day post on November 7, in addition to the one I do on May 1. If November 7 continues to attract more support, I may eventually switch to that date exclusively. But, for now, I reserve the options of returning to an exclusive focus on May 1, doing annual posts on both days, or switching to some third option should a good one arise.

In addition to its growing popularity, November 7 is a worthy alternative because it is the anniversary of the day that the very first communist regime was established in Russia. All subsequent communist regimes were at least in large part inspired by it, and based many of their institutions and policies on the Soviet model.

The Soviet Union did not have the highest death toll of any communist regime. That dubious distinction belongs to the People's Republic of China. North Korea has probably surpassed the USSR in the sheer extent of totalitarian control over everyday life. Pol Pot's Cambodia may have surpassed it in terms of the degree of sadistic cruelty and torture practiced by the regime, though this is admittedly very difficult to measure. But all of these tyranniesand morewere at least to a large extent variations on the Soviet original.

Having explained why November 7 is worthy of consideration as an alternative date, it only remains to remind readers of the more general case for having a Victims of Communism Day. The following is adopted from this year's May 1 Victims of Communism Day post, and some of its predecessors:

The Black Book of Communism estimates the total number of victims of communist regimes at 80 to 100 million dead, greater than that caused by all other twentieth century tyrannies combined. We appropriately have a Holocaust Memorial Day. It is equally appropriate to commemorate the victims of the twentieth century's other great totalitarian tyranny.

Our comparative neglect of communist crimes has serious costs. Victims of Communism Day can serve the dual purpose of appropriately commemorating the millions of victims, and diminishing the likelihood that such atrocities will recur. Just as Holocaust Memorial Day and other similar events promote awareness of the dangers of racism, anti-Semitism, and radical nationalism, so Victims of Communism Day can increase awareness of the dangers of left-wing forms of totalitarianism, and government domination of the economy and civil society.

While communism is most closely associated with Russia, where the first communist regime was established, it had equally horrendous effects in other nations around the world. The highest death toll for a communist regime was not in Russia, but in China. Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward was likely the biggest episode of mass murder in the entire history of the world.

November 7, 2017 was the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia, which led to the establishment of the first-ever communist regime. On that day, I put up a post outlining some of the lessons to be learned from a century of experience with communism. The post explains why most of the horrors perpetrated by communist regimes were intrinsic elements of the system. For the most part, they cannot be ascribed to circumstantial factors, such as flawed individual leaders, peculiarities of Russian and Chinese culture, or the absence of democracy. The latter probably did make the situation worse than it might have been otherwise. But, for reasons I explained in the same post, some form of dictatorship or oligarchy is probably inevitable in a socialist economic system in which the government controls all or nearly all of the economy.

While the influence of communist ideology has declined greatly since its mid-twentieth century peak, it is far from dead. Largely unreformed communist regimes remain in power in Cuba and North Korea. In Venezuela, the Marxist government's socialist policies have resulted in political repression, the starvation of children, and a massive refugee crisisthe biggest in the history of the Western hemisphere.

In Russia, the authoritarian regime of former KGB Colonel Vladimir Putin has embarked on a wholesale whitewashing of communism's historical record. Putin's brutal war on Ukraine is primarily based on Russian nationalist ideology, rather than that of the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, the failure of post-Soviet Russia to fully reckon with its oppressive Soviet past is likely one of the reasons why Putin's regime came to power, and engaged in its own atrocities.

In China, the Communist Party remains in power (albeit after having abandoned many of its previous socialist economic policies), and has become less and less tolerant of criticism of the mass murders of the Mao era (part of a more general turn towards greater repression). The government's brutal repression of the Uighur minority, and escalating suppression of dissent, even among Han Chinese, are just two aspects in which it seems bent on repeating some of its previous atrocities. Under the rule of Xi Jinping, the government has also increasingly reinstated socialist state control of the economy.

Here in the West, some socialists and others have attempted to whitewash the history of communism, and a few even attribute major accomplishments to the Soviet regime. Cathy Young has an excellent critique of such Soviet "nostalgia" in a 2021 Reason article.

