Cruelty and Suffering Start From Ideas - Even “Ideals”
Nice people are often behind the most cruel and destructive human suffering. It’s because they never stopped to track the fallout of the nice-sounding ideals of their leaders. Communism always requires subservience and authoritarianism. It has proven disastrous to humanity, over and over, yet people still try to defend it as a beautiful ideal that just hasn’t had the right leaders.
Professor R.J. Rummel in "Death by Government" finds that from 1917 until its collapse, the Soviet Union murdered or caused the death of 61 million people, mostly its own citizens. From 1949 to 1976, Communist China's Mao Zedong regime killed as many as 78 million of its own citizens. Read “The Devil and Karl Marx” by Paul Kengor. That's 139 million people killed, and millions more who suffered under Communism.
Vladimir Putin's clear oppression of Ukraine is horrifying. But we’re even watching Communism spread in America--celebrated on campuses, protected by our media, and promoted by our own political leaders. Even many Republicans say nothing to call out the Communist take-over in Canada, or the outright Communist oppression in US cities like New York and Portland.
What do we DO?... We tell this truth to our friends, our co-workers, fellow students, and our neighbors. We write to our news media and to businesses. We rally. We peacefully but strongly protest, and we Do Not Comply with Communism.
Consider this warning from the Russian-born American writer, Ayn Rand:
“When, at the age of twelve, at the time of the Russian revolution, I first heard the Communist principle that Man must exist for the sake of the State, I perceived that this was the essential issue, that this principle was evil, and that it could lead to nothing but evil, regardless of any methods, details, decrees, policies, promises and pious platitudes. This was the reason for my opposition to Communism then — and it is my reason now. I am still a little astonished, at times, that too many adult Americans do not understand the nature of the fight against Communism as clearly as I understood it at the age of twelve: they continue to believe that only Communist methods are evil, while Communist ideals are noble. All the victories of Communism since the year 1917 are due to that particular belief among the men who are still free.”