How will you spend your Thanksgiving break?
Communist revolutionary Raymond Lotta may have a point — everything we've been told about communism is wrong.
Except Lotta and his cabal believe Marxist revolutions humanely emancipated the masses and can do so again in the U.S. with the "firm grip" of a new socialist revolutionary.
Such thinking is antithetical to actual history. Communism as a form of governance, despite whatever affinity liberal professors and students may have for this utopia of collectivism, is worse than anything conceived in our worst nightmares.
Allow me to debunk three of the many incorrect claims made by Lotta at his speech at the Cantor Film Center Monday evening.
1. "(Communism) is a liberating experience."
I suppose Lotta's definition of "liberating" includes no free press, merciless suppression of dissent, indefinite internment in gulags, forced collectivization of peasantry property, the starvation of millions induced from food rationing, and pogroms throughout Poland. This concept of communist liberation is a sick joke to victims of the Stalin and Mao regimes, under which approximately 20 million and 40 million perished, respectively.
2. "Communism made extraordinary strides in equality."
This is totally bogus. As soon as the Bolsheviks hijacked power, they were unapologetic and merciless in their use of terror, irrespective of one's position in society. Take, for example, the mass executions of Cossacks, an ethnic group that benefited from its favorable political status under the former tsarist government. Between 1919 and 1920, about half a million Cossacks were either killed or deported after the region's Bolshevik president called for an indiscriminate policy of mass extermination. This single episode is one of many mass murders executed under the guidance of Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, who were together responsible for more deaths than Hitler.
3. "Religion is a great shackle and chain around the masses of people."
This lie is unsurprising; communism is inherently anti-religious. The three main monotheistic religions — Christianity, Judaism and Islam — teach worshipers that individual rights come from their Creator. This is a clear threat to communism's atheistic world view that humans are mere protoplasm, subject to the decrees of dictators and the caprices of commissars. Religion, in actuality, liberates humanity with the knowledge that individual sovereignty is a self-evident truth, which Thomas Jefferson kindly reminded us of when he said, "God who gave us life gave us liberty."
About two weeks from now the world will celebrate the 20th anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union. However uplifting the fall of the Berlin Wall may feel in our hearts, the fact our society still has to debate the merits of communism is discouraging.
For some reason, we either ignore or forget the sinister elements of communism — the gulags, mass executions and collectivization techniques — and focus instead on the false nobility of communist revolutionaries. They want to cure the natural inequities of capitalism, so we are told, to revolutionize and change the world and free societies of exploitation and poverty. They will deny themselves all earthly comforts to attain these desired ends, but they do so through the most sinister of means.
These utopian fantasies, in turn, make malleable minds desirous for revolutionary causes or at least neglectful of communism's very real horrors.
