Yesterday, November 7th marked the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik takeover of Russia. Revolutionary success in 1917 marked the start of what Perry Metzger writing in Samizdata magazine called ‘a century of horror’. Since that date in the early part of the 20th century the Russian revolution and the Communist and socialist revolutions it inspired worldwide have been the cause of death of at least 100 million people. That’s a million people for every year that has passed since the Bolsheviks turned Russia into a nightmare of oppression and death.
We as civilised beings quite rightly do not celebrate the beginnings of the Nazi regime and neither do many Britons celebrate the period of Bloody Mary’s reign, we can see that these times and these ideologies were oppressive at best and downright evil at worst. Unfortunately, all too often Communism, probably because of the influence of Leftists in the West’s education and administrative systems, Communism gets a free pass for its crimes that so few other ideologies get. It is morally right to remember those who died in the Shoah or the Armenian and Rwandan genocides and those put to death because they are the ‘wrong’ religion or political persuasion from Britain’s past, in order to prevent these crimes from happening again. Therefore it is equally right and proper and indeed essential to remember those who suffered under Communism and the many blessed lives that were lost to an ideology that is every bit as evil as Nazism in both its intent and its outcomes.
Perry Metzger said:
I struggled for a while for what to write here, but I felt I had to write something, because today is a fateful anniversary.
Exactly 100 years ago, on November* 7, 1917, the Communist Revolution in Russia began.
In the ensuing decades, about one hundred million people died because of the Russian Revolution and other communist revolutions it inspired.
These deaths were not an accident, not the result of some deviant misinterpretation of Karl Marx’s true intent, and not some minor incident of history we all should ignore. They were a direct consequence of what you can read in Marx’s writings and those of his successors.
There is no gentle way to say this: if any ideology can be said to be evil, if any set of ideas can be said to be evil, then Communism is evil.
I’ve seen it said recently, on Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere, that we mustn’t compare the Communists to the Nazis because the Nazis started with bad intentions while the Communists had good intentions.
I must disagree. The Communists started with intentions every bit as monstrous as those of the Nazis.
No one ever believes their intentions to be evil of course, and our society has, sadly, a great many people who retain a romantic attachment to communism, and who teach this romantic attachment to their friends, neighbors, and (in the case of the huge number of Marxist academics who unaccountably are working in every university), their students.
The Nazis didn’t believe themselves to be evil, and neo-Nazis today do not believe themselves to be evil. So it is with the apologists for Communism — they do not believe themselves to be evil. I’m sure that Marx didn’t perceive himself to be evil, he believed his enemies to be evil, and I’m sure Hitler felt the same. That doesn’t matter. Self-perception has nothing to do with the thing. It’s the hateful ideas and the trail of corpses that are relevant.
And so we face the problem that many people, even now, even after a century of almost inescapable evidence, still hold a romantic attachment to Communism, do not react to a red star or a hammer and sickle with the instinctive horror that they feel for a swastika.
In other words, our society still has not come to grips with Communism.
Read the rest of this excellent and thought provoking article via that link below:
https://www.samizdata.net/2017/11/a-century-of-horror/
The writer is correct, society and indeed the world has not yet come to grips with Communism and the monstrous charnel houses that it turned the nations it controlled into. Maybe when the Berlin Wall fell, the West and to a lesser extent the nations of Eastern Europe, failed to ‘De-Marxify’ their societies and their institutions and didn’t subject them to the sort of purge that went such a long way into removing the threat of a resurgent Nazism in Germany following World War II. If the promoters of Leftism in our own societies had been removed from their positions of influence in the immediate Post 1989 / 1990 period, then maybe we would not be seeing so many instances of Leftist in places like schools and colleges, continuing to promote Marxism as a viable social system. It is scandalous that Communism has been allowed to fester and grow in places like academia and the public services and even more scandalous that they have been allowed to promote Communism to those young people who have little idea of what horrors Communism always brings.