In sum, we need Victims of Communism Day because we have never given sufficient recognition to the victims of the modern world's most murderous ideology or come close to fully appreciating the lessons of this awful era in world history. In addition, that ideology, and variants thereof, still have a substantial number of adherents in many parts of the world, and still retains considerable intellectual respectability even among many who do not actually endorse it. Just as Holocaust Memorial Day serves as a bulwark against the reemergence of fascism, so this day of observance can help guard against the return to favor of the only ideology with an even greater number of victims.

See the original post here:
November 7 as Victims of Communism Day - 2023 - Reason

November marks the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In 1989, this symbol of Communist tyranny came tumbling down, marking the end of a totalitarian nightmare. After the threat of Nazism was defeated, Communism turned a third of the world into a police state the likes of which had never been seen.

Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II recognized, in a clear-eyed way not shared by many other academic and political elites, that Marxisms blood-red banners meant not liberation but oppression. More than this, they saw that Communism was not only something that should be opposed, but that could be. Their collective strategies worked even faster than the most optimistic expected. As that deadly edifice of Communism tumbled down, its fractured walls meant a no-longer-divided Berlin, no more Stasi, no more secret arrests.

In the joy of that moment and the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later, famed political scientist Francis Fukuyama declared the End of History. He believed that the death of Communism was the final obstacle to the triumph of Enlightenment liberalism and democracy. He was, of course, mistaken.

Though we may not be living in Orwells 1984 or Huxleys Brave New World, the abdication of freedom and the embrace of historys worst ideals continues, and not just in China, Russia, and Iran. In England, silently praying in front of an abortion clinic can get a person arrested. According to a Pew Research report, a majority of young Americans prefer freedom from offense over freedom of speech. In pro-Hamas parades across the West, thousands have proclaimed that violence, oppression, and censorship are acceptable if the right groups are being harmed, oppressed, and silenced. The ideals of diversity and dissent have been reduced to slogans to signal our virtue, not realities to live out in practice. As a result, more and more power is granted to state, academic, corporate, and media authorities to rescue us from dangerous ideas, ironically in the name of diversity and inclusion.

Those people who are tearing down the posters of kidnapped Israeli kids are not replacing them with other images. They are just denying a space to speak. The younger, leftist crowd increasingly thinks of core freedoms, such as the freedom of speech, as questionable at best and as a dangerous excuse for hatred at worst. In America, we now debate whether some speech should be coerced. In Britain, though silent prayer can be illegal, calls for genocide are protected. A world in which we are free only insofar as we agree with those currently in power is a world thats not free at all.

During the twentieth century, the world moved forward on the inertia and inheritance Christianity gave to the West. This momentum, however, only lasted so long. Somewhere, during the long fight against the twin tyrannies of Fascism and Communism, we lost those fundamental beliefs and insights into humanity that grounded our ideals about freedom in the first place. Now, well into the twenty-first century, with this Judeo-Christian foundation stripped from beneath us, nothing remains to sustain the passion for liberty. Without a vision of ordered freedomwhat Os Guinness has rightly noted as a freedom for rather than just a freedom from the claim to rights and liberties are reduced to squabbles between various groups vying for power.

President Reagans epic call to Tear down this wall! will have been for nothing if something better is not built in its place. Western freedom cannot be preserved without a proper understanding of human nature, the understanding that birthed Western freedom in the first place. Only the description of reality offered in the Bible and confirmed by centuries of Christian reflection is robust enough for this task. If rooted only in the malleable ideas of the majority or on the passing fancies of those in power, our most precious liberties will collapse as surely as Communisms concrete boundaries did.

This Breakpoint was co-authored by Dr. Timothy Padgett. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to breakpoint.org.

The rest is here:
The Fall of the Berlin Wall and the Fate of the West - Breakpoint - BreakPoint.org

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, has a deep understanding of the perils born from communism.

Thats because his father, Rafael Cruz, joined the revolution under Fidel Castro in Cuba at 14 years old. He was totally unaware of the horrors of communism at the time, because Marxist revolutions begin with children. He had to fight for his freedom.

