Author: John Stonestreet and Dr. Timothy D. Padgett
A few weeks ago, someone commented that a Colson Center What Would You Say? video, entitled “Am I On the Wrong Side of History?” falsified the crimes that were committed by Communist regimes. In a way, the critic was correct. The video only mentioned 94 million casualties of Communist governments. According to the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, the actual number was much higher.
Though Marxism has inflicted unparalleled harm on humanity, many today, particularly young people, still want it. In July, the Minnesota Democratic Party endorsed Omar Fateh to be the next mayor of Minneapolis. His self-described “Democratic Socialist” agenda foreshadowed the rise of Zohran Mamdani, a leading candidate to be the mayor of New York City. Though Fateh’s endorsement was later revoked with accusations of “irregularities” at the convention, the mere fact that he made it that far is cause for alarm.
These young politicians did not come out of left field (pun intended). Socialism and Marxism continue to gain traction today, particularly among people too young to remember the twentieth century. They are not old enough to have seen the Berlin Wall come down, or witness the victims of “Democratic Socialism” fleeing to the West, or to have heard stories about how bad things were in the “workers’ paradise.”
Instead, they’ve been taught in school and on social media a different set of causes for the problems of modern society. A recent post on X declared, “You don’t hate Mondays ... you hate being exploited by capitalism.” This is silly, of course. Any study of economic growth shows that prosperity increases in step with free markets. But still, many fall for it.
Lucy Biggers used to be one of them. She worked for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and believed the New York Congresswoman to be a more attractive Bernie Sanders with social media savvy. In a recent article in The Free Press, Biggers explained how young people are taught to blame all of life’s problems on capitalism. “[M]ost of them,” she said, “don’t have any idea that they are supporting horrible ideas that literally ruin civilization.”
The false promises of Marxism are compelling. Utopias always are. But, as Os Guinness said recently in the Truth Rising documentary, there’s always a gap between the utopia that is promised and the reality that is achieved. Throughout history, that gap is filled by violence, as those in power seek to force the world they envision. Marxism, when applied, is state-sponsored oppression in the form of technocratic rule. Which is why Marxism has been responsible for the worst crimes in human history, though all in the name of a good cause.
When Vladimir Lenin came to St. Petersburg in April 1917, he preached “Peace, Land, and Bread!” What the people actually got was war, tyranny, and famine. In his short time in power, millions starved, millions more were killed in the civil war, and the rest lost what little freedoms they had, all in the name of “the Revolution!”
Between taking control in the 1920s and his death in 1953, Joseph Stalin slaughtered an estimated 20 million people. In what’s come to be known as the Holodomor, two million died in Ukraine from his forced collectivization campaigns of the 1930s. The survivors lived in fear. His paranoid tyranny was mocked recently in the dark comedy, “The Death of Stalin.”
China under Mao Zedong recorded the most deaths. He killed somewhere between 45 and 65 million of his own people. Forty million died just between 1958 and 1962, victims of the deeply flawed economic policy known as The Great Leap Forward. His “Cultural Revolution” enshrined the worst kinds of intolerance, suppression, and torture imaginable.
Everywhere Marxism has been tried, the story is the same. Between 1975 and 1979, Pol Pot murdered as many as three million Cambodians, or 25% of their entire population. The Ethiopian famine of the early 80s was the result of flawed Marxist practices. From the thousands of students killed at Tiananmen in 1989 to the 2020 suppression of protests in the once free city of Hong Kong, China’s Marxism always returns to tyranny.
Marxism is the embodiment of three well-used phrases: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions;” “Ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have victims;” and “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” It’s vitally important that those of us old enough to remember history share that memory with rising generations. The lives and liberties of millions depend on it.