Communism Kills People

This is the biggest "Duh!" moment we've had in a while.

Author Frank Dikotter pours through thousands of documents from Mao-era China and discovers that 45 million people were killed during the Great Leap Forward when the Communists starved its own people to "progress."

As Moe Lane points out:

(T)he People’s Republic of China’s ‘Great Leap Forward’ caused truly frightening numbers of deaths: looking at the actual source material, its author is now estimating a death toll of 45 million (50% more than previous estimates). That works out to about 6.5% of its population, based on the 1960 census: to put that in perspective, the equivalent for 2010-era USA would be 20.15 million, or just over the entire population of New York State.

You don't hear the apologists for communism as much now as you used to, but "progressives" will occasionally argue that the problems with Stalin and Mao were in execution (literally), not theory. But the theory is evil, as well, and there's nothing "democratic" in any of the "democratic" communist regimes.

Equating Communism With Nazism?

A Hidden History of Evil

In the world’s collective consciousness, the word “Nazi” is synonymous with evil. It is widely understood that the Nazis’ ideology—nationalism, anti-Semitism, the autarkic ethnic state, the Führer principle—led directly to the furnaces of Auschwitz. It is not nearly as well understood that Communism led just as inexorably, everywhere on the globe where it was applied, to starvation, torture, and slave-labor camps. Nor is it widely acknowledged that Communism was responsible for the deaths of some 150 million human beings during the twentieth century. The world remains inexplicably indifferent and uncurious about the deadliest ideology in history.

The problem is that so many on the Left still believe communism's problem was implementation, not theory.

Did You Know...

Soviet spy Alger Hiss was readmitted to the Massachusetts bar within days of his conviction of perjury because Hiss "had demonstrated the "moral and intellectual fitness" required to be an attorney"?

Want a Greener Planet? Kill Babies!

That's China's recommendation: if you want to help the environment, institute a "one child" policy like China has, complete with forced abortions.

“The [Chinese] policy on family planning proves to be a great success,” Zhao was quoted by the official Xinhua news agency as saying in Copenhagen, where she is one of Beijing’s delegates at the U.N. climate conference.

“It not only contributes to reduction of global emission, but also provides experiences for other countries – developing countries in particular – in their pursuit for a coordinated and sustainable development.”...

A report on Zhao’s comments in the state-run China Daily said she acknowledged that the one-child policy was not without “consequences” – but the only ones she mentioned were the skewed gender balance and a rapidly ageing society.

“I’m not saying that what we have done is 100 percent right, but I’m sure we are going in the right direction and now 1.3 billion people have benefited,” she said.

I'm sure many on the left would agree with this, given their rabid anti-child philosophies.

Why Do We Mistreat the Poles So?

Via Brothers Judd:
U.S. Honors Stalin on Hallowed Ground, Will Saddam Hussein Be Next?

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russians began taking down their statues of Josef Stalin, the mass murderer who killed millions of people. Astonishingly, in America, the National D-Day Memorial is honoring Stalin by placing his bust on a pedestal at its museum in Bedford, Virginia.

This misguided move will haunt millions of Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, Jews, etc. whose families were massacred by this Soviet tyrant. Stalin's killing machine slaughtered more people than Adolf Hitler and the Nazis did.

Hitler and Stalin were allies and started World War II in 1939 by both attacking Poland at the same time. But William McIntosh, the D-Day Memorial's president says that because Stalin became a U.S. ally after Germany invaded Russia, he deserves to be acknowledged along with Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

McIntosh is wrong. Stalin only gave lip service to the allies so that they would attack Nazi Germany on the Western front. Stalin did not liberate Eastern Europe from the Nazis in 1945; he sent in Soviet troops that occupied half of Europe until the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Stalin the communist barely hid his disdain for capitalist America during WWII, and once the war ended, he began the Cold War and ordered his scientists to work on missiles and nuclear weapons that could destroy the United States.

You really have to wonder about the thought process that goes into some of these decisions. We allied with Stalin because we needed to squeeze Hitler to defeat him. And then we turned to defeat the USSR. For any American museum to honor Stalin is despicable.

Why Should We Remember the Berlin Wall?

A young friend of mine snottily told me that she didn't consider the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall to be a big deal. As she put it:

I am sure this will irk some, but I have a problem with us being so sentimental about tearing down a wall in another country when we're so gung-ho about putting up a fence at our own.

Why should we remember? Maybe this is why:

I Feel Safer Already

U.S. Changes Course on Eastern European Nuclear-Missile Shield

The White House is scrapping a Bush-era plan for an Eastern European missile-defense shield, saying a redesigned defensive system would be cheaper, quicker and more effective against the threat from Iranian missiles.

This is probably more about appeasing the Russians than about safety and security from Iranian missiles. What an appropriate date.

President Obama celebrates the 70th anniversary of the fruition of the famous non-aggression pact … the Sept. 17, 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland* … with a big present for Stalin wannabe Vladimir Putin.

It's also Constitution Day, a propos of nothing.

This is a much better deal for the neo-Stalinists than the Molo-’Trop was. Cutting deals with Hitler was a predictably dodgy game, destined to end badly … as any fool could see given what Hitler was doing with the Munich Agreement. So the Obama-Putin Iranian Nuclear Disarmament/Eastern European Betrayal Pact is more like if Stalin had cut a deal with Chamberlain on, say, Sept. 2, 1939, to help contain Hitler. Or maybe like Hitler cutting a deal with Chamberlain to keep Mussolini in line.