Cruz opens with the scene of his father beaten and bloodied on a prison floor at the hands of Cuban forces at the beginning of his latest book, Unwoke: How to Defeat Cultural Marxism in America, which was exclusively provided to Fox News Digital.

Communist revolutions begin with young people because theyre naive, they dont understand how the world works, Cruz told Fox News Digital in an interview. Theyre easily deceived, and the book describes how my father was thrown in prison in Cuba and tortured in Cuba and beaten almost to death and how he fled Cuba and came to America seeking freedom.

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In his book that releases Tuesday, Cruz describes how Marxism the political and socioeconomic theories of German philosopher Karl Marx has seeped into nearly every aspect of American society.

Universities, K-12 education, journalism, big tech, entertainment and science, Cruz writes, are all being impacted by Marxist ideology, which forms the basis of communism.

The universities are where the Marxists got their first foothold, where they developed the woke virus and where it mutated and ultimately spread to institutions throughout America, Cruz said.

The book delves into the history of Marxism, starting with Karl Marxs perspective of an inevitable conflict between the wealthy and the less privileged, Cruz said.

He outlines the classical Marxist approach involving violent revolution, where the working class seizes control of production and the government redistributes wealth.

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Cruz then traces the evolution of Marxism, particularly in the 1960s, highlighting how it transitioned into critical legal studies. This new perspective applies the same Marxist framework to law, viewing it as a tool of oppression used by the powerful against the vulnerable. This shift began at Harvard, his alma mater, which became a focal point for the spread of Marxism in the United States, he said.

Cultural Marxism is a method of saying the never ending struggle between victims, and oppressors can only be corrected through force by the government punishing the oppressors and rewarding the victims, Cruz said. And what the modern left has done, so that its applied that approach oppression matrix to race, gender, to sexual orientation to transgenderism, and that worldview, enforced through brute force is what has seized control of so many of our institutions across the country.

Each chapter of the book outlines where the ideology infiltrated and lays out a strategy for fighting back and winning through a sort of civil boycotting.

In the book, Cruz pointed to the Bud Light and Target cases, where both companies suffered significant losses after attempting to impose their own moral viewpoints on their customers.

Bud Lights attempt to lecture its customers through woke marketing backfired, causing them to plummet from the top-selling beer in America to losing billions of dollars. Similarly, Targets decision to push radical transgender ideology on young children led to a massive loss in revenue.

The result was immediate, Cruz said. And one of the things really striking that I talked about in the book is in the early discussions of the executives at Target, what they were saying was, We dont want to be another Bud Light, we want to avoid what happened to Bud Light.'

That is an example of changing the incentives where the downsides, giving into the woke mob, have been elevated Maybe, just maybe theyll stay out of politics and just sell their damn products to the customers, he said.

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The text also traces the evolution of Marxism into critical legal studies and critical race theory, which apply similar oppressive frameworks to law and race respectively, emphasizing government intervention as a solution.

Additionally, Cruz pointed to the significance of tech billionaire Elon Musk taking over Twitter, calling it the single most important step forward for free speech in modern decades.

China which Cruz writes about in his concluding chapter also plays a role in bolstering communism in America.

I think understanding Chinas role in all of this is important to fighting back which I believe we can fight back, he said. And this book is a roadmap on how to fight back, but it also tells stories. Its interesting, its not some dry academic treatise, it is real world, whats happening and what you can do about it and fight back.

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Cruzs new book Unwoke shows readers how to defeat cultural ... - 1330 WFIN

One man who has studied these questions in great depth is Roman David, a Czech sociologist and expert on transitional justice based in Hong Kong. Indeed Mr. David, who was himself a 21-year-old student in 1989, carried out sociological surveys of both ex-political prisoners and former party members and collaborators for his book Communists and Their Victims: The Quest for Justice in the Czech Republic.

When I spoke to him by Zoom, I first asked Roman David what had led him to research and write the book in the first place.

