25 Replies to “Communism Turns 100”

  1. It’s a big part of the reason why the “antifascist” groups in the U.S. are going to go nuts this weekend. They are really little more than Marxists but they are too stupid to know it. Useful idiots indeed.

  2. Nothing to celebrate is right. Monstrous ideology that claimed as victims a couple of dozen of my family.
    May all communists rot in hell.

  5. Okay,so they made a few mistakes in the first 100 years,sometimes it takes awhile to iron out the bugs.Look at the Edsel,for instance.
    NOW,if our new progressives,who don’t recognize their true affiliation, ever take power,you can expect them to do it right,because they are SO much smarter than the Bolshevik peasants.
    And far,far more vicious and bloodthirsty. A modern revolution with the current crop in charge would make the Russian Revolution look like a Sunday school picnic, and don’t worry about re-education camps,these bastards wouldn’t bother,just apply Auschwitz type solutions.
    Nothing to celebrate? The biggest understatement of the year.

  6. Nah, it’s never been done right. So it can’t be 100 yrs/old.
    ~Bernie Sanders and any socialist pol who wants a chance at Totalitarian power.

  7. My mother told me stories about what happened after the Red Army reached Berlin. No, its soldiers weren’t looked upon with favour. When our section of the city came under British control, the people regarded the English as liberators from the Soviets.
    Here’s an interesting twist. After re-unification, the foreign troops went home. When the Americans left, they departed as friends, particularly since they helped keep Berlin functioning during Stalin’s blockade. When the Russians withdrew, few people, if any, were unhappy about their leaving.

  8. Oh, but we workers of the world must unite, don’t we? After all, we have nothing to lose but our chains.
    In reality, what they want is to exchange the (imaginary) chains we already have for the ones they are most anxious to fasten to our wrists and ankles.
    Remember, freedom is slavery or, if the lefties are to be believed, the other way around.

  9. Whenever some nut starts blabbing about Socialism, I always say that it worked once and they fall for it.
    Pleb: Real socialism has never been tried etc. etc.
    Me: oh it worked once.
    Pleb: Where?
    Me: It worked when the Germans did it.

  10. This socialist crap is cloaked in the K to 12 mostly, whether it’s Fullbull Warming or Hate The Rich, that is cloaked somewhat, but stealth socialism all the same, by the time its University, and they’ve left the militant unionized useful idiot teachers behind, the new leftie idiots are, tenured pony tailed professors, who tell the kids outright, that socialism is way better than capitalism. My son started out his first 2 years at U hating the rich, but since he was in medicine his daddy kept taking him over to the donor boards in the Foothills and asking him, “where is the name of any poor person on that board, or better yet, where is the Suzuki Foundation’s name, Pembina institute, Sierra Club, Greenpeace etc.? Plenty of good wealthy people and their dastardly “dirty oil companies” names up there donating millions but no ATA or NDP or names like Nenshi Notley or Braid, but these fools claim to have all the answers”. Took 2 years of that and he is now 8 years later quite happy to be a somewhat on his way, way past the self loathing lefties who tried to mould him into a loser like themselves. Listen to your kids when they come home from school or University, and when the professor tells them “The new socialism is way better than the old socialism”, have this article handy people.

  11. Yeah,
    Growing in a socialist country run by communists right in the heart of Europe, know firsthand how pleasant it is to live in communist paradise.
    There were times I was hungry, not starving though, I was needed to do the labour for the ruling class. The ruling class not much different from todays and where it is going. The ruling class of politicians of all parties though the socialist extremists in particular and the media being the main pillar of support so they are included on the gravy train is going the way into tyranny and dictatorship.
    If you thing this is exaggeration, just sit back and watch until it will be too late.
    The socialist extremists that is the government of Alberta, are doing their little bit by little bit to progressively limit freedom. You see, if this happens little bit by little bit the plebeians will accept it as progress, never questioning the road to totalitarian dictatorship, tyranny of the ruling class helped by the union bosses. An easy sleight of hand will do it.
    The union bosses are fascists without exception. The politicians are afraid of them. The union bosses use tactics of communists, national socialists and fascists. The poor suckers that are forced to be in those organizations are just pawns in the process.
    An interesting clip about the ruling class disconnect with your everyday people.
    Those that bake bread, those that plow the field, those that bring them food in a restaurant.
    The ruling class apparently has no idea, being legends in their own minds, that those others are actually people that think about things, go to the bathroom as ruling class do, must eat just like ruling class do and one can imagine, look just as funny as everyone else when they do sex.
    Somehow, the ruling class works in completely useless jobs and collect very good money for no other reason than telling the plebeians how they should live because they know.
    Charles Murray: The Elites Cannot Empathize with the Working Class
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOMAPmi76qI

  13. “The socialist extremists that is the government of Alberta, are doing their little bit by little bit to progressively limit freedom. You see, if this happens little bit by little bit the plebeians will accept it as progress, never questioning the road to totalitarian dictatorship, tyranny of the ruling class helped by the union bosses.”
    You nail exactly what is happening. The Bolsheviks were in a hurry. What we have now is a slow and insidious coup happening. We have an unofficial Komsomol or Red Guard in effect running our universities these days and no contrary opinion to radical socialism is allowed.

