Today is International Victims of Communism Day.
And we need to really push this one, because it’s direly needed.
In an infamouis 2016 survey of millennials:
- 32% of Millennials thought George Bush killed more people than Stalin
- 42% didn’t know who Mao Zedong was
- 37% thought Lenin was the good guy.
By all rational accounts, Communism has been the greatest human disaster ever to befall mankind. Greater than Naziism, which is the only accessible yardstick. Nothing else in human history is even close.
And yet at any gathering of Millennials, you’ll find a bobblehead in a Che t-shirt, and a few more parroting the Bernie-Bro platitudes that are Communism’s entry level drug.
Maybe it’s time to crowd-source a production of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
See: Dr.R J Rummel at https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM
it provides a lot of breakout comparative information to support the big totals.
Rummel died in 2014 so if this is information you want for reference purposes it would be worthwhile to capture the site – there’s no telling how long the University of Hawaii will keep the site up
It’s a indictment of our education system that this crap has yet to be relegated to the history books: Today’s millenials are too young to remember what the Warsaw Pact nations looked like before Communism fell in Europe. I remember taking a trip to Berlin in the summer of ’92. The Wall was almost completely torn down by that point, but you could still see the economic demarkation between former West and East Berlin.
But since we have a generation that grew up with teachers that either downplayed the negatives or still emphatically maintain that it “just hasn’t been implemented right yet”, we are in for another generation thinking these ideas are new, instead of newly-packaged.
Communism, fascism, pro-abortionism. Just sayin’.
And Lenin wasn’t the bad guy; that was Yoko. Oops, never mind……
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich has been made into a film. A really good one and it is available on YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdkvpopu0kY
The foundation of Marxism was the belief that the engine of history was known, but time and again Marxists have failed at predicting the course of history. The USSR, in particular, produced generations of scholars of history and social dynamics. Their learning was based exclusively on Marxism. Their scholarly interpretations of Marxism were modified, again and again, to include the momentous, world-changing events that Marxist scholars had failed to predict would occur.
In Inferno, Dante described Hell as a place without reason. Damned souls wander aimlessly, and occasionally join groups that form and dissolve randomly. Communist societies are like that. Stalin would uproot whole villages and ethnic groups and move them thousands of miles specifically to make break there sense of order and place.
In Second Hand Time, the Last of the Soviets, Alexievich described a typical scene that demonstrated the squalor and unreason of Communist Russia: one man, and agent of the state, the son of a peasant, tortures another man, an agent of the state, to extract a confession. The men are nearly identical, the same social class, the same level of education, the same loyalty to the state, both had committed the same crimes, if any. The roles of interrogator and prisoner could have been assigned randomly.
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IAN: “It’s a indictment of our education system…”
We need to get people into a system like Tom Wood’s “Liberty Classroom.” There is a similar one called SchoolSucks.com. Prager U, Hillsdale etc. Skip overpaying for the f’ing job signaling of a college degree. Then brush up on our math and statistics. Take a basic accounting class. Your ***return on investment*** will be equal if you get a trade or whatever where there is a skills shortage and society will be less dumb.
It is my opinion that Marxist history–based in the idea of constant class warfare–is not designed to describe history as much as it is to drive history. I’m a fairly avid reader of literature from the 19th century, and while it’s clear that most of the writers are from the upper classes, they also managed to sell millions of books to those of the lower classes. In those books, the lower classes are often pictured as finding a sense of place as they serve those who are more fortunate–and there are news and historians’ accounts of this as well.
So at least among those who felt this way, the Marxist historical narrative is, more or less, attempting to foment hate and resentment where none previously existed. Thankfully, they’ve often failed.
Bikebubba-
Have you read Larks Rise to Candleford? The BBC series was awful, it didn’t match the narrative of the books at all.
The books are basically a memoir of growing up in rural England in the last few decades of the 19th century. The narrator (Flora Thompson) is almost invisible. It’s as much of an anthropological study as it is a memoir. Thompson clearly describes village life: how people lived, what their houses were like, how much they were paid, how they dealt with marriage and child birth, even how people set up their outhouses.
I couldn’t watch the series.
In the books Thompson described the working class people as quite prudish. They hid pregnancy from children and certainly never discussed sex. When the mother got close to her time, the parents would farm the other kids out to relatives so they wouldn’t be home when the event occurred. They didn’t want them to know anything about childbirth, I believe Thompson mentions that she didn’t even understand why her parents sent her to stay with relatives for a few weeks.
In the TV series they show the new mother surrounded by family and children when she gives birth.
Cringeworthy.
To the ignorant that worship STATISM is to wish your own demise! The willful taking from someone might seem acceptable until that someone is you!!
