Call it what you want: communism, socialism, democratic socialism, progressivism. Distinguishing among the various strains of far-left extremism is merely a matter of posturing and splitting hairs. These descriptors all fit neatly under the common umbrella of collectivism, meaning the superiority of the state over the individual. What matters is not how these extremists label themselves, but rather the genuinely radical agenda about which they all essentially agree. Put simply, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and those who embrace their ideas seek to deconstruct our constitutional republic brick by brick.
The challenge in pinning down exactly what socialism is and has been over more than a century is whether to start with its horrifying history or its current portfolio of radioactive policy proposals. The latest doozies came at the socialist convention over the weekend in Chicago, where new expressions such as “body fascism” and “health fascism” were introduced into the political lexicon, decrying the call to eat healthy and exercise, of all things. And of course, thinly veiled antisemitism continues to course through their veins.
But we digress. In the rush to condemn the preposterous ideas currently being peddled by American socialists, it is no longer particularly useful to issue blanket condemnations of socialism without providing enough specific historical information or knowledge base to the untold millions of Americans who are ignorant about the true nature of socialism. Those under 40 years old never lived through the Cold War or the global threat posed by communism and, by most accounts, are barely taught about Soviet, Chinese, Cuban, North Korean, Venezuelan, or Cambodian totalitarianism in American schools.
The history of socialist states stretches back more than a century, 110 years to be precise, to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution that transformed Czarist Russia into the Soviet Union. The Soviets would ultimately overrun and install puppet governments throughout Eastern Europe, expanding their tyranny into an empire. One useful way to tie the past to the present is to consider the lament of longtime KGB operative and current Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, who continues to commit unspeakable crimes against humanity in Ukraine as he drives Russia into the ditch with a disastrously failed war. Putin once called the collapse and dissolution of the Soviet Union "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century." Once a communist, always a communist, one supposes.
The Chilling Historical Reality of Socialism
We don’t have nearly enough time for a comprehensive recitation of socialist-communist horrors, but just a few appalling documented facts should prove sufficiently enlightening to those who are either too young or too ignorant of history to comprehend what life was like under communism. What follows is not for the faint of heart but is necessary for rising generations to understand about the real history of socialism and communism.
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Since, as now seems particularly relevant, those who ignore history are bound to repeat it, let’s start with ground zero, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, which led to the ascension of Joseph Stalin. Stalin's forced collectivization of agriculture led to the deaths of an estimated 3.5 million to 5 million Ukrainians. In Stalin’s campaign of political repression, close to 1 million people were summarily executed by the Soviet secret police. The total death toll under Stalin’s reign of terror has been estimated at the jaw-dropping total of between 20 million and 25 million souls.
In China, Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward began in 1958, aimed at turning the country from an agrarian economy into a communist society. It triggered the Great Chinese Famine and a death toll of between 30 million and 45 million people. Mao’s Cultural Revolution led to widespread massacres, public humiliations, and systematic destruction of Chinese cultural heritage.
In Cuba, immediately upon overthrowing the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in 1959, Fidel Castro ordered the execution of thousands of former officials, dissidents, and political opponents by firing squad. The regime instituted “re-education” camps that imprisoned political dissidents, religious citizens, and homosexuals, among others. The totalitarian oppression forced more than 1 million Cubans to flee at any cost, with thousands drowning in the shark-infested waters of the Florida Straits on makeshift rafts.
In what became the most shamefully overlooked genocide in modern history, Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge seized power and sought to turn Cambodia back into a primitive agrarian country. Millions were forced at gunpoint into the countryside to perform back-breaking labor, thousands dying on the marches. As documented in the film The Killing Fields, the regime systematically executed anyone suspected of ties to the former government, ethnic minorities, religious leaders, and intellectuals, including people who simply wore glasses or spoke a foreign language. Victims were beaten to death or executed at mass gravesites.
The human cost across just these four socialist-Communist totalitarian regimes totaled tens of millions of lives. This is not propaganda but scrupulously compiled evidence over decades. And this is before we consider the likes of Kim Jong Un in North Korea or Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, who until his arrest had taken a prosperous country with the world’s greatest oil reserves and bankrupted it while commanding a global drug trade that led to untold thousands of deaths. And, of course, it goes without saying that these one-party totalitarian regimes share many common characteristics. Free speech, freedom of worship, a free press, opposition parties, the right to dissent do not exist. The all-powerful atheist state replaces God.
The Laughably Lame Defense of Socialism
Socialists have offered but a single lame defense of their record of failure, death, and misery over the last 110 years. You will hear many of them claim that “real socialism has never been tried.” Right, we are supposed to embrace the idea that every collectivist regime — Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, Kim Jong-un’s North Korea, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Castro’s Cuba, or all the once-enslaved countries behind the Iron Curtain — simply suffered from incompetent governance. In other words, collectivism was just improperly implemented or it would have been a smashing success, true to the doctrines of Vladimir Lenin, who, it should be noted, was clear that socialism was designed as merely a step toward full-on communism, proclaiming that "the goal of socialism is communism"
The best way to predict how someone will behave in the future is to simply examine how he or she behaved in the past. Anyone absorbing the bone-chilling reality of socialism and communism described herein should now understand that collectivism can never be allowed to flourish in a free country. We have seen how it has destroyed everything in its path, and yet it has arisen afresh as a moving force within one of America’s two major political parties. It should remind us of just how fragile a democracy can be. The late Rep. Tom Lantos, co-founder of the DC-based Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and Museum, issued a message we would all be wise to heed: “The veneer of civilization is paper thin. We are its guardians, and we can never rest.”
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