If We Don't Fight Back, Communism Is Our Future

At Townhall.com Dennis Prager has an important piece entitled The Denial of Evil: The Case of Communism that tells the horrors of Communism in ways that I have not made plain. Yes, the Communists killed wantonly and often. They felt no compunction about taking the life of fellow human beings, which begs the question of just how did they attain this level of dehumanization. But it may have been the torture and humiliation visited upon even more people than just those killed.

And, of course, these numbers do not describe the suffering endured by hundreds of millions of people who were not murdered: the systematic stripping people of their right to speak freely, to worship, to start a business or even to travel without party permission; no noncommunist judiciary or media; the near-poverty of nearly all communist countries; the imprisonment and torture of vast numbers of people; and, of course, the trauma suffered by the hundreds of millions of friends and relatives of the murdered and imprisoned.

These numbers don't tell you about the many starving Ukrainians who ate the flesh of people, often children, sometimes including their own; or the Romanian Christians whose communist prison guards forced them to eat feces to compel them to renounce their faith; or the frozen millions in the vast Soviet Siberian prison camp system known as the Gulag Archipelago; or the Vietnamese communists' routine practice of burying peasants alive to terrorize people into supporting the communists; or Mao Zedong's regular use of torture to punish opponents and intimidate peasants, like leading men through the streets with rusty wires through their testicles and burning the vaginas of wives of opponents with flaming wicks -- Mao's techniques to terrorize peasants into supporting the Chinese Communist Party in its early days.

The thing that ought to scare you is that it can happen here, indeed, it is happening here. If we don't fight back, it will become our future.