That our culture still accepts the doctrines supporting Marxism at all tells us more of the perniciousness of our Academia where brainwashed professors who cannot think in any other manner continue to teach the rubbish they were themselves taught.
Thus we were foisted with the likes of one Barack Obama who could not help but be who he was made into. I am truly more impressed by how resilient the political system is than by anything he was. That it has then thrown up the most powerful counter revolution in history is astonishing to watch.
Perhaps now we can have a true intellect revolution as well.
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The Staggering Toll of the Russian Revolution
Never has there been such an insidious and deadly ideology as Marxism-Leninism.
https://fee.org/articles/the-staggering-toll-of-the-russian-revolution/
Russian President Vladimir Putin would like to ignore the
Bolshevik Revolution, which marks its 100th anniversary this month.
Putin reportedly told his advisers that it would be unnecessary to
commemorate the occasion. He knows better—it is nothing to be proud of.
It Began with the Revolution of 1917
Lenin’s coup on November 7, 1917, opened a new stage in human history.
The horrors of twentieth-century socialism—of Lenin, Stalin,
Hitler, Mussolini, Mao, and Pol Pot—were the offspring of 1917. Seventy
years earlier, Marx and Engels predicted the overthrow of bourgeois
rule would require violence and “a dictatorship of the proletariat . . . to weed out remaining capitalist elements.” Lenin conducted this “weeding out” using indiscriminate terror, as Russian socialists before him had done and others would continue to do after his death.
The late Rudolph Rummel, the demographer of government mass murder, estimated the human toll of
twentieth-century socialism to be about 61 million in the Soviet Union,
78 million in China, and roughly 200 million worldwide. These victims
perished during state-organized famines, collectivization, cultural revolutions, purges, campaigns against “unearned” income, and other devilish experiments in social engineering.
In its monstrosity, this terror is unrivaled in the course of human history.
Lenin’s coup on November 7, 1917, the day Kerensky’s provisional
government fell to Bolshevik forces, opened a new stage in human
history: a regime of public slavery. Collectivist economic planning led
to coercion, violence, and mass murder. Marx and Engels had defined
socialism as “the abolition of private property.” The most fundamental
component of private property, self-ownership, was abolished first.
Stalin introduced Article 12, which
permitted that children age twelve and older be sentenced to death or
imprisonment as adults
Wholesale Destruction
The Marxists’ biggest targets have always been the family, religion, and civil society
—institutional obstacles to the imposition of the omnipotent state. With the Bolsheviks in power, Lenin set out to destroy them.
Murder of children became a norm after he ordered the extermination
of Czar Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra, and their five children.
Millions of families were rounded up and forcibly relocated to remote
and uninhabited regions in Siberia and Kazakhstan. Hundreds of thousands
of children died of starvation or disease during their journey into
exile and were buried in mass unmarked graves.
In 1935, Stalin introduced Article 12 of the USSR Criminal Code,
which permitted that children age twelve and older be sentenced to death
or imprisonment as adults. This “law” was directed at the orphans of victims of the regime,
based on the belief that an apple never falls far from the tree. Many
of these kids, whose parents had been jailed or executed, were commonly
known as bezprizorni, street children. They found themselves
living in bare, dirty cells in a savagely violent gulag, where they were
mixed with dangerous criminals and were brutalized and raped by guards
and common criminals.
The Soviet Union was the first state to have as an ideological and
practical objective the elimination of religion or, in other words,
physical extermination of religious people. With Lenin’s decree of
January 20, 1918, nationalization of the church’s property began:
cathedrals, churches, church grounds, and all buildings owned by
churches were looted, and valuables (gold, silver, platinum, paintings,
icons, historical artifacts) were either stolen by Communist atheists or
sold to the West via government agents, communist sympathizers, and
fellow travelers such as American business tycoon Armand Hammer, who met Lenin in 1921.
To be religious often meant a death sentence. The goal was the
state’s absolute monopoly over thought by means of a secular religion,
socialism. Almost all clergy and millions of believers of all
(traditional) religions were shot or sent to labor camps. Seminaries
were closed, and religious publications were prohibited.
Marxism-Leninism pretended to be “scientific socialism,” the
universal explanation of nature, life, and society. However, deviation
from its ideology, especially traditional “bourgeois” science, was
punishable by death. The scope of the persecution of scientists was a real genocide.
An Abject Failure
After seventy-four years of mayhem and misery, the Bolshevik
Revolution failed. The biggest country on Earth, with abundant natural
resources of all kinds, could not meet the basic needs of its citizenry.
The system had no means to rationally allocate resources in the absence of property rights and the market institutions that rely on them.
Ideas have consequences.
From my own life in the Soviet Union, which ended the same
year that Vladimir Putin reported on the collapsing Berlin Wall for his
KGB bosses, I can attest to the truth of Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises’s statement that socialism amounts to a “revolt against economics.”
Yet, socialism still has sympathizers in the West. Many Americans
believe that socialism is good, whereas communism, fascism, and Nazism
(National Socialism) are violent and anti-democratic. A public-opinion survey published
last year proved that general assumption: 43 percent of respondents
younger than thirty had a favorable view of socialism; only 32 percent
had a favorable view of capitalism. This is a powerful warning. The anti-capitalistic mentality has
brought suffering and mass murder in all socialist countries and has
reduced standards of living and the quality of life in mixed economies.
The Soviet Union is now gone, as are the huge statues of Marx and
Lenin that littered the East, but ideas have consequences, and no body
of ideas attracted a greater following than Marxism-Leninism. A Russian
aphorism says, “The only lesson of history is that it teaches us
nothing.” For too many people this is as true as ever.
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