  14. In my 2nd cousin’s book about his mother, which I translated into English, he writes that the group of Russian/German refugees she and her son were with were not allowed to cross the Elb River by the British troops due to the Allied agreement with Stalin.
    The story goes on to say the almost all the women, Germans and refugees from eastern Europe, from 13 to 80, even in the villages not just Berlin, were raped. This lady and her son were sent back to Russia to a labour camp. Her husband, a teacher, had been shot in 1937 because he had refused to join the Komsomol while in university and would not teach atheism and Soviet dogma. She never remarried and ultimately relocated to Germany (1990) with her now married son and his three children, who also were married with children. She died in Germany in 1998.
    One of my sons-in-law is a teacher and wonders how long he will be allowed to teach as there is some stuff he will not teach.

  15. Correct. There is very little difference between the two. About the only differences were that Germany believed in national boundaries and communism didn’t simply because it viewed itself as running the entire world. The other difference was that while communists did not believe in private ownership, the Nazis did, but they regulated business so tightly that it operated at the pleasure of the government. In Germany during the lead up to WWII, the difference between National Socialism and communism was often discussed in Germany. There was an anecdote which was very popular among them. It tells of two peasants who did not understand the difference between Bolshevism and National Socialism. One of them asked the other his opinion on the matter. The answer was: “Under Bolshevism all your cows will be taken away from you because you are a kulak. Under National Socialism you are allowed to keep the cows; but the State takes all the milk, and you have the expense and labor of feeding them.”

  16. I soooooo look forward to the next 100 years of Commies finally “fixing” the world. I am sure in the next 100 years … they will finally “get it right”. /dripping with sarc.

  17. What you wrote sounds familiar. My mother said that rape by Soviet troops was commonplace. (This confirms the rumour that Stalin put the worst people he could find in the front lines.)
    She told me of when, at one time, she was shot at. She felt the bullets whizzing by her legs.
    Her family had a Red Army detachment billeted at their house. She wasn’t particularly impressed with them. One, though, that she told me about was a chap who simply wanted to go home now that the war was over. Another she spoke highly of was the medical officer who attended to her because she was ill with scarlet fever at the time. She was in the hospital shortly before the war ended but couldn’t stay there, likely because of what was happening.
    My father never spoke much of his childhood during the war. From what I heard about other relatives, his section of Berlin had it worse than my mother’s, so his silence on the matter was understandable.

  18. I liked Ayn Rand’s succinct description of the difference between Socialism and Communism, “Suicide versus Murder” respectively, because socialism is brought about by popular vote.

  19. If one regards success as two million dead Cambodians, famines in China and North Korea and Lenin’s bloodthirsty Cheka, then, yes – communism was VERY successful.
    Sewer Rat, this:
    “A North Korean who tried to bring a drunk Soviet lieutenant to justice said, “I cannot forgive the Soviet soldier who raped my wife. Many such perpetrators went unpunished. Though another lieutenant colonel urged the Soviet military police to punish the perpetrators to maintain military discipline several times, his words went unheeded, the report said.
    The 25th Primorsky Krai unit commander of the Soviet Far East Army arrived at Pyongyang Airport on Aug. 26, 1945, and described the Soviet army as liberators. “Remember fellow Koreans! Your happiness is up to you. You have achieved freedom and independence. Everything is up to you now,” he said. The report, however, quoted the commander as threatening to “hang half of the Koreans” if they rise up against the Soviet army in protest of their abuses.
    The commander held a party with his subordinates for 22 hours in a row in downtown Haeju on Nov. 16, 1945. A fire broke out and burned houses, but he said the fire was an act of arson committed by dissidents and received 300,000 yen as compensation.
    The report quoted another Soviet colonel as saying privately, “The Korean people were enslaved for the past 35 years. It’s okay for them be enslaved a little longer.”
    (“Newly Released Soviet Report Details Atrocities in North Korea” – One Free Korea, March 10, 2010)
    I’m sure the sensitive millennials will have a thing or two to say about this.

