Greatest Killer of 20th Century – Communism

Greatest Killer of 20^th Century – Communism 

If common man is asked to name greatest killer / killing event, they most probably will tell about natural disaster like tsunami or an earthquake or may be World Wars.  I think the greatest killer of 20^th century has been the “Communists” & “Communism”. Common man will never name Communism as the greatest killer as very few cares to go in depth about such ism and the country practicing this. 

Natural disaster has no enemy – it is impartial in devastation. World wars or any war had / has specific enemy and killing in the name of some “purpose or cause”. But killing of own people (own national or own party member, friends – of any age ) without any cause based on so called crime / blame / allegations has been the speciality of communist states over many decades. 

We have read a lot about “Nazis” & “Fascists”, their secret agencies (Gestapo, SS etc. ) & gas chamber killing of Jews which  shook faith on humanity. Hitler systematically eliminated  his perceived enemy  (Jews) over about a decade but killed few Germans except  those who tried to oppose  (socialist, communist, democrats ) the maniac. 

Compared to this Stalin, Mao Zedong, Hoxa, Ho Chi Minh , Lon Nol, Pol Pot, Ceaucescu, Fiedel  Castro, and our own communists eliminated their own followers, simple pesants & workers, countrymen and above all intelligentsia systematically wiped out over decades. 

Nothing were known in those days as the communists had perfected the art of propaganda ( dis-information ) and killing by secret agency like KGB. Some information started coming out during 70’s & 80’s (Boris Pasternek – Dr. Zhivago  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – The Gulag Archipelago, Physics  Nobel laureate  Shakharov are well known ). 

With crumbling of communist states & Berlin wall information coming out from the cupboards / archives of KGB & other agencies put horror stories in pale shade.  

Stalin said the death of one person was tragic , the death of a million a mere “statistic”. Stalin (also Lenin ) hated intellectuals and persecution of writer, playright , scientist – any kind of intellectual was a regular affair with him. 

How many died on account of the Soviet exported Hungarian revolution of 1919 no body knows. Also when Soviet Tanks rolled in Czechoslovakia to remove Dubchek . Or later in Rumania and soon.  

The horror of “ Long March” and “ Great Leap Forward “ & Cultural Revolution / Red Guard menace”  of great leader  Mao Zedong and incidence of Tienanmen Square few years back in China is too fresh in the memory of people world over, including China. Statistics cannot tell the suffering & displacement & killing of rivals and ordinary people throughout China. Children were put against parent , wife against husband, pupil against teacher – whole nation was in turmoil under Red Guards.  Anyway , as per Stalin “death of a million a mere statistic”. 

Subsequent communist leaders world over created new records. Lon Nol and Pol Pot competed against each other in brutality & mass killing in Cambodia. What they achieved in a short period of few years  will put Hitler / Stalin / Mao in shame. Worthy successor to worthy leader. All these are killing of own people – innocent ordinary people. 

Killing of common people by communist Militia in civil clothes in early days of Soviet regime was common and on regular basis which are recorded in many document (e.g. Koba The Dead by Martin Amis ). Stalin famously said “Death Solves all problems. No man, no problems. After the death there would be no man and no problem, but there would indisputably be a corpse . To die in Russia in these times is easy , but to be buried is very difficult. After nationalisation of the graveyards , burial depended on bribery.

 

The entire families of the “Kulaks”, the targeted peasants , were deported and encamped in their millions during the early 1930’s alone.  About 1 million children died in the Holocaust. About 3 million children died in Terror-Famine of 1933. (Martin Amis ). During the early 1930s every non-apparatchik in the USSR was hungry and the peasants were starving in their millions . Naftaly Frenkel argued that slavery could work economically – so long as the slaves died very quickly – “we have to squeeze everything out of a prisoner in the first three months – after that we don’t need him any more” ( Martin Amis )

 

Even if we add the total losses of the Second World War (40-50 million )  to the losses of the Holocaust (  6 million )  we arrive at a figure which apparently, Bolshevism can seriously rival. Civil war, Red Terror , famine, collectivization accounted for perhaps 11 million, conquest suggests; Solzhenitsyn gives a figure ( a modest estimate ) of 40-50 million who were given long sentences in the gulag from 1917 to 1953 ( and many followed after brief Khrushchev  thaw ) and then there is the Great Terror , the deportations of peoples in the 1940s and 1950s , Afghanistan --. The twenty million begins to look more like the forty million ( Martin Amis )

 

They intended to break the peasantry , they intended to break the Church ( any religious place ), they intended to break all opposition and dissent. And they also intended to break the truth .

 

Man made famine due to wrong and dictatorial planning by Stalin ( USSR ) & Mao ( China ) – more people died than world war II. Communist will say there wasn’t a famine , there may have been occasional  shortages.

 

Horror of killing  own people was spread over all communist states – also to Vietnam , Laos, Cambodia and even to our communist province – West Bengal where cream of youth were eliminated in the name of Naxalite & inter party rivalry. This movement has put West Bengal at least two decades behind and resulted in severe brain-drain to other states.

 

You follow any communist state – Hungary, Rumania , Czechoslovakia, Albania , Cuba – Story is same – killing own  people in the name of revolution.

 

Opportunistic alliance by communists ( Stalin – Hitler Pact ) and dumping of friends (?) without hesitation – not supporting Republican in Spain, dumping of Cuba after creating Missile crisis, Patrice Lumumba ( Congo ) , Kasem ( Iraq ), Communist Party in Indonesia and ultimately Afghanistan leading to massive killing of communists  are the creation of revolutionary  communist leadership on whom these people believed.

 

Marxism was the product of the intellectual middle classes,  Nazism was yellow , tabloidal , of the gutter, Marxism made wholly unrealistic demands on human natures; Nazism constituted a direct appeal to the reptile brain. And yet both ideologies worked identically on the moral sense (Martin Amis)