(Official Washington Examiner editorial, June 12): Communism always was and will be evil, not just in its application but in its very conception. When it opens to the public on Monday, the Victims of Communism Museum will forever and rightly warn the world to treat communism as a deadly plague.
Indeed, communism is the deadliest ideology, by far, that has ever plagued the planet. Its practitioners have killed more than 100 million people worldwide through unproved war, mass executions, intentional famines, and other diabolical methods. Those numbers come not from some right-wing outfit but from The Black Book of Communism, co-authored by six leftist French intellectuals and published by Harvard University Press in 1999.
Soviet Union founder Vladimir Lenin oversaw the deaths of between 3 million and 5 million people. Josef Stalin executed, often by torture, or otherwise deliberately caused the deaths of up to 20 million. (Between 3.3 million and 7.5 million of them were Ukrainians, by the way, through famines caused not by “acts of God” but by intentional confiscation of grain and other government policies.) Leading historians blame China’s Mao Zedong for up to 77 million deaths. The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia killed 2 million. Cuba, the North Vietnamese, the Eastern-bloc nations under the Soviet umbrella, and others killed hundreds of thousands more.
Again, most of this was by design. Karl Marx himself called for “a revolution that cares as little about the human lives it destroys as an earthquake cares about the houses it ravages.” He and Friedrich Engels wrote that “the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified, and concentrated [only through] revolutionary terror.”
Lenin, Stalin, and their minions took Marx to heart. As noted by Winston Groom in The Allies, the Bolsheviks put to death untold numbers in “a carnival of perversion so breathtaking as to be unbelievable, except for the many files that recorded it….. [The full editorial is at this link.]