Roman David|Photo: Department of Sociology and Social Policy, Lingnan University

I had a very interesting inspiration during my doctorate in Brno, where I studied with Professor [Vladimr] ermk, who was a political philosopher and justice of the Constitutional Court.

We had a lot of debates about justice, and I came to the conclusion that to solve the problem of dealing with the past we cant rely on lawyers, because there is no uniform opinion among lawyers.

Law in books is just an illusion, and one lawyer can have a perfectly legitimate opinion and another lawyer can have a perfectly legitimate dissenting opinion.

This realization motivated me to look beyond. I wrote an article for a newspaper which was entitled Two ways of persecuting the crimes of communism.

I outlined two paths that could lead to the prosecution. One was the Czech Republics path through the Act on the Illegitimacy of the Communist Regime, and another was a path advocated by my supervisor, Professor ermk.

Following the publication the leadership of the Confederation of Political Prisoners contacted Professor ermk and asked what he could do with this issue of prosecution.

As a judge he couldnt do anything, but what he did was to call me and said, We need to help these people, somehow.

Then I came to realise that in order to study justice, I need to really ask people what they think about justice, what does justice mean to them and especially to ask the victims of human rights violations.

In your book you say something that for me is so interesting. You say that Czechia was a leader in dealing with the past in post-communist Europe. What did the Czechs get right in that regard, do you think?

Photo: University of Pennsylvania Press

Well, I said we were leaders in terms of outcomes. But we need to see that there were historical conditions for the process of dealing with the past.

Since the Battle of White Mountain, 1918 and the establishment of Czechoslovakia and 1945, dealing with Nazism, we already had some sort of blueprint for dealing with the past.

We know that the new regime deals with the previous regime, that the perpetrators or the protagonists of one regime are damned in the following regime.

There was a whole conceptual apparatus available: words such as restitution, rehabilitation, or denazification at that time. These words were already available in our vocabulary, so that gave us a certain head start.

And what made us leaders is that in 1990, or already in 1989 actually, the first laws were passed in Parliament which started to dismantle the Communist regime.

They included the Confiscation of Communist Property Act, the Rehabilitation of Political Prisoners Act, the Restitution Act and the Act on the Illegitimacy of the Communist Regime.

Monument of Battle of White Mountain (November 8, 1620)|Photo: tpnka Budkov, Radio Prague International

So these acts were fundamental for laying the groundwork. And they were so thorough that they allowed us to progress in comparison to other countries in post-Communist Europe on a massive scale.

They essentially sidelined the judiciary from this process. The judiciary played second fiddle. The most important thing was that the decisions were done on the basis of law, rather than by judicial decision.

If we look at the justice system at that time, in the early 90s, what were the mistakes made in the transition from communism to democracy?

I would need to go the previous question, when you mention what made us leaders. Let me tell you that the process of dealing with the past requires more than legal measures: It requires the involvement of society.

For political prisoners rehabilitation, one of the very important factors is their social acknowledgement.

So for example political prisoners, for their rehabilitation, one of the very important factors is their social acknowledgement. Another important factor is their reception in their neighbourhoods. And there are many other factors which affect the well-being of political prisoners.

Now these factors were pursued informally in the Czech Republic. They were not really supported by the state. But, thanks to the history of the Czech lands, we had the understanding that these are important things to do, so society was dealing with them.

Illustrative photo: Fifaliana Joy, Pixabay, Pixabay

But what is a mistake here, or what is the weakness, is that these social measures of justice were not pursued more systematically.

Another issue was that a whole alternative way of dealing with the past was completely absent.

When you speak about the rehabilitation of people who were imprisoned, say, before 1989, was that carried out well? Were the victims satisfied with how they were rehabilitated, could you say?

It was about half and half. Some of them reported a solid level of rehabilitation. Some of them a lower level of rehabilitation.

The major measures which were approved legally, for example the financial compensation, and the possibility of returning to their former professions, if they were of an age to, were the most important factors in their rehabilitation process.

But then there were a whole range of factors which were not accentuated, because they were not known in the Czech lands. They were factors which were related to alternatives to justice, inspired by the whole process of justice, in a comparative perspective, in countries like South Africa.