But we don't really need this since Vice President Joe Biden assures us Iran isn't a threat.

I feel so much better, don't you?

UPDATE: I feel even safer.AP NewsBreak: Nuke agency says Iran can make bomb.

The Real Che Guevara

The Washington Times had a story yesterday on
The Victims of Che Guevara poster being offered by the Young America's Foundation. The poster uses photos of people killed by Che to make his image.

Che Guevara has become something of an icon among Hispanic youth, the vast majority of whom know nothing about him. It's a pity so few children know or understand the bloody path of Cuba, or of communists in general. But then, they aren't being taught that, are they?

"Che is one of the heroes that the left idolizes," said Patrick X. Coyle, vice president of YAF. "But a lot of kids don't know anything about him. We thought this would be a great way to highlight his atrocities."

The occasion for the poster is Freedom Week, YAF's annual commemoration of the fall of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9, 1989, which has since become the most famous event symbolizing the collapse of Soviet communism.

Conservative students on more than 100 college and university campuses will participate in Freedom Week events, and YAF has printed 10,000 copies of the Guevara poster to dramatize the fact that communism "affected real individuals," Mr. Coyle said.

"In fact, collectivist regimes, according to 'The Black Book of Communism,' murdered more than 100 million people worldwide in the 20th century," he said.

The Left loves to talk about people killed by Christians but fails to point out that far more people were killed by communism than by Christians at any point in history. For all its failings, Christianity has done far more good in the world than evil.

Students Don't Understand the Toll of Communism

Sometimes you find some strange things when you troll the moonbatosphere, but one of the strangest is the way some leftists think the United States is worse, more dangerous, and kills more people than communist regimes.

This isn't an argument I make without evidence. See this site which compares the U.S. unfavorably with Pol Pot. Or this A.P. story about how the ruthless communist regime in China is viewed more favorably than the U.S. I guess the moral to that story is if you suppress your own people, it's ok. Just don't try to bring freedom and democracy to other countries.

Now, Malcolm Kline is suggesting a Communist Genocide Studies class to educate young people on the horrors of communism, a subject glossed over by most university professors.

"Ask college students, and I have, how many Stalin killed and you get the answer, ‘thousands,’" University of Pennsylvania history professor Alan Charles Kors said on June 12th at the Heritage Foundation. "That’s like saying Hitler killed hundreds of Jews."

"Communism claimed 100 million victims," Emil Constantinescu pointed out in the same forum that Dr. Kors addressed. "In my country, Romania, we had one million dead and one million political prisoners out of a total population of 16 million." Constantinescu was the former President of Romania...

"What about the 60’s radicals who kept pictures of Mao and Che on their walls?" Dr. Kors asks. He characterizes that act as "the equivalent of putting up pictures of Hitler and Eichmann."

"They get to teach students about the superiority of their political philosophy," Dr. Kors asserts. Dr. Kors is the co-founder of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) which spawned a national network of pro-bono attorneys who defend students whose civil liberties have been jeopardized by college administrators.

"No other system has caused as much death as communism has," Dr. Kors concludes. "In the case of Nazis, we rightly hunt down 90-year-old men because the bones cry out for justice."

"In the case of communism, we follow the advice of our educated class which says, ‘No witch hunts.’" He is pessimistic about the prospects of an enlightenment among these elites.

"Understanding of communism is going to have to come from civil society because it isn’t going to come from the professoriat," he advises. For such an epiphany to occur among faculty members, Dr. Kors contends that "you need universities that hire pluralistically and not by political litmus test."

Part of the problem, as I pointed out here, is that liberals have a convenient memory where communism is concerned. Many don't even acknowledge the millions of people murdered or enslaved by communist regimes of the 20th Century, and have turned communist symbols into fashion statements. Without some curriculum changes, we can't expect young adults to know the atrocities committed by these monsters.

Hollywood and Fashionable Communism

The flap over Cameron Diaz carrying a handbag with Maoist symbols and "Serve the People" on it is a reminder of how out of touch Hollywood stars--the ones who feel compelled to tell the rest of us how we should behave--really are.

Cameron Diaz apologized Sunday for carrying a bag with a political slogan that evoked painful memories in Peru.

The voice of Princess Fiona in the animated "Shrek" films visited the Incan city of Machu Picchu in Peru's Andes on Friday carrying an olive green bag emblazoned with a red star and the words "Serve the People" printed in Chinese, perhaps Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong's most famous political slogan.

The bags are marketed as fashion accessories in some world capitals, but in Peru the slogan evokes memories of the Maoist Shining Path insurgency that fought the government in the 1980s and early 1990s in a bloody conflict that left nearly 70,000 people dead.

"I sincerely apologize to anyone I may have inadvertently offended. The bag was a purchase I made as a tourist in China and I did not realize the potentially hurtful nature of the slogan printed on it," Diaz said in a statement e-mailed to The Associated Press.

Shining Path isn't ancient history, but Diaz wouldn't even bother apologizing if the fracas didn't tarnish her image as a conscientious lefty. I suppose it goes with the Che Guevara T-shirts. Maybe add a hammer and sickle belt buckle. After all, those symbols don't mean anything, right? It's all just fashion!

It's amazing that the same people who constantly remind us that the U.S. backed Saddam Hussein in the 1980s (and will quote Noam Chomsky about all the other horrible aspects of American foreign affairs) have the convenient memory to forget the horrors of communism.