Opinion Forum

Never Forget

January 21st, 2010

In my last post I pointed out that socialism, along with its brother doctrines of fascism and communism, have killed too many people in too many revolutionary seas of blood to be regarded as anything but pure, naked evil. Unfortunately, with the notable exception of the Holocaust, a lot of this past has been sanitized or outright omitted from the history textbooks. For example, nearly everybody can name the number of Jews murdered in WWII, but how many people can name the amount of people killed by the Soviet Union? (Answer: 20 million.) By the famines in the Ukraine? (Answer: 2 million.) By the Mao’s Cultural Revolution in the 50s and 60s? (Answer: 65 million.) By Pol Pot in Cambodia in the 70s? (Answer: 2 million.) By Kim Jung Il in North Korea in the 90s? (Answer: 2 million.) For that matter, how many of you were even fully aware that all of these deaths had happened? Because if you’re anything at all like I was six months ago, you probably weren’t able to name them all off the top of your head.

Tomorrow night at 5:00 pm EST there is going to be a documentary on the Glenn Beck program. It is called “Live Free… or Die” and I am asking you to watch it because, unless you are already an expert on Eastern European and Asian 20th century history, chances are you will have something to learn.

Perhaps some of you will think that I am being silly or exaggerating, or that Glenn Beck is being silly or exaggerating. Perhaps they will accuse his title of being “extremist” or “fear-mongering,” or say that Che and Stalin have nothing to do with America today. But the simple truth of the matter is that the title of Beck’s documentary is not any sort of exaggeration, merely a succinct summation of a simple, historical fact. At the core of every person’s life is a single choice: freedom, or dependency. At the core of every nation’s existence is a single choice: individualism, or collectivism. America chose freedom and individualism, and it became the greatest nation in the history of the world; these countries chose dependency and collectivism, and they became home to death camps and mass graves.

I am putting this up today as advertising, but I will put up the links tomorrow for those who cannot watch this live. You are of course free to think whatever you like after you have watched it… but you will not be free to claim innocence from the consequence of your ideas. Or in other words:

Some might think — though I don’t — that nine years ago there was some excuse for men not to see the direction in which the world was going. Today, the evidence is so blatant that no excuse can be claimed by anyone any longer. Those who refuse to see it now are neither blind nor innocent.

The greatest guilt today is that of people who accept collectivism by moral default; the people who seek protection from the necessity of taking a stand, by refusing to admit to themselves the nature of that which they are accepting; the people who support plans specifically designed to achieve serfdom, but hide behind the empty assertion that they are lovers of freedom, with no concrete meaning attached to the word; the people who believe that the content of ideas need not be examined, that principles need not be defined, and that facts can be eliminated by keeping one’s eyes shut. They expect, when they find themselves in a world of bloody ruins and concentration camps, to escape moral responsibility by wailing: “But I didn’t mean this!”

Those who want slavery should have the grace to name it by its proper name. They must face the full meaning of that which they are advocating or condoning; the full, exact, specific meaning of collectivism, of its logical implications, of the principles upon which it is based, and of the ultimate consequences to which these principles will lead.

They must face it, then decide whether this is what they want or not.

Ayn Rand, April 1946

Articles written by Brianna Aubin
Tags: collectivism, freedom, Glenn Beck, Holocaust, mass murder, socialism
Categories: History, News, Politics | Comments (3) | Home

3 Responses to “Never Forget”

Brian | January 22nd, 2010 at 6:03 pm

I wasn’t aware of the numbers in Korea, but I was with the rest. The Ukrainians, by the way, claim the famine of 1932-33 killed nearly 10 million while the Russians claim around 2 or 3 million.

Also, I think the USSR number of 20 million is probably low-ball.

During the Cultural Revolution in China, many of those executed were thrown, not in mass graves (which might have been an improvement) but were pitched in warehouses to rot so that flies might have fertile homes for their offspring so that chickens might have something on which to feed (maggots). Worse still is that the number of people murdered in China probably ignores the Mongolians and Tibetans that were murdered by the Chinese.

Pol Pot not only murdered the educated (doctors, teachers, etc), he murdered people that wore glasses because they merely looked educated.

One more tidbit. Everybody knows the Holocaust figure when it comes to Jews, but it has been fairly well established that Hitler murdered nearly 6 million non-Jews (incl. Christians, Gypsies, the disabled, etc).

Brianna | January 22nd, 2010 at 9:59 pm

Brian – I was sticking to the Soviet Union proper, and the numbers listed in the Black Book of Communism. I know that Hitler killed a lot of others in the camps as well, but kept to the Jews because it is the Jews that everybody learns about in school. That others besides the Jews died in the camps rarely rates more than a brief mention from most “educrats”.

Brianna | January 23rd, 2010 at 2:43 pm

Brian – I take it back; you were right, the Ukranian estimate was lowball. Don’t know whether I was looking at the wrong figues, made a typo, or what. Anyway, the right answer (according to The Black Book of Communism) is 6 million.