And those played a critical role for the rehabilitation of political prisoners.

So when I studied those processes I also included questions about the meaning of truth and truth sharing how important that is for former political prisoners.

There was no formal forum to establish and deal with the past.

I found that if they shared their stories privately, with family members for example, they reported a higher rehabilitation score.

But if they shared their stories publicly the score was negative. That was usually because there was no formal forum to establish and deal with the past.

As a result, truth sharing was done by, lets say, journalists, or by invitations to speak to students at schools. And these are not the best forums for opening up.

Because they require a certain patience, for example when they are dealing with students. But they also require a certain tolerance when dealing with journalists, because journalists need to do their jobs, they need to edit.

And for many former political prisoners, when they have been interviewed they felt that very important parts of their lives were cut, because there are simply always some limitations. But then for them it was not really a positive experience.

Illustrative photo: Post Bellum

One thing Id also like to ask you about is restitution. You say that restitution didnt really deliver for foreign Czechs, Czechs who had left the country, in most cases to escape from communism.

This is a shame. I think this is very unfair treatment of Czech people. Simply some people could not take the risk to return to a transitioning country by giving up the citizenship that they had earned, for example, in the US or many other countries which did not necessarily allow dual citizenship. So they were in a very difficult legal position.

Photo: Czech Television

But what is more problematic is how the Czech government handled it. Why this was handled this way, Im really not sure.

But the outcome is that essentially nationalistic considerations made sure that Communist-era injustices remained unrectified.

What about lustration, or screening. This was a system that was brought in by law in 1990 or 1991, under which people who had had high positions in the Communist Party were barred from important posts in the new democratic system. Was that useful, or effective, as a form of bringing about change for the better?

There were informal processes that were already conducted before the lustration law.

Its a question, to what extent it was useful. There were informal processes that were already conducted before the lustration law was approved. So that somehow diminished the impact of the law.

What were these processes? Were they the lists of collaborators?

No, they were something that was called a vote of no-confidence in the leadership. This was pursued in all state institutions, schools so already in 1989, 1990 there were changes in personnel.

Cibulka's lists of secret police collaborators

That was very important to do, and the lustration law was also brought in to, among other things, legalise these kinds of changes, in terms of saying which changes are allowed, and which changes are not so to put some legal regulations into it, and to prescribe who can and cannot hold certain positions.

This was simply because there was a certain rotation: people were dismissed in one place and then became a director in another place, or another school, and things like that.

But what is important here is to see there are different lustration models. For example the Czech lustration model is exclusive in its nature and is based on dismissals.

In Hungary they approved a model which is more inclusive. It was based on the revelation of background information about an individual who wanted to retain his position in government.

There are different lustration models. The Czech model is exclusive in its nature and is based on dismissals.

In Poland they approved another model of a kind of an inclusive, or kind of reconciliatory, system in which similar to in South Africa the position of a person who wanted to hold office was exchanged for true revelation about his past. So the person needed to make a disclosure, and upon full disclosure he or she was granted a second chance and could hold office in the new system.

In my previous book, I wrote about these systems and I compared their utility. I found out that the Czech system is the best in establishing trust in government, simply because a government without tainted officials is better than a government with tainted officials. That makes perfect sense.

Illustrative photo: Office of Czech Government

But what is interesting is that reconciliatory system, the Polish system based on confession, was also effective. Although here it has to be said that it was three times less effective than the Czech system.

In comparison to the contribution to reconciliation, or to some kind of overcoming the divisions of the past, the Czech system had no effects. The Hungarian system also had no effects, either positive or negative.

But the Polish system had a positive effect. So the people who were confessing their wrongdoing essentially had a positive relationship, or positive standing, in society, in comparison to those secret collaborators who were just disclosed, without anything else.

About secret collaborators, you write in the book also about coercion, that people were very often forced into being collaborators. Does the fact that coercion was so often used mean that its just not fair to point the finger at people who appeared on lists of collaborators?