  20. People have been convinced that the political battle is right vs.left, it’s not. People need to keep an eye on authoritarianism. It doesn’t really matter if it is communism, fascism, corporatism. nepotism, Nazism, theocracy, technocracy, oligarchy, bureaucracy etc. It is all authoritarianism.
    Capitalism, constitutional democracy, free markets, republics, classical liberals and libertarians, universal human rights, individual rights, meritocracy, Reason, the scientific method and equal protection under the may not be perfect but they’re the best we have developed. I’m not a fan of the hybrids either because whenever a sweet sounding limit is added to modify one of the previous concepts it reliably moves towards authoritarianism. Compassionate, fair, concerned, consensus…
    While everyone is focussed on the last generations monsters the new ones are creeping up behind you.
    If you are appalled by the 20th century massacres but support population control, racial identity politics and faith that a powerful central government will remain benign…then you might be a progressive (liberal or conservative).

  21. Progressivism inevitably leads to ever greater state coercion on economic factors, always eroding personal freedoms while destroying prosperity.
    The latest iteration has ditched the poor for votes and political power accruing from co-opting the middle class, contrary to socialism’s supposed goals.
    Hypocrisy, mendacity, double-standards & the utter paradox of their political culture bothers them in no way, they look past it & eventually the corpses.
    They double down on their failure which exacerbates the situation further, ie the poor stay poor but are joined by a declining middle and upper income earners, while government grows, increasing its burden on economies, becoming more authoritarian and indeed totalitarian to stifle the protests of the people. That inevitably leads to accelerating state coercion, violence, depravation, corruption and finally economic collapse.
    The aparatchiks make out like bandits, so all is good from their viewpoint.
    But collectivism that always follows interventionism destroys prosperity and freedom through inflation, war or both.
    No socialist state will ever move off collectivism, interventionism and authoritarianism/totalitarianism because that is all that can sustain their fatal conceit.
    They never get off coercive, corrupt and callous socialism because it works for those elites and their prescriptions are actually the disease.
    Hayek got that. So did Ludwig von Mises (both actual “liberals,” who says it better than I ever could:
    “The Dictatorial, Anti-Democratic, and Socialist Character of Interventionism”
    Many advocates of interventionism are bewildered when one tells them that in recommending interventionism they themselves are fostering anti-democratic and dictatorial tendencies and the establishment of totalitarian socialism. They protest that they are sincere believers and opposed to tyranny and socialism. What they aim at is only the improvement of the conditions of the poor. They say that they are driven by considerations of social justice, and favor a fairer distribution of income precisely because they are intent upon preserving capitalism and its political corollary or superstructure, viz., democratic government.”
    What these people fail to realize is that the various measures they suggest are not capable of bringing about the beneficial results aimed at. On the contrary they produce a state of affairs which from the point of view of their advocates is worse than the previous state which they were designed to alter. If the government, faced with this failure of its first intervention, is not prepared to undo its interference with the market and to return to a free economy, it must add to its first measure more and more regulations and restrictions. Proceeding step by step on this way it finally reaches a point in which all economic freedom of individuals has disappeared. Then socialism of the German pattern, the Zwangswirtschaft of the Nazis emerges.”
    National socialism, international socialism, inhabited by the same callous fools and their fatal conceit they run economies and determine prosperity.
    Marx did not care to understand the rapid rise of living standards in the industrial revolution, nor the coercive nature of the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” nor the iron law of oligarchy where elites enrich themselves and whose sole aim becomes to enhance their political power, no matter the price to society.
    Marx actually believed, as statists do now, that harmonious transactions between individual society made people selfish/atomized, when, once again, the opposite of what they believed is true, government replaces individual interaction in favour of the atomized PC automaton spewing socialist slogans, hoping for favour from the new regent; despot yes, enlightened – no.
    https://mises.org/library/planned-chaos

  22. Thank you for that.
    You quote from Mises, “What these people fail to realize is that the various measures they suggest are not capable of bringing about the beneficial results aimed at. On the contrary they produce a state of affairs which from the point of view of their advocates is worse than the previous state which they were designed to alter. If the government, faced with this failure of its first intervention, is not prepared to undo its interference with the market and to return to a free economy, it must add to its first measure more and more regulations and restrictions. Proceeding step by step on this way it finally reaches a point in which all economic freedom of individuals has disappeared.” This is exactly what happens.
    When Lenin enacted the NEP in Russia in 1921 to help the economy recover from the devastating effects of the Russian Civil War my grandfather realized that this was only a short term illusion and the Marxists would return to their earlier policies with a vengeance. He left when he had the opportunity. He was right.
    It is sad that so many are believing the lies of Marxism again.

  23. Ken, the issue is when a simple mind reacts to a complex world. They believe because they are not able to understand.

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