Richard Ebeling emails:
Dear Bob,
I have a new article on on, “The 25th Anniversary of the End of the Soviet Union.”
December 24th marks the 25th anniversary of the formal end of the Soviet Union on December 24, 1991. After almost 75 years, the tragic and brutal experiment in “building socialism” ended in the country in which it began.
Western and Russian historians have estimated at as many as 68 million innocent men, women and children may have been killed by the Soviet regime over those nearly 75 years in making the new “Soviet Man” and Soviet society. The perversity is that this mass murder was considered not only necessary but also an act of love. So much did the radical communist revolutionaries love humanity that to make that better world they were willing to kill millions of people to purify the world of capitalist “enemies of the people.”
In the 1930s and 1940s, Stalin sent millions more to the network of slave labor camps stretching across the entire Soviet Union known as the GULAG to work and die in the name of achieving the industrial and raw material goals of the socialist five-year plans. For those to be simply executed, Stalin gave personal orders to beat confessions out of the victims for crimes never committed, before they were shot or sent to their sure deaths in the labor camps in Siberia, above the Arctic Circle or in Soviet Central Asia.
But the horror did not end with Stalin’s death in 1953. In the 1960s and 1970s, the KGB decided that anyone opposing or criticizing the Soviet system was suffering from mental illness, so hundreds, perhaps thousands, more were sent to mental institutions where they were “treated” with pain inducing drugs to bring them to their proper socialist senses.
Wherever socialism was imposed in the 20th century it brought nothing but death and destruction in its wake, and with mass cruelty unmatched by anything in human history. At a time when socialism seems to be regaining an intellectual and political respectability, it is worth remembering the Soviet Union’s chamber or horrors and declaring – never again.
http://www.epjresearchroom.com/2016/12/the-25th-anniversary-of-end-of-soviet.html
Best,
Richard
─ In the 1960s and 1970s, the KGB decided that anyone opposing or criticizing the Soviet system was suffering from mental illness[...] ─
ReplyDeleteSocialism: This beautiful and great idea that needed to be beaten into people violently and mercilessly to assure happiness.
Remember when professor Samuelson had predicted that the Soviet Union would surpass the US in productivity by 1990? Yeah, good times.