It depends on who compiles the list. So if this is some kind of a wild list, compiled based on leakage of information, its not fair.

But even assume that the list is correct. Imagine the list is 100 percent correct. Is it fair to point the finger at these people, and blame them, if they may have been forced, in all kinds of ways, to collaborate?

Well, it is fair if a person wants to hold public office. I think it is a requirement of holding a position of trust, that people have information about a persons past.

Imagine that in a police station there are people who used to, lets say, persecute dissidents and they are continuing to police the community. How would the community feel safe about this?

So these types of situations need to be addressed. And I think that transparency is very useful in this aspect.

For me one of the most fascinating points you make is that retributive measures against pre-1989 Communists may in fact have been a kind of block, or impediment, to those people transforming themselves into, lets say, democrats.

Retributive measures inhibit the personal transformation of ex-Communists and inhibit their ability to internalise human rights.

Yes, this is one of the findings: that retributive measures essentially inhibit the personal transformation of former Communists and inhibit their ability to internalise human rights. It can also inhibit generational transformation of former Communists and their offspring.

One of the hypotheses that I was working with is that those retributive measures created an inversion effect: They turned society upside down, and those who were up were now down, etcetera.

So thats partly true. We can say that those retributive measures didnt help to reconcile or overcome those divisions. In fact, they solidified those divisions. They created a situation in which, lets say, a former Communist or a former secret informer gained these type of fixed identities. And there was no escape out of it.

So this is not really something that is useful for society. It creates more divisions, or deepens the existing divisions, rather than overcoming those divisions.

And its good that society is unified about fundamental issues. We can see it, for example, related to the war in Ukraine: We would be better equipped to face the Russian aggression if we were unified, if we had, for example, the former Communists on board.

Clearly now they are not that relevant, because they are out of Parliament, but who knows they may make it back in.

Even now, all these decades later, sometimes I hear people, especially older people, saying that it was a mistake in 1989 or 1990 not to ban the Communist Party. What do you say to that assertion?

I think if we want to have a liberal society, we cannot really use those instruments which are available to authoritarian rulers too often.

I dont say exactly that there should not be possibilities of banning illegal organisations, but I dont think the Communist Party should have been banned.

Simply, it was important to cut it off from its resources, from its property. This happened the property was confiscated. It was important to cut it off from influence on the secret police; the secret police was dissolved.

So suddenly there was no longer a state party but instead a political party, like any other, although still with significant membership and significant resources. But nevertheless it already posed less danger at that time than it did in, say, 1989.

Many former Communist Party members have been involved in Czech politics in the last 30-plus years, including recently Andrej Babi, who was prime minister, Milo Zeman, who was prime minister and later president, and the current president, Petr Pavel. Could it be said that a lot of former Communists have contributed, maybe even a lot, to Czechia over those decades?

Andrej Babi in 1981|Photo: Czech Television

I look at results from my survey, which were not published, because they were not significant but I tried to find out whether movements like ANO or Freedom and Direct Democracy have a significant number of former Communist Party members, or their offspring.

And there is no such significant result. They do not have a concentrated cohort of former Communist Party members. So this is kind of at the kind of grass-roots level.

On the political level, we have the society that we have. We cannot replace people. It takes whole generations to replace, to phase out [laughs], the Communist regime.

So one could say that some people who were members of the Communist Party were contributing to society.

I see the current president, Petr Pavel, who was a member, and he also tried to face this issue openly, rather than running away from it.

President Pavel is a decorated war hero, but its not a bad thing that the issue of his former Communist Party membership stays with him.

Hes a decorated war hero and hes also a skillful diplomat, but its not a bad thing that this issue of his former Communist Party membership stays with him; his steps can be scrutinized, and I think that is only a good thing for politics.

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The aftermath of the Velvet Revolution was justice delivered? - Radio Prague International

Socialism did not kill merely the bodyit sought to extinguish the soul and all belief in anything transcendent in the human person. As we celebrate the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is time to remember and reclaim mans oldest faith, a faith in one Almighty God who make each of us in His glorious image. Only then can we challenge the so-called wisdom of this world.

