The Sheila Variations

[sigh] I like to pretend to be an expert on these things, but you outscored me. It's horrifically wrong, isn't it? Not that you outscored me, I mean, just that it's so hard to even crack 50%.

Some time ago I read a book called The Black Book of Communism, from cover to cover.

I used to say things like, "true Communism has never been tried" and "their system has many advantages over ours."

I really used to say things like that. I used to mean it, too. I thought it made me smarter than other people, in fact.

If you don't mind my mentioning, I've written and/or published a few things on this subject:

Marx's Children

Famine, Lies, and Justice

The Legacy of Karl Marx

Quote from one of the above articles:

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"...They hacked Liu's hair, put dirt into her mouth, and beat her. [She] was forced to crawl on the playground and repeatedly say: 'I am Liu Meide. I am a poisonous snake.' ...After a journalist of the Beijing Daily took a photograph, the student kicked Liu from the table to the ground. Liu was pregnant at that time. Her baby died from prenatal injuries soon after the birth."

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The above happened the same year I was born, by the way. It's not fictional. It's but one small episode from a time period wherein several million people were executed.

And so I repeat this painful truth:

I used to apologize for these people.

I did. I really meant it, too.

Because I thought I knew what I was talking about.

You know what, Dean? There's something in me that still, to this day, feels something like - unbelief when faced with all of this.

The numbers astound. The quiz really gets at that, I think. 6 million people killed in the German holocaust - That number seems large enough, but it is miniscule compared to Communism.

You think that the numbers of people who died in the choices (in the quiz) are WAY too high - because, after all, who the hell can comprehend the deaths of 30 million people? I even struggle with comprehending what 6 million means, with the Nazi holocaust).

I just ... throw up my hands in incomprehension.

I can KNOW certain things, I can know it with my mind - but I cannot understand.

Oh, and thanks for the links - I'll check them out.

The numbers are difficult to grasp, but grasp them we should. When the numbers become real, and the stark, cold apparatus that wrought such mind-numbing numbers is exposed, then others might have the same change in understanding that Dean describes. Thank you both for contributing to that educational change.

Mind-numbing. Orwell couldn't have said it better.

What truly numbs the mind, and turns the stomach, is that so much of this is, to so many, completely unknown: not even forgotten or glossed over, but simply so absent from whatever passes for a "typical" knowledge of history that it might as well have taken place on another planet.

It is commonplace, bordering on cliched, and certainly has become quite easy, to think of the Holocaust as a singularly unique act of supreme evil, but it's more accurate, honest, and frightening to recognize that it was not truly so unusual in a century whose most distinguishing feature was systematic murder on a truly incomprehensible scale.

I'm only intermediate, I'm ashamed.

Where are the gaps in your knowledge, Bill?

Mine are the intricacies of Mao's regime.

(Or - that's one of the gaps revealed in this particular quiz. I have many more gaps, of course. I can't speak Aramaic. I have no understanding of how to build a suspension bridge. I know nothing about the history of Iceland. That's a gap. I couldn't sit down and knit a sweater.)

Mostly in Lenin and post-Stalin Soviet communism, I seem to know the most about Stalin's era. I seem to have a general knowledge for Korea, Cambodia, China, and Vietnam. I said it once before, I've spent most of my time reading American history. This is something I should know more about.

You don't speak Aramaic? I was hoping you'd be the one to provide the running translation of "The Passion".

Dave J:

It is horrendous that this is not known, by the general public.

There's no excuse for not knowing, really. Not in a democratic society with free exchange of information. But - I don't remember being taught about all of this in school. The Russian Revolution, maybe - but not the horrors of the 1930s.

I got interested in that all on my own.

But it's all there - the information is all there - it's no secret.

You inspired me to edit and re-post one of my old messages. You redheaded demon, you.

The Legacy of Karl Marx.

Just remember my friend: "True communism has never been tried."

Uh-huh.

Dean, and to that I say: THANK GOD.

That was a really hard test - I, too, did a lot better on the Soviets than the Chinese. Mao's various campaigns to destroy his population confused me with their bizarre names - I tended to lump it all under the Cultural Revolution. Also some of those questions were pretty darned nit-noid - "how many delegates to the '34 party congress had Stalin arrested by '39?" I knew it is was a majority, but could not have told you "1108".

But the point is that Communism was, by a couple of orders of magnitude, the worst crime of the 20th century, and even today, most people would say that Hitler was the worst. But it's better now than in the '80s, when the truth of Soviet genocide was still actively disputed on college campuses in the US.I remember being raked over the coals by leftie professors for citing Robert Conquest. Now we know Conquest UNDERESTIMATED the crimes of the Soviets - he even went back and revised his previous accounting UPWARDS.

So Dean - what happened to make you change your mind? Was it a book? Or ... Why the ideological transformation?

Well, while I'd like to tell you there was some dramatic event that caused the change, but it wasn't. It was a sort of gradual thing, mostly. Part of it was that I became self-employed, and did that for a number of years, and started to realize as a result that there's not much in this world that anyone can do for you unless they have power, and you have to give someone power in order to let them do things for you.

If that makes any sense? I'm not sure.

