My only criticism of this article is that it leaves out the massive democide by the ChiComs. Rummel puts the number killed in that one at over 76 millions, more than the Soviet Communists managed, and many more than the Nazis.
http://hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM
Knowledge of the utopian democides of the 20th Century is why I will always own military-style firearms. Only ignorant idiots think “it can’t happen here”. Nothing about human nature has changed.
I’ll close with two quotes from my FR profile page that are applicable here:
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - The Gulag Archipelago
Although our modern socialists’ promise of greater freedom is genuine and sincere, in recent years observer after observer has been impressed by the unforeseen consequences of socialism, the extraordinary similarity in many respects of the conditions under “communism” and “fascism.” As the writer Peter Drucker expressed it in 1939, “the complete collapse of the belief in the attainability of freedom and equality through Marxism has forced Russia to travel the same road toward a totalitarian society of un-freedom and inequality which Germany has been following. Not that communism and fascism are essentially the same. Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion, and it has proved as much an illusion in Russia as in pre-Hitler Germany.”
No less significant is the intellectual outlook of the rank and file in the communist and fascist movements in Germany before 1933. The relative ease with which a young communist could be converted into a Nazi or vice versa was well known, best of all to the propagandists of the two parties. The communists and Nazis clashed more frequently with each other than with other parties simply because they competed for the same type of mind and reserved for each other the hatred of the heretic. Their practice showed how closely they are related. To both, the real enemy, the man with whom they had nothing in common, was the liberal of the old type. While to the Nazi the communist and to the communist the Nazi, and to both the socialist, are potential recruits made of the right timber, they both know that there can be no compromise between them and those who really believe in individual freedom.
— F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
Two points from that. First, the Nazis and the Communists didn’t have a nickel’s difference between them, just to spell it out, and I believe the horror of both should be remembered at the same time. Second, our modern socialists are taking us down a path that leads inexorably to a modern Gulag - if we let them.
Second, our modern socialists are taking us down a path that leads inexorably to a modern Gulag - if we let them.
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Every American who sends their children into the government’s K-12 socialist-entitlement, single-payer, and GODLESS indoctrination camps ( misnamed “schools”) is “letting them”.
Every citizen who agree to work for, establish, and uphold these government K-12 GODLESS indoctrination camps is “letting them”.
This is a memorable passage from the Archipelago for me as well. However, there needs to be a corrective or two.
The Russians did fight for freedom in 1918 and all the way through mid-20s. The Tambov Rebellion, for example, was a massive farmer revolt; the first time a government used weapons of mass destruction, -- chemical weapons, -- on its own citizens. People were marching against NKVD's machine guns carrying icons. When Hitler invaded in 1941, people were greeting the Germans as liberators, and thousands joined the Wehrmacht, because they saw a chance to liberate their fatherland. It wasn't for the lack of resistance that the Soviets prevailed.
The popular mind associates the Stalinist terror with the purges of the Communist cadre in 1930's. But a brutal war has been waged by the Soviet system on the Russian people for longer than a decade prior to that, and many fought back, howbeit desperately. It is the commies, hunted down like rats by their fellow commies that hunkered down waiting to get shot.