Lavrentiy Beria, the man who would have succeeded Stalin if Khrushchev hadn’t deposed him:
However, in 2003 his cases’ files in the Soviet archives were opened. They recorded he had committed “dozens” of sexual assaults during the years he was NKVD chief. Simon Sebag-Montefiore, a biographer of Stalin, concluded the information “reveals a sexual predator who used his power to indulge himself in obsessive depravity.”[42]
The records contained the official testimony from Colonel R.S. Sarkisov and Colonel V. Nadaraia, two of Beria’s most senior NKVD bodyguards. They stated that on warm nights during the war years, Beria was often driven slowly through the streets of Moscow in his armored Packard limousine. He would point out young women to be detained and escorted to his mansion where wine and a feast awaited them. After dining, Beria would take the women into his soundproofed office and rape them. Beria’s bodyguards reported that their orders included handing each victim a flower bouquet as she left Beria’s house. The implication being that to accept made it consensual; refusal would mean arrest. In one incident his chief bodyguard, Sarkisov, reported that a woman who had been brought to Beria rejected his advances and ran out of his office; Sarkisov mistakenly handed her the flowers anyway prompting the enraged Beria to declare “Now it’s not a bouquet, it’s a wreath! May it rot on your grave!” The woman was arrested by the NKVD the next day.[42]
Women also submitted to Beria’s sexual advances in exchange for the promise of freeing their relatives from the Gulag. In one case, Beria picked up Tatiana Okunevskaya – a well-known Soviet actress – under the pretence of bringing her to perform for the Politburo. Instead he took her to his dacha where he offered to free her father and grandmother from NKVD prison if she submitted. He then raped her telling her “scream or not, it doesn’t matter.”[43] Yet Beria already knew her relatives had been executed months earlier. Okunevskaya was arrested shortly afterwards and sentenced to solitary confinement in the Gulag from which she survived.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavrentiy_Beria
I know, Wikipedia, but the reference is to Seberg-Montefiore, a noted historian of Russia (I’ve read his book on the Romanovs).
The Wikipedia entry does not describe the full depth of the sadism and cruelty of Beria.
MP: never read it. I’d always wondered how a degree of propriety was kept in those one room farmhouses, and assumed that their assumptions of privacy were quite different than ours–that kids would have been in the room when their brothers and sisters were conceived, born, nursed, bathed, etc.. Maybe they had some workarounds, as you hint, but I’d still have to guess there were some things going on.
The point on Beria is also well taken–on another site, I’ve been discussing the nudity of Schindler’s List, and one of the most striking things about it is that the mistress scenes illustrate a man whose idea of afterglow is killing innocent people. We need to remember how the total state gives power to psychopaths to assume positions of great power.
We need to remember how the total state gives power to psychopaths to assume positions of great power.
Che anyone?
JPA: the list would be pretty long, don’t you think, if we chose to compile it? (sigh)
@TheFedSucks: Agreed. As a holder of a B.S., I’ve observed at least a couple of PhDs who made me question the worth of their diplomas. Mike Rowe has some inspiring things to say about the courage of not going the college route. I’m fortunate that I went to a smaller college and pursued a degree that stressed the hard sciences and kept the fluff to a tolerable minimum. I’ve put my degree to good use my entire career, but I know others who’ve been less successful: The world only needs so many liberal arts majors when compared with STEM degrees. Should my children want to pursue careers as tradesmen, I will wholehartedly support their decision.
And teaching STEM more at the high-school level would also benefit everybody. Three-fourths of my high school was overseas, and I felt I was more than prepared for my freshman year of college: When my roommates struggled with things like differential equations, I had 2 years of experience with them already.
An Article from The Atlantic that’s actually interesting:
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/05/late-capitalism/524943/
It is about the history and current us of the term “late capitalism.” The author notes that the term comes not from Marx, but from Marxists. She actually is smart and direct enough to note that Marxists have always used the term to describe contemporary capitalism. There is some “crankiness” involved: Marxists seem to identify any feature of contemporary culture and economics they disapprove of as being a feature of “late capitalism”:
He told me he saw late capitalism as kicking into gear in the Thatcher and Reagan years, and persisting until today. “It has come out much more fully to the surface of things,” he said, citing the flash crash, derivatives, and “all this consumption by mail.”
and
“It’s Trump. It’s Brexit. It’s whatever is going on in France. Why talk about capitalism when nothing seems to be shaken up? But now things are shaken up. Let’s allude to the big, giant, totalistic system that is underneath everything. And let’s give it more than a hint of foreboding. Late capitalism. Late is so pregnant.”
When I read something like this, I can’t help but wonder why the Left is compelled to inflict their alienation and neuroses on the rest of us. The last quote is onto something. “late stage capitalism” implies that it is about to end, and be replaced by whatever. Some system not based on people owning their labor, I suppose. Like slavery.
I disagree with the author’s premise, BTW. Marx wrote quite a bit about the “end of capitalism.” The need for economic growth when resources became exhausted were supposed to lead to wide spread war, and more misery for the workers (of course!). Marx also went on about decade long economic cycles that he imagined. It all sounds very odd, like prophecies from the Knights Templar or some of the crazier Jehovah’s Witnesses Watchtower stuff.