At the end of Volume I of his magnificently disturbing Gulag, Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote:

Shut your eyes, reader. Do you hear the thundering of wheels? Those are the Stolypin cars rolling on and on. Those are the red cows rolling. Every minute of the day. And every day of the year. And you can hear the water gurglingthose are prisoners barges moving on and on. And the motors of the Black Marias roar. They are arresting someone all the time, cramming him in somewhere, moving him about. And what is that hum you hear? The overcrowded cells of the transit prisons. And that cry? The complains of those who have been plundered, raped, beaten to with an inch of their lives. We have reviewed and considered all the methods of delivering prisoners, and we have found that they are all. . . worse. We have examined the transit prisons, but we have not found any that were good. And even the last human hope that there is something better ahead, that it will be better in camp, is a false hope. In camp it will be . . . worse.[1]

Not confined to the Soviets, such bleakness reigned throughout much of the 20th century.

However one chooses to define ita point that Caldwell made very nicely, noting that many think of socialism as a natural human inclinationnational socialism (also known as fascism) and international socialism (also known as communism) are responsible for the largest mass murders in history. Well, responsible might not be the best word. Perhaps, responsible for the poor and evil ideas that prompted the largest mass murders in history.

Advocates of communism claim it is the opposite of Nazism, and advocates of Nazism claim it the opposite of communism. Each form of socialism, however, is simply the flip side of the same coin.

Take, for example, the ideas of Josef Goebbels, the infamous Nazi butcherer. His diary from the 1920s is full of expressions of sympathy for Communism. In the final analysis, he wrote on October 23, 1925, it would be better for us to end our existence under Bolshevism than to endure slavery under capitalism. On January 31, 1926, he told himself in his diary: I think it is terrible that we [the Nazis] and the Communists are bashing in each others heads Where can we get together sometime with the leading Communists? It was at this time that he published an open letter to a Communist leader assuring him that Nazism and Communism were really the same thing. You and I, he declared, are fighting one another, but we are not really enemies.

If you will not have God (and he is a jealous God), you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin, wrote T.S. Eliot in 1936. Again, Eliot is worth quoting at length, here from Choruses on the Rock.

But it seems that something has happened that has never happened before: though we know not just when, or why, or how, or where. Men have left GOD not for other gods, they say, but for no god; and this has never happened before That men both deny gods and worship gods, professing first Reason, And then Money, and Power, and what they call Life, or Race, or Dialectic. The Church disowned, the tower overthrown, the bells upturned, what have we to do But stand with empty hands and palms turned upwards In an age which advances progressively backwards?[2]

Taken together, these two forms of secularism, atheism, and materialism, national socialism and international socialism, led to the murder (yes, murder is the best term here) of nearly 205 million human beings between 1917 and, circa, 1994, in a variety of gulags, holocaust camps, and killing fields. Those murdered were civilians, usually the citizens and residents of the very countries doing the murdering.

To NKVD, Frunze. You are charged with the task of exterminating 10,000 enemies of the People. Report results by signalread a not atypical Soviet telegram.

Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds, let them be thousands, let them drown themselves in their own blood, V.I. Lenin stated. And, again, Well ask the man, where do you stand on the question of the revolution? Are you for it or against it? If hes against it, well stand him up against the wall.

Instead of deluding the proletariat as to the possibility of eradicating all causes of bloodbaths, Italian Fascist Benito Mussolini argued, we wish to prepare it and accustom it to war for the day of the greatest bloodbath of all, when the two hostile classes with clash in the supreme trial.

The socialists of all stripes craved blood with nothing less than vampiric lust.

If we add in the number of soldiersthose fighting on the battle fields in uniformduring the same time period (or, a bit broader time period; encompassing the whole of the 20th century), we add an additional 50 million to the list, thus bringing the total to 255 million killed in the twentieth century. Yet, this is worth pondering. After all, governments killed four times the number of persons war did. In other words, the greatest killer of the twentieth century was not war, it was government.