Then there was learning about the Berlin Wall. I for a while bought into the fact that it was a "defensive" wall, until I started to see documentaries and read about it, and I had to ask myself: "If their system is so great, why are they shooting people in the back for trying to escape?"

Last week I was in Grand Rapids for a wedding, and by coincidence the Gerald Ford Museum was across the street from our hotel. President Ford was a congressman from that area, and that's where he still lives. So being a history geek I went to check it out. Not that he was all that amazing a Presidenet, but what the hell, it was right across the street. There was a huge slab from the Berlin Wall there in the lobby. It was concrete, with metal wires and rocks embedded in it. On one side were some black painted-on numbers. On the other, wildly colorful graffiti. It was obvious by this alone which side had faced West, and which East. I remember reaching up to touch it, feeling the cold concrete reality of it, and my soul thrummed a little.

I used to apologize for these people. I felt a little ashamed, and a little proud. My country, my Presidents, helped tear down this wall.

Like you, I enjoy history. I've read any number of books, and magazine articles, on this subject over the last 15 years. But about a year and a half ago, I picked up a copy of "The Black Book of Communism," and read it from cover to cover. Reading it was sort of the breaking point for me. I mean, by then I'd already decided I had been wrong, that Communism was by its very nature an impossible system, one that could only oppress people if it were ever to work. So I already knew I was wrong, that I'd been foolish, that it was a good thing the Soviet Union was gone. But I don't know if I can describe what it was like reading this book anyway. It was, and is, the only work which attempts to simply list all the crimes of Communism in one place. The crimes of every regime are listed there, the big ones and the little ones: the Soviet Union, Poland, China, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Cuba, Chile, Peru... everywhere where Communists had an influence, big or small.

It was gripping, and it was hard, and I made myself read every page of it. I felt like a puppy getting his nose rubbed in a pile of shit. Often I just sat and read. Sometimes, my hands shook. A few times, I cried. And I can only tell you my conclusion:

I hate these people. And if you don't, there's something wrong with you.

Is the "you" in your last sentence addressed to me? Or is it a generalized "you"? I think I've made it clear my feelings about Communism and Communists!

The image you give of the two sides of the Berlin Wall says it all. God. Unbelievable. That we should see the edifice crumble in our lifetime as well...I can't remember anything so exciting, so MIND-blowing (in my own lifetime, that is), as the years of 1988 to 1991. I would watch the news, with my jaw dropped. People hacking at the wall with hammers, David Hasselhof playing a guitar on top of the wall (such a strange image!!).

Shhh, don't mention David Hasselhoff, red. They might be moved to build a new wall!

My quiz performance was woeful. I knew the broadest outlines of events in Soviet and Chinese Communism, but not most of the details. I agree that we need to do a much better job of teaching this history in our schools. I'm not sure I ever had any classes that even touched upon Russian or Chinese history - certainly none in high school.

In terms of the Communism vs. Fascism debate, my feeling is that murder and rule by the incitement of fear are simply the basic tools used by any totalitarian regime of any political persuasion. Hitler certainly would have killed a great many more people before he was done, if we hadn't stopped him...

For some bizarre reason, though - even though I know Baywatch is cheesy and all that - the footage of David Hasselhof playing on top of the wall to a bunch of shrieking German teenagers - gives me chills. I don't care WHO he is, and I don't care how cheesy Baywatch might be - he was representing US.

Oh - and I pretty much only had US history in high school. Which only vaguely touched on Soviet Russia, because of World War II.

But from reading 1984 when I was 15 years old - I had a horror of totalitarianism. I never romanticized Communism, I didn't go thru that phase, for some reason.

Wait - let me rephrase - (I know it's semi-ridiculous to be talking about David Hasselhof, but oh well) - He wasn't representing us. He was representing freedom itself. Quite a big job for a lifeguard!

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of this is that even with the evidence of the horrors of communism, even with the wealth of information out there showing how truly inhumane that system is, there are still people, not only around the world, but in this country, that declare themselves communists. That's the truly scary part.

I've also read The Black Book. It's devastating.

I became an anti-communist as a boy watching the news here in the U.S. of the Polish resistance to Moscow when I was 13. I became obsessed with Walesa and the Solidarity movement. It was my first political epiphany of sorts.

Remembering the kind of euphoria we all felt when the wall fell, well imagine how it will be here in Florida when Castro dies.

--scott

You know I love ya, Red. It was a generalized "you." ;-)

I gotta check out that Black Book.

"there are still people... that declare themselves communists."

Don't forget that there are also plenty of Nazi worshippers in America and the rest of the world. Just because communism got its hooks into two large countries like the Soviet Union and China doesn't mean that the fascists are better in any possible way.

Facism, communism and fundamentalist Islam (among others) share the idea that mass slaughter is an acceptable way to achieve utopia. Which is why the twentieth century started with the Turks killing 1.5 million Armenians and ended with famine in North Korea.

James Dunnigan, in his book 'How to Stop a War' calls this a civilian terror, which is like a civil war in which one side is unarmed. In his database of the wars of the last 200 years civilian terrors rack up the really big numbers.

Idealists want one world government to prevent war between governments. But the prevalence and destructiveness of civilian terror argues for many small governments instead.

Government is useful, but it is the most dangerous thing man has ever made.

Yours,
Wince