Monday, September 7, 2015

The Human Cost of Socialism in Power

Dear Bob,

I have a new article on the news and commentary website, “EpicTimes,” on, “The Human Cost of Socialism in Power.”

After having been relegated to the dustbin of history following the fall of the Berlin War, “socialism” seems to be making a comeback, at least in that a candidate for the Democratic Party nomination for president of the United States calls himself a socialist, and has plenty of active followers on that basis.

But with it now being almost a quarter of a century since the end of the Soviet Union, the reality of socialism-in-practice apparently has been forgotten. That makes it worth taking the time to recall what socialism in power really meant in the 20th century, and in the country that first experienced its firm grip: Russia.

In the name of building a “new man” for a “new society” freed from capitalist greed and exploitation Lenin, Stalin and their socialist revolutionaries followers imposed death, destruction, and slave labor on tens of millions.

Eliminating the “politically incorrect” included torture to gain false confessions, and planned famines to force millions to bend to their will for a “better world.” There were even quotas under the government’s five year plans about how many “enemies of the people” were to be executed or rounded up for the compulsory work in the labor camps that dotted the harsh cold of Siberia or the burning deserts of Soviet Central Asia.

But even after Stalin was gone, the later rules of Soviet Russia came up with other methods to handle critics or opponents of the socialist system. One of the cruelest was to assert that resistance to Soviet power demonstrated mental illness, with the accused being sent to psychiatric hospitals where they were injected with drugs that had pain-inducing and mind-disorienting effects.

It is estimated that as many as 68 million people – unarmed, innocent men, women, and children – were “liquidated” in the name of “building socialism” between 1917 and 1986 in the Soviet Union.

So when people, once again, talk about a “new, beautiful world” of sharing, sacrifice and “social justice,” is it important to know what socialism in power has really meant in the attempt to make the socialist “dream”: a human nightmare that destroyed tens of millions of lives.

http://www.epictimes.com/richardebeling/2015/09/the-human-cost-of-socialism-in-power/

Best,
Richard

5 comments:

  1. Mr. Ebeling writes another superb article. Thanks for posting it. I also find him to be a very articulate speaker. It's a pity he's not interviewed more often. I guess he presents too much of a challenge for the journalists.

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  2. Maybe not so naive as presumptuous. There's no indication that the republicans wish to stop their brand of socialism. To prove the government's inadequacies would be to prove it for all sides.

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  3. You would think so but remember (and this is the type of stupidity I hear from socialists)..."They didn't do it right". I hear that A LOT from those types. I even worked for a dumbbell like that at one point.

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  4. It is critical to promote the term Interventionism so that Capitalism does not bear the brunt of the current failures.

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  5. Republicans are just as socialist as Bernie... they are national socialists rather than Bernie's international flavor of the same murderous cult.

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