By Dennis Prager | The Western Journal
Photo: Vladimir Lenin, Russian founder of the Russian
Communist Party (Bolsheviks), inspirer and leader of the Bolshevik Revolution
(1917) - Getty Image
One of the most highly regarded books of the 20th century
was Ernest Becker’s “The Denial of Death.” Winner of the 1974 Pulitzer Prize,
the book is regarded as a classic for its analysis of how human beings deny
their mortality.
But there is something people deny more than mortality:
evil. Someone should write a book on the denial of evil; that would be much
more important because while we cannot prevent death, we can prevent evil.
The most glaring example of the denial of evil is communism, an ideology that, within a period of only 60
years, created modern totalitarianism and deprived of human rights, tortured,
starved and killed more people than any other ideology in history.
Why people ignore, or even deny, communist evil is the
subject of a previous column as well as a Prager University video, “Why Isn’t Communism as Hated as Nazism?” I will, therefore,
not address that question here.
I will simply lay out the facts.
But before I do, I need to address another question: Why
is it important that everyone know what communism did?
Here are three reasons:
First, we have a moral obligation to the victims not to
forget them.
Just as Americans have a moral obligation to remember the
victims of American slavery, we have the same obligation to the billion victims
of communism, especially the 100 million who were murdered.
Completing this poll entitles you to The Western Journal
news updates free of charge. You may opt out at anytime. You also agree to
our Privacy
Policy and Terms of Use.
Second, the best way to prevent an evil from reoccurring
is to confront it in all its horror.
The fact that many people today, especially young people,
believe communism is a viable — even morally superior — option for modern
societies proves they know nothing about communism’s moral record. Therefore,
they do not properly fear communism — which means this evil could happen again.
And why could it happen again?
That brings us to reason number three.
The leaders of communist regimes and the vast number of
people who helped those leaders torture, enslave and murder — plus the many
more people who reported on their neighbors for saying something objectionable
to the communists — were nearly all normal people.
Of course, some were psychopaths, but most were not.
Which proves that any society — including free ones — can devolve into
communism or some analogous evil.
Now some facts:
According to the authoritative “The Black Book of
Communism,” written by six French scholars and published in the United States
by Harvard University Press, the numbers of people murdered — not people
killed in combat; ordinary civilians trying to live their lives — by communist
regimes were:
Latin America: 150,000
Vietnam: 1 million
Eastern Europe: 1 million
Ethiopia: 1.5 million
North Korea: 2 million
Cambodia: 2 million
The Soviet Union: 20 million (many scholars believe the
number was considerably higher)
China: 65 million
These numbers are quite conservative. For example, in
Ukraine alone, the Soviet regime and its Ukrainian Communist Party helpers
starved 5 to 6 million to death within a two-year period. It is almost
inconceivable that only 14 to 15 million other Soviet citizens were murdered.
And, of course, these numbers do not describe the
suffering endured by hundreds of millions of people who were not murdered: the
systematic stripping people of their right to speak freely, to worship, to
start a business or even to travel without party permission; no noncommunist
judiciary or media; the near-poverty of nearly all communist countries; the
imprisonment and torture of vast numbers of people; and, of course, the trauma
suffered by the hundreds of millions of friends and relatives of the murdered
and imprisoned.
These numbers don’t tell you about the many starving
Ukrainians who ate the flesh of people, often children, sometimes including
their own; or the Romanian Christians whose communist prison guards forced them
to eat feces to compel them to renounce their faith; or the frozen millions in
the vast Soviet Siberian prison camp system known as the Gulag Archipelago; or
the Vietnamese communists’ routine practice of burying peasants alive to
terrorize people into supporting the communists; or Mao Zedong’s regular use of
torture to punish opponents and intimidate peasants, like leading men through
the streets with rusty wires through their testicles and burning the vaginas of
wives of opponents with flaming wicks — Mao’s techniques to terrorize peasants
into supporting the Chinese Communist Party in its early days.
I return to the theme of the denial of evil.
People associate evil with darkness. But that is not
accurate: It is easy to look into the dark; it is very hard to stare into
bright light.
One should therefore associate evil with extreme
brightness, given that people rarely look at real evil. And those who do not
confront real evil often make up evils (such as “systemic racism,” “toxic masculinity” and
“heteronormativity” in 21st-century America) that are much easier to confront.
The Book of Psalms states, “Those of you who love God —
you are to hate evil.”
In other words, you can’t love God if you don’t hate
evil.
And if you don’t believe in God, here’s another way of
putting it: “Those of you who love people — you are to hate evil.”
