The Deadly History of Socialism
Many Americans, especially young people, want to get rid of capitalism — because of its inequality — and install socialism as a replacement. But such a plan has been tried all over the world, with disastrous results....
You have been told, repeatedly, and may even believe, some of the following: The one-percent exploit everyone else; white people have an unfair advantage over everyone else... conservatives and/or Republicans are Nazis; freedom of speech is a cover for intolerance and hate...
If you believe these things, and others like them, then you likely believe that there is only one valid solution to the problem. And that is, we must get rid of capitalism, overthrow any whiff of privilege, and institute a fair system of socialism...
Germany
In the 1930s and 1940s, until the destruction of the Hitler regime in 1945, Germany was a socialist nation. No doubt, you’ve heard that this isn’t true, that Germany was a fascist nation or a Nazi nation. Moreover, you’ve been told, repeatedly, that Nazism is an ideology of the politics of the Right. More bluntly, you have been told, or at least you’ve heard repeatedly, that conservatives and Republicans are today’s modern, racist Nazis.
Let’s clear up this foggy notion straight away. “Nazi” is an acronym for the full name of the party in question: the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP. In English that is the National Socialist German Workers Party. Let’s put a fine point on this: In Nazi-era Germany, the plan was to build a socialist nation favoring ethnic Germans by ending the supposed privileges others, such as the Jewish minority, were imagined to have.
... the reality is that socialism is really about favoring some group or groups over all others. In Nazi Germany, the group to be favored was the ethnic Germans....
Mao’s China
The reason why everyone frantically attempts to escape socialism once it’s shackled upon them is because it does, in fact, bring equality to the people — by making them equally unfree, equally poor, equally miserable, and very often, equally dead...
Mainland China fell to communist domination in the years following World War II. Under the dictatorial control of the Communist Party, led by “Chairman” Mao Tse-tung,...
Frank Dikötter, a Hong Kong-based historian who has had access to a wide range of Chinese communist archives and has done groundbreaking work in removing the veil from decades of Chinese communist tyranny, put it succinctly in his 2010 book, Mao’s Great Famine. “Between 1958 and 1962,” he wrote, “China descended into hell.”...
The authors of The Black Book of Communism, the pre-eminent scholarly catalogue of communist mass murder and atrocity, estimate that 65 million died or were killed as a result of communist policy and atrocity in China....
Famine and Genocide in the Soviet Union
... One group that came in for especially harsh treatment were the Cossacks, an ethnic group with a long tradition of independence and a fierce reputation as skilled warriors. Many Cossacks had been anti-Bolshevik.
The communists, as a result, began an explicit policy of “de-Cossackization” in about 1920, which resulted in widespread genocide...
... The Kulaks were a class of independent farmers in Russia and Ukraine who had gained a bit of wealth through their hard work. Naturally, this was intolerable to the communists now ruling from Moscow, and so the order came down “to exterminate the kulaks as a class.”
This deadly campaign was conducted simultaneously with state restriction on the food supply, resulting in one of history’s most deadly famines, one that would foreshadow the famine of Mao’s Great Leap Forward, the mass deaths under Cambodia’s brutal Pol Pot, and the starvation of millions in socialist Ethiopia in the 1980s....
Socialists promise to deliver a better world that provides equality of outcomes for everyone. But that is only an illusion, a bit of propaganda aimed at the gullible. Those who really want to see an improved world, with greater prosperity for all and respect for the individual, need to look elsewhere. They need to look to limited government, diffusion of power, and respect of individual natural rights....