Below is a Letter to the Editor of a small regional paper out west I wrote this morning. The article that inspired it is here (& below) and is highly recommended.
The opinion piece on the “Black Book of Communism” was one of only SIX Google produced under “news” in a search for that book in quotes.
I can’t thank you and the writer enough for publishing it. It’s URGENT that we understand the EXISTENTIAL THREAT of BIG GOVERNMENT no matter WHAT “flavor” it comes in NO MATTER HOW GOOD THE INTENTIONS.
If you read the old Soviet constitutions, or even China’s today, it reads GREAT, but when you fundamentally change the relationship between the citizen and their government from one of “negative” rights – which is what we have, in short, the right to be left alone, to “positive” rights, where the gov’t gives you everything (you think) you want, PEOPLE DIE EVERY TIME. Human nature will NOT ALLOW ANY OTHER OUTCOME.
For crying out loud! We’ve seen the human rights abuses and atrocities RIGHT HERE and RECENTLY as 80 years ago when FDR rounded up the Japanese. This was the same period “eugenics” became fashionable and Hitler took notice… and what happened?
There are TOO MANY EXAMPLES of HORROR for our children to not understand – VISCERALLY – that there is a DIRECT, INVERSE relationship between the largeness of the central gov’t and the smallness of individual liberty.
THANK YOU.
Annie Fields
www.saltusa.com
One of the last standing conservatives left in Massachusetts!
Here is the article from The Spectrum:
Communism Has Killed Millions
In December, I wrote about the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which came – oh so appropriately – on Christmas Day in 1991. My take on the event was that it was a great blessing for the world. And so it was. The fall of global communism’s central pillar was one of the most momentous, positive and far-reaching geo-political changes in history. We’ve largely forgotten how menacing and lethal the threat of communism really was.
A number of books and articles have been published in recent years, cataloguing the staggering loss of life that can be credited to communism’s depredations worldwide. They don’t get much attention in the mainstream, but their thesis has slowly worked into the popular consciousness. Somebody even came up with a silkscreen that reads, “Communism killed 100 million people, and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.” Underneath, it has the infamous portrait of Che Guevarra, the revolutionary “people’s hero” and killer.
Gotta get me one of those.
The most well-known of these books is “The Black Book of Communism,” by French historian Stephane Courtois and several other writers. In essence, Courtois and his team detail and methodically explain their death toll estimates for the global holocaust wrought by Marxist/Leninist ideology. Here’s their list, starting with the smaller atrocities and working up. It adds up to just shy of 100 million lost souls.
10,000 killed by Communist parties not in power – i.e. revolutionaries and guerrillas and the international communist movement.
150,000 dead in Cuba (including 14,000 executions directed by leftist icon Che Guevara), Nicaragua, Chile and other Latin American countries.
1 million lost in Vietnam. These aren’t war dead, but those killed by Ho Chi Minh in the Communist north, and later in South Vietnam when the United States pulled out and the North invaded.
1 million killed in Eastern Europe, where the “iron curtain” first went up and resistance was crushed repeatedly in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland and anywhere Soviet puppets ruled.
1.5 million destroyed in Afghanistan. The press loves to lament accidental Afghan casualties today, but Soviet troops massacred Afghans wholesale.
1.7 million wiped out in Africa by various Soviet- and Chinese-backed regimes.
2 million murdered in North Korea, in death camps and through regime-caused starva- tion.
2 million butchered in the killing fields of Cambodia at the hands of the Khmer Rough, Maoist/Communist extremists trying to turn time back to “year zero.”
20 million annihilated and intentionally starved by Bolsheviks, Marxists, Leninists and Stalinists as they set up and ruled the supposed “worker’s paradise” of the USSR.
65 million wasted in the People’s Republic of China. Like Stalin, Mao and other Chinese communists used famine as a weapon. The “Great Leap Forward” and the “Cultural Revolution” were history’s greatest atrocities, carried out by a corrupt and evil ideology.
Tad Trueblood has more than 20 years experience in the U.S. Air Force and national security community.
