As widespread violence broke out following the death of George Floyd, and we became aware of the embedded ideology of the suddenly ascendant Black Lives Matter movement, one would have thought that the public’s virtue-signaling affection for the group would be short-lived at best.
After all, when the co-founders of an organization describe themselves plainly and unapologetically as “trained Marxists,” a red alert should immediately be triggered in the minds of all decent people. The idea of this inhuman ideology rearing its head afresh calls forth memories we all thought were buried deep inside us of the living hell rained down on a succession of great nations in the 20th century by murderous Marxist tyrants. This should do more than just serve as a warning to us all. It should send chills up and down the spine.
And it certainly does among the survivors of these large-scale atrocities, those who have lived to tell of death camps, forced labor, secret police – of unending hunger and poverty and unbridled corruption – the very destruction of culture, history, and a way of life. Ask those who escaped the jackboots of Fidel Castro, Nicolas Maduro, or Kim Jong-un, and read the accounts of those who fell victim to Josef Stalin’s reign of terror, Mao Zedong’s mass starvation, or Pol Pot’s killing fields.
Living under Marxism is undoubtedly the experience on Earth most closely resembling Dante’s Inferno. Why do you think the fall of the Berlin Wall 31 years ago triggered perhaps the most joyous worldwide celebration in our lifetime? And why do you think the Soviet Union simply dissolved itself and ceased to exist shortly thereafter? The world well recognized the consequences of ever letting such totalitarian tyranny rise again.
But sure enough, this plague on the planet has risen afresh. And we can thank the savage criminals intercepting the Floyd outrage and converting it to open insurrection in the streets and the complicity of a scandalously incurious media that elevated every BLM talking point to the level of pure virtue while ignoring their frightening beliefs.
How can this possibly be? It was one thing to support the concept of Marxism-socialism when it was first introduced into Soviet Russia, but we now have more than 100 years of historical evidence demonstrating the inarguable evil of a system aimed at crushing the very essence of a nation’s soul.
Well, as frightening, unprecedented, and incomprehensible as Marxism’s rise from the ash heap appears, a look back at the history of the last three centuries reveals the fundamental truth revealed by the wise King Solomon in Ecclesiastes: There is nothing new under the sun.
Call it the 50-year itch. Every half-century, give or take, revolutionary fervor rises and threatens to violently overthrow an existing order. It seems not to matter whether the results of similar uprisings in the distant past had failed or been disastrous.
If you rewind about half a century from this moment, you get to 1968, when an anti-American and race-fueled rebellion led to rampant violence in the midst of the Vietnam War, and following the twin assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. Everything we thought sacred was challenged as never before.
Go back another 50 years, and in the heat of World War 1, you find the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, when Marxist-Leninist rebels removed and executed the Czar of Russia and installed the first communist government in world history. More than 100 million would die during the 70 years of a Soviet tyranny, which spread its tentacles across the entire eastern bloc of Europe and emboldened radicals in our own land. The reverberations of that revolution have echoed down through the years to the BLM movement of today.
We have all learned about the rebellion, which happened half a century before the rise of communism: America’s Civil War, which finally secured the Union in 1865 at the cost of more than one million lives.
Many will forget, or have overlooked, the grave threat posed to this union 50 years before the Civil War: The War of 1812, when the British attempted to take back what they had lost in the American Revolution. The Brits had the better of it for a while, burning down the White House (then called the Presidential Mansion) and driving inland before finally succumbing and signing a peace treaty with their former colonial subjects in 1814.
Finally, it was a half-century previous to that war when the fuse of colonial rebellion against the British crown was lit. Rioters protesting the Stamp Act in 1765 set the stage for a bloody war years later that won America’s independence.
Call it coincidence if you will, but an undeniable, every-half-century pattern of revolution fills the books of modern world history. This may provide little more than cold comfort to those shaken by the present progressive movement to destroy the heart of America. But it does prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the impulse to rebel against perceived injustice in the existing order is endemic to the human species. And most importantly, it provides hope for the future, for we have demonstrated through radical uprisings, secession, assassinations, world wars, and attacks on our homeland, that we shall survive the existential threat before us today.
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