We can break down these governmental killingswhat demographer R.J. Rummel has labeled democide. Communist China murdered 65 million; Soviet Russia slaughtered 62 million; National Socialist Germany butchered 21 million; and Nationalist China killed another 10 million. Nazi Germany certainly murdered the greatest number in the shortest amount of time, with most of its 21 million deaths taking place between late 1942 and early 1945, a denouement, perhaps, of the life of its wicked and Satanic regime. Cambodia, though, wins when it comes to sheer horror. Between 1975 and 1978, it reduced its own population by nearly fifty percent, with forced de-urbanization and insane re-education camps.

Most historians claim that the liberation of various oppressed groups defines the twentieth century. Such a view is pathetically dishonest. From the standpoint of, say, 2200 AD or 2500 AD, however, the twentieth-century will simply be remembered as one hell of a bloody mess. Lets hope it will be properly viewed as an anomaly rather than as the beginning of a diabolic trend.

An age which advances progressively backwards, indeed.

Yet, it must also be rememberedas Alexander Solzhenitsyn claimed in his Gulagthat socialism did not kill merely the body, it sought to extinguish the soul and all belief in anything transcendent in the human person. In volume one of The Gulag, the great Russian thinker listed ten soul-destroying aspects of socialism.

It has suddenly become vogue again, especially among the younger generation, to embrace some form of socialism. At its extremes, some even willingly and openly wear Che Guevarra and, horrifically enough, in this very room on Monday night, a pro-communist t-shirt. How many millions had to die for one ignorant man-child fool to parade his idiocy?

And, yet, we must also remember that this November 9th is the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

In 1953, 1956, 1968, and 1979, Eastern Europeans rebelled vehemently against their socialistthe Union of Soviet Socialist Republicsoppressors, with the United States looking on in willful and convenient ignorance. All of this changed on May 17, 1981, when President Ronald Reagan gave the Commencement address at the University of Notre Dame. The years ahead are great ones for this country, for the cause of freedom and the spread of civilization, he said, with utter conviction. The West wont contain communism, it will transcend communism. It wont bother to denounce it, it will dismiss it as some bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.

Allied with John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Kohl, and others, Reagan worked relentlessly to undermine the worlds moral confidence in the Soviet Empire. He knew the struggle was not a materialist one, but a spiritual one, a struggle for the very definition of man.

Though the 200th anniversary of the French Revolutionwhich the Soviets hoped to celebrate through a series of world-wide parades and festivals1989 served as the end of the Soviet Empire, with one satellite country after another falling into the glorious decay of freedom, liberty, and dignity. Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland each successfully rebelled against socialist oppression. On November 9, after a series of peaceful protests, East Germany too fell, and 1,000s upon 1,000s of mere Germans tore down the symbol of socialist evil, the Berlin Wall.

Socialism, Whitaker Chambers wrote, is not new. It is, in fact, mans second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: Ye shall be as gods. It is the great alternative faith of mankind. Like all great faiths, its force derives from a simple vision. Other ages have had great visions. They have always been different versions of the same vision: the vision of God and mans relationship to God. The Communist vision is the vision of Man without God. It is the vision of mans mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world.[3]

It is time to remember and reclaim mans oldest faith, a faith in one Almighty God who make each of usand every other human beingin His glorious image. Only then can we challenge the so-called wisdom of this world.

Notes:

[1] Solzhenitsyn, end of Volume 1 of the Gulag.

[2] T.S. Eliot, Choruses from the Rock, in Complete Poems And Play, 1909-1950 (Harcourt, Brace, 1971), 108.

[3] Whittaker Chambers, Witness (1952; Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1980), 9.

This essay was delivered as a response to Hillsdale Colleges Center for Constructive Alternatives on Socialism, on November 6, 2019 and was first published here in that same month and year.

The Imaginative Conservativeapplies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politicswe approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please considerdonating now.

The featured image is The Day the Wall Came Down, by Veryl Goodnight, a 1997 statue depicting horses leaping over actual pieces of the Berlin Wall, courtesy of Wikipedia.

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Remember, Remember, the 9th of November - The Imaginative Conservative