Wednesday, February 24, 2021

Here Are a Few Communist Atrocities You Don't Know About and the Left Hopes You Never Do

 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.

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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.

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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.”

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https://www.westernjournal.com/dennis-prager-communist-atrocities-dont-know-left-hopes-never/

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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/

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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."