If you don’t hate communism, you don’t care about, much
less love, people.
_________________
Sources
for the above:
Ukraine:
Anne Applebaum, “Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine.”
Romania:
Eugen Magirescu, “The Devil’s Mill: Memories of Pitesti Prison.” (Cited in Paul
Kengor’s “The Devil and Karl Marx: Communism’s Long March of Death,
Deception, and Infiltration.”)
Vietnam:
Max Hastings, “Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975.”
China:
Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, “Mao: The Unknown Story.”
______________
https://www.westernjournal.com/dennis-prager-communist-atrocities-dont-know-left-hopes-never/
____________________________
RELATED
ARTICLES
Former Clinton Adviser: US Becoming a
'Totalitarian State' Under Biden
By Jack Davis | The Western Journal
The creeping shadow of totalitarianism is falling across America,
according to feminist author Naomi Wolf.
Wolf, who served as an adviser to former President Bill Clinton during his 1996 re-election campaign,
appeared on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” on Monday, declaring that emergency orders are violating the rights of
Americans, according to Fox News.
Wolf said Americans must see “the terrible crisis that
we’re in, that we have to recognize — under the guise of a real medical
pandemic, we’re really moving into a coup situation, a police state situation.”
“That’s not a partisan thing,” Wolf told Carlson. “That
transcends everything you and I might agree or disagree on. That should bring
together left and right to protect our Constitution.”
“We’re absolutely moving into what I call step 10,” she
said, referencing the book she wrote about totalitarianism and how tyrants
consolidate power, “The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot.”
“Whether they’re
on the left or the right, they always do the same 10 things and now we’re at
something I never thought I’d see in my lifetime,” she said.
“It is step 10 and that’s the suspension of the rule of
law, that’s when you start to be a police state, and we’re here. There is no
way around it.”
Wolf said that groups on the left and right are
both concerned over the direction the nation has taken,
saying that the ordinary people she speaks with are expressing “fear and
horror.”
“The state has now crushed businesses, kept us from
gathering in free assembly to worship as the First Amendment provides, is
invading our bodies … which is a violation of the Fourth Amendment, is
restricting movement, fining us — here in New York state I could be fined
$15,000 a day if I gather people more than 10 or 25 people, depending on where
in New York state I live — which is a complete violation of the First
Amendment. The violations go on and on and on,” Wolf said.
“Autocratic tyrants at the state, and now the national
level, are creating this kind of merger of corporate power and government
power, which is really characteristic of Italian fascism in the twenties,” she
said.
“They are using that to engage in kind of emergency
orders that simply strip us of our rights: rights to property, rights to
assembly, rights to worship and all of the rights that our Constitution
guarantees.”
Wolf said Americans must protect their Constitutional rights.
“Nowhere in the Constitution does it say all this can be
suspended if there’s a bad disease. We have lived through typhus, cholera,
smallpox, HIV, tuberculosis, polio, the Spanish flu.”
“We’ve lived through an attack on our soil — never have
there been months and months and months of emergency powers when we weren’t
actually fighting a war,” Wolf said.
“Lockdowns have never been done before in free societies,
and really, we are turning into a version of a totalitarian state before
everyone’s eyes.”
“I really hope we wake up quickly,” she said, “because history also
shows that it’s a small window in which people can fight back before
it is too dangerous to fight back.”
https://www.westernjournal.com/former-clinton-advisor-us-becoming-totalitarian-state-biden/
_____________________________________
CATCHING
WILD PIGS
BY Henry P. McIntosh IV
Karl Marx once said, "Remove one freedom per
generation and soon you will have no freedom and no one will have
noticed."
I have had this story in my computer files for at least
five years. I do not know who the author is but I came across it last night and
began editing it. I wanted to share it with you because the lesson is so damn
important that I hope you will share it with others across this great land.
There once was a biology professor in a large college that
had some foreign exchange students in his class. One day while the class was in
the lab, the professor noticed one young man, an exchange student, who kept
rubbing his back and stretching as if his back hurt.
The professor asked the young man what was the matter.
The student told him he had a bullet lodged in his back. He had been shot while
fighting Communists in his native country who were trying to overthrow his
country's government and install a new communist regime. In the midst of his
story, he looked at the professor and asked a strange question. He asked:
"Do you know how to catch wild pigs?"
