The protests roiling our college campuses have provided yet another opportunity for the perennially disgruntled to call for the end of America’s democratic form of government and system of free market capitalism, and to replace both with some collectivist pipe dream.
It is a searing indictment of American higher education that our students and graduates are so ignorant of the death and destruction wrought by both communism and socialism that they can advocate for Marxism with a straight face.
The death toll associated with a century of communism is almost impossible to grasp. It is certainly upward of 100 million people. The late Rudolph Rummel, a historian and professor of political science at the University of Hawaii, calculated the number at closer to 170 million people killed—and that number excluded deaths from battles and wars. Millions died as a result of political persecution: imprisonment, torture, purges, executions, and other murders.
But tens of millions more died from starvation.
In Russia, 5 million people starved in the famine of 1921–22. Another 6 to 9 million starved in another famine in the early 1930s. (More than 3 million Ukrainians alone perished, in what is now called the “Holodomor.”)
In China, up to 45 million people starved to death in the Great Famine of 1958–1962 caused by the policies of Mao Zedong.
In Cambodia, the communist Khmer Rouge killed an estimated 2 million, or 25 percent of the population. Untold numbers of those starved to death under the economic restructuring put in place by the regime.
In North Korea, somewhere between a quarter of a million and 3.5 million people starved to death in the famine of the mid-1990s.
Socialist Hugo Chavez took Venezuela—the most prosperous country in South America—and reduced the majority of its population to abject poverty in just over a decade.
Why does this happen over and over again?
Hubris. Arrogance. Stupidity. But more than anything else, the complete lack of alternatives.
By Laura Hollis
