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100 Years. 100 Million Lives. Think Twice.
By LAURA M. NICOLAE

In 1988, my twenty-six-year-old father jumped off a train in the middle of Hungary with nothing but the clothes on his back. For the next two years, he fled an oppressive Romanian Communist regime that would kill him if they ever laid hands on him again.

My father ran from a government that beat, tortured, and brainwashed its citizens. His childhood friend disappeared after scrawling an insult about the dictator on the school bathroom wall. His neighbors starved to death from food rations designed to combat “obesity.” As the population dwindled, women were sent to the hospital every month to make sure they were getting pregnant.

My father’s escape journey eventually led him to the United States. He moved to the Midwest and married a Romanian woman who had left for America the minute the regime collapsed. Today, my parents are doctors in quiet, suburban Kansas. Both of their daughters go to Harvard. They are the lucky ones.

Roughly 100 million people died at the hands of the ideology my parents escaped. They cannot tell their story. We owe it to them to recognize that this ideology is not a fad, and their deaths are not a joke.

Last month marked 100 years since the Bolshevik Revolution, though college culture would give you precisely the opposite impression. Depictions of communism on campus paint the ideology as revolutionary or idealistic, overlooking its authoritarian violence. Instead of deepening our understanding of the world, the college experience teaches us to reduce one of the most destructive ideologies in human history to a one-dimensional, sanitized narrative.

Walk around campus, and you’re likely to spot Ché Guevara on a few shirts and button pins. A sophomore jokes that he’s declared a secondary in “communist ideology and implementation.” The new Leftist Club on campus seeks “a modern perspective” on Marx and Lenin to “alleviate the stigma around the concept of Leftism.” An author laments in these pages that it’s too difficult to meet communists here. For many students, casually endorsing communism is a cool, edgy way to gripe about the world.

After spending four years on a campus saturated with Marxist memes and jokes about communist revolutions, my classmates will graduate with the impression that communism represents a light-hearted critique of the status quo, rather than an empirically violent philosophy that destroyed millions of lives.

Statistics show that young Americans are indeed oblivious to communism’s harrowing past. According to a YouGov poll, only half of millennials believe that communism was a problem, and about a third believe that President George W. Bush killed more people than Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, who killed 20 million. If you ask millennials how many people communism killed, 75 percent will undershoot.

Perhaps before joking about communist revolutions, we should remember that Stalin’s secret police tortured “traitors” in secret prisons by sticking needles under their fingernails or beating them until their bones were broken. Lenin seized food from the poor, causing a famine in the Soviet Union that induced desperate mothers to eat their own children and peasants to dig up corpses for food. In every country that communism was tried, it resulted in massacres, starvation, and terror.

Communism cannot be separated from oppression; in fact, it depends upon it. In the communist society, the collective is supreme. Personal autonomy is nonexistent. Human beings are simply cogs in a machine tasked with producing utopia; they have no value of their own.

Many in my generation have blurred the reality of communism with the illusion of utopia. I never had that luxury. Growing up, my understanding of communism was personalized; I could see its lasting impact in the faces of my family members telling stories of their past. My perspective toward the ideology is radically different because I know the people who survived it; my relatives continue to wonder about their friends who did not.

The stories of survivors paint a more vivid picture of communism than the textbooks my classmates have read. While we may never fully understand all of the atrocities that occurred under communist regimes, we can desperately try to ensure the world never repeats their mistakes. To that end, we must tell the accounts of survivors and fight the trivialization of communism’s bloody past.

My father left behind his parents, friends, and neighbors in the hope of finding freedom. I know his story because it is my heritage; you now know his story because I have a voice. One hundred million other people were silenced.

One hundred years later, let us not forget the history of the victims who do not have a voice because they did not survive the writing of their tales. Most importantly, let us not be tempted to repeat it.

Excellent piece. Unfortunately, the people who most need to read it won't.

Wisdom and writing ability beyond her years. Communism would be great if people didn't possess corruptibility. They do, so it can't work.

A link to what those College age snowflakes should read... This is the real Communism:

http://gulaghistory.org/nps/do...gulag-curriculum.pdf

quote:

Originally posted by pbslinger:
Wisdom and writing ability beyond her years. Communism would be great if people didn't possess corruptibility. They do, so it can't work.

Regardless of human corruptibility, there is nothing great about communism.

Really good OpEd, thanks.

Milton Friedman discussing this issue...



Link to original video: https://youtu.be/p31-xQ2Rrz4

The only creatures capable of true communism/socialism are ants and bees. Humans simply do not have the ability to make it work. there will always be those that are more equal than others.