The professor
laughed and thought it was a joke and asked for the punch line. The young man
said that it was no joke. "The way you catch wild pigs is by finding a
suitable place in the woods and putting corn on the ground. The pigs will find
it and begin to come every day to eat the free food. If you have patience, soon
they will come every day. At that point, you put a fence down one side of the
place where they are used to coming. When they get used to the one-sided fence,
they begin to eat the corn again and, at that point, you put up another side of
the fence.
The pigs get used to the two sides of the fence and they
ignore it preferring to find the corn eat the free food all there for the
taking. Exhibiting patience, you continue until you have all four sides of the
fence up with a gate on the last side. You leave that gate open.
The pigs, which are used to the free corn, start to come
through the gate to eat that free corn again. You then slam the gate shut on
them and catch the whole herd.
Suddenly the wild pigs have lost their freedom. They run
around and around inside the fence, but they are caught. Soon they put aside their captivity and go
back to eating the free corn. They are so used to it that they have forgotten
how to forage in the woods for themselves, so they accept their
captivity."
If you think about this story, it is exactly what is
happening in America & Canada. The government keeps pushing us toward
Communism /Socialism and keeps spreading the “free corn” out in the form of
programs such as supplemental income, tax credits for unearned income, tax
exemptions, dairy subsidies, payments not to plant crops (CRP), welfare
entitlements, medicine, drugs, shelter and access to our social security
programs for illegal immigrants, open borders during a pandemic, etc., all
while we continually lose our freedoms, just a little at a time.
President Biden campaigned (from his basement) as the
soft-spoken, grandfatherly gentle leader, unlike that curmudgeon Trump, who was going to fulfill our every need. In
case you haven’t noticed, none of Biden’s actions, all 52 of his executive
orders, have done anything positive to help Americans and America. Indeed, they
have weakened America economically, morally, and militarily.
One can make a good case that President Biden is pushing our nation closer to war every time he opens his mouth. Certainly, his willingness to re-enter the Iran Deal is not just a slap in the face of Israel, but a door opener to fostering armed conflict because Israel will not stand by and allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon. John Kerry, the new “Climate Czar” has his fingers in the Iran discussions and is blinded by his desire to welcome the world’s largest sponsor of state terrorism and hatred for all things Western to the table. And, of course, Kerry is delighted that the democrats have embraced climate change and escalated it to the top of their list of vitally important and necessary things to accomplish! Of course, there is no science behind any of it, but that doesn’t matter.
The damage has already been
done with Biden’s canceling the Keystone XL Pipeline, banning fracking and oil
and coal exploration on Federal Land, and wiping out America’s energy
independence it took decades to develop. And who, in command of their
faculties, believes Joe Biden will be tough on China’s expansion plans in the
South China Sea? Remember, there is a plethora of evidence to suggest he and
his son Hunter have very close ties to the Chinese Communist Party and might
very well have taken payments in exchange for access to the office he now
holds.
One should always remember two truths:
1. There is no
such thing as a free lunch and,
2. You can never
hire someone to provide a service for you cheaper than you can do it yourself.
You see, stripped of all the fancy jargon and the talking heads we see on TV, the major problem we face today is this:
The democrats/ liberals/socialists/communists all believe passionately that the future of America lies with Big Government.
In their minds, it is big government that
must be the guiding light for our future. Big government can plan our lives for
us and our children better than we can ourselves. Big government believes that
the problem does not exist that throwing money at it cannot solve. Hell, we’ve
spent $5.0 Trillion since the 1960s on Civil Rights and we’ve still got “racial
inequity”….but no one is mentioning that in the media…any media. For the Left,
government agencies once created are the closest thing we have to eternal life
here on earth!
On the other side of the aisle, Republicans believe that
the Republic or Founders gave us, where the only sovereign power our
representatives have is that which we the people have given to them, is still
the most unique and admired form of government in the history of mankind. It
has served us well for 245 years and is the envy of the world! That bears
repeating….the envy of the world. We still revere the worlds of Abraham
Lincoln…’government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not
perish from the earth”
People ask me from time to time…what can we do? My response is always the same: fight back! Write your representatives, congressmen and women, senators, governors. Organize and inundate them with your feelings. Don’t sit back and allow yourselves to be overtaken by actions you know to be wrong. You have the power to do this. Use it.
Meanwhile, If you see that all of this wonderful
government "help" is a problem confronting the future of democracy in
America & Canada, you might want to share this with your friends. If you
think the free ride is essential to your way of life, then you will probably not
share this.
But, God help us all when the gate slams shut!
Now, think about this:
Quote for today: "The problems we face today exist because the people who work for a living are now outnumbered by those who vote for a living."
