A century of communism

Daniel Hannan MEP writes:

In 1917, Lenin’s Red Guards stormed the Winter Palace in Petrograd. …

The revolution, in other words, began as it was to continue: with looting. It wasn’t long, though, before the looting turned to bloodshed – bloodshed on an unimaginable, oceanic scale.

Nothing had prepared humanity for so much slaughter. Perhaps ten million indigenous Americans were killed by European pathogens after Columbus. A similar number of people died in the Atlantic slave trade. The Nazis killed 17 million. The Communists killed 100 million – some shot after show trials, some tortured to death, some starved to enforce collectivisation.

Never have so many died for an ideology.

The Communists took over or banned every voluntary association, emptying the civil space that used to exist between state and citizen. When the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party seized power in 1948, for example, Janos Kádar, as Minister of Home Affairs, abolished over 5,000 independent associations: churches, charities, chess clubs, Boy Scout troops, village bands.

If you think the state must be all powerful, then you want to eliminate all other institutions.

How often we see some moral idiot wearing a Che Guevara tee-shirt. We should react as we would to someone wearing an Adolf Hitler or Osama bin Laden tee-shirt; but, in general, we don’t.

I recall the Labour and Green MPs mourning the death of Fidel Castro, despite the murders, executions and torture he oversaw.

There are always ideologues who say they’d be happy to break a few eggs in order to make an omelette. These ideologues need to be refuted with the observable data of the last hundred years. Setting aside the vast fact that human beings are not eggs, there has not been a single case of an omelette actually emerging. Communism leaves us with empty eggshells and empty bellies. Every time. This story shall the good man teach his son.

Communism has failed in literally every country that has tried it.