In my opinion, these 3 books should be mandatory reading for high schools:

• KOLYMA The Arctic Death Camps - Robert Conquest
  
• The Gulag Archipelago - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
  
• Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar - Simon Sebag Montefiore
  

Communism and true socialism sound great, until the policies are actually put in place. Then you wind up with, to use a recent example, Venezuela, where José Poorschmuck can't get toilet paper but the ruler's daughter is worth billions. Then there is the little matter of over 100 million people killed by communists (more when you add Nazi Germany, which was socialist, a different flavor of the same shit sandwich) in the 20th century.

Another of their problems, I think, is that they look at the welfare/nanny states of Europe and equate them with true socialism. IMO, they are not. They don't try to control everything. And for their governments to provide everything from womb to tomb, they are subjected to a level of taxation that would have us breaking out the pitchforks and torches.

My understanding is that Orwell was pro-socialism until he saw the reality of Stalinist Russia, which inspired Animal Farm. The reality of socialism is that under the guise of serving the people, the gov't serves themselves first and foremost, the people get leftovers, doled out to oppress.

It seems to me that the current Social Justice mantra in public ed today is designed/intended to exalt socialism and demean capitalism (ie, to promote all world cultures as equal or superior to traditional Constitutional America).

quote:

Originally posted by lkdr1989:
In my opinion, these 3 books should be mandatory reading for high schools:

• KOLYMA The Arctic Death Camps - Robert Conquest
  
• The Gulag Archipelago - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
  
• Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar - Simon Sebag Montefiore
  

The problem is half of those students would think they are a blueprint to a utopian society.

quote:

Originally posted by Jim Shugart:
Excellent piece. Unfortunately, the people who most need to read it won't.

Then the best thing to do would be to export them to live in communism for a few years so they can learn first hand.

quote:

Originally posted by mbinky:

The problem is half of those students would think they are a blueprint to a utopian society.

Those people were in the way of creating it, so they had to be sacrificed.

quote:

Originally posted by egregore:

quote:

Originally posted by mbinky:

The problem is half of those students would think they are a blueprint to a utopian society.

Those people were in the way of creating it, so they had to be sacrificed.

But, the Intellectuals were the first to be "rounded up"....oops, sorry College faculty/student.

quote:

Originally posted by BamaJeepster:

Communism cannot be separated from oppression; in fact, it depends upon it. In the communist society, the collective is supreme. Personal autonomy is nonexistent. Human beings are simply cogs in a machine tasked with producing utopia; they have no value of their own.

It's interesting to me that the very generation of people that are so pro-Socialist don't understand that it is the exact opposite of how they were brought up - special snowflakes constantly reassured of their unique individuality and rewarded with trophies for losing. Their desire for a Socialist overthrow only makes sense if we understand that each of them thinks that they will be in a position of power and will be a decider for the rest of society. Thank goodness most Progressives are so obnoxious and obvious. Makes it much easier to avoid or marginalize them.

Oppression, rationing of goods and services, the government owning all property, controlling what you read, hear and learn. Not to mention determining your destiny by assigning you to a job.

They have no clue. Maybe they need to hear firsthand from peoples that escaped from oppressive regimes for the freedom that this country allowed them. But unfortunately they would not believe what they hear.

Seriously, I wonder if their parents were old commune members. And they were fed the happy stories of how everyone worked together for a common goal. Only rational reason for this. Funny thing, nobody that I knew who had parents that fled those "workers paradises" ever wanted to emigrate to those countries.

Sad but true about the opinions of the young. And here we are erasing our history likely dooming us to repeat it. In Nuremberg they take great care of some of the Nazi monuments not because they cherish that time but they want to make sure everybody knows about it so they won't repeat it.

quote:

Originally posted by marksman41:

quote:

Originally posted by BamaJeepster:

Communism cannot be separated from oppression; in fact, it depends upon it. In the communist society, the collective is supreme. Personal autonomy is nonexistent. Human beings are simply cogs in a machine tasked with producing utopia; they have no value of their own.

It's interesting to me that the very generation of people that are so pro-Socialist don't understand that it is the exact opposite of how they were brought up - special snowflakes constantly reassured of their unique individuality and rewarded with trophies for losing. Their desire for a Socialist overthrow only makes sense if we understand that each of them thinks that they will be in a position of power and will be a decider for the rest of society. Thank goodness most Progressives are so obnoxious and obvious. Makes it much easier to avoid or marginalize them.

It is startling that while they have been propagandized to idolize and push towards socialism, little of their conditioning prepares them to actually live under socialism. Since they imagine themselves to be in a position of power and won't, those that are duping them will just "deal" with them when the snowflakes find out the truth.

quote:

Originally posted by pbslinger:
Wisdom and writing ability beyond her years. Communism would be great if people didn't possess corruptibility. They do, so it can't work.

Wrong. Dead wrong. Communism will never work because it runs completely and totally counter to basic human nature. People are hard wired to be 'individual' with individual needs and goals. The collective concept of communism is antithetical to that basic reality.