The German Workers' Party name was changed by Hitler to include the term National Socialist. Thus the full name was the National Socialist German Workers' Party Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP) called for short, Nazi. By the end of 1920 it had about three thousand members.
While the victims of the Nazi Holocaust are continuing to receive their just place in history, it is important to note that they are not the only victims of mass murder. A far greater holocaust was committed by those supposedly working in the name of all humanity, rather than those working in the name of the "master race." This is the Red Holocaust, committed by socialist dictators from Stalin to Mao to Pol Pot. Their victims have not yet received their full measure of remembrance, those who supported these dictators have not yet received their full measure of disgust.
The crimes are immense in scale and in magnitude. The USSR was founded on a basis of mass murder and deliberate starvation: the Russian Civil War, the Red Terror and the Reds' forced confiscation of food from the peasants, lead to millions of deaths. This was prior to Stalin: upon his succession, he began to use the security apparatus in order to arrest and kill people on a virtually random basis. Much like the factories under central planning, the security organs had quotas to fulfill: one of the artifacts to have survived the era shows that Stalin drew up lists of each region, with two categories. One category would indicate imprisonment, going to the slave labour camps. The other category would indicate immediate death. Stalin often would put notations on the list, such as "A further 6,000 for the Krasondar region," with a stroke of the pen, wiping out a further 6,000 lives.
It was believed among top communists that there was a certain percentage of the population that opposed the regime and had to be done away with. But in typical communist fashion, this was not something that could be left to the discretion of low level cadre. After all, iron, steel, pigs, wheat production, and virtually everything else economically had to be defined by a quota to assure that lower level cadre were guided in their work.
It may be utterly incomprehensible to those outside such a totalitarian system that such cadre were also given quotas of people to murder, but it was consistent with the idea of central planning and control.
From Moscow NKVD (a predecessor to the KGB) headquarters an order would go out to some small towns or villages to kill so many "enemies of the people," and soon enough the local henchmen would report back that the task was completed.
That such orders would be given is incredible enough. That the local official would obey them is unbelievable. Why did "quite ordinary decent human beings, with a normal hatred of injustice and cruelty" carry out these merciless purges and executions? Simple: through sweating, trembling, fear. Consider what Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov, in their book appropriately titled Empire of Fear, wrote about what a friend, who is called M-, said of his experience,
as an N.K.V.D. official in a country town in the Novo-Sibirsk region. The number of victims demanded by Moscow from this town was five hundred. M-went through all the local dossiers, and found nothing but trivial offenses recorded. But Moscow?s requirements were implacable; he was driven to desperate measures. He listed priests and their relatives; he put down anyone who was reported to have spoken critically about conditions in the Soviet Union; it was more than M-'s life was worth not to fulfill his quota. He made up his list of five hundred enemies of the people, had them quickly charged and executed and reported to Moscow: "Task accomplished in accordance with your instructions."
M-...detested what he had to do. He was by nature a decent, honest, kindly man. He told me the story with savage resentment. Years afterwards its horror and injustice lay heavy on his conscience.
But M- did what he was ordered. Apart from a man's ordinary desire to remain alive, M- had a mother, a father, a wife and two children.
Throughout this period Stalin was particularly concerned about Ukrainian nationalism and their opposition to collectivization. This was a major reason for Ukrainian opposition to Moscow and a source of support for Ukrainian exiles abroad planning for an independent Ukraine, and being given aid to that end by Nazi Germany. One strong base for this opposition was the peasant. In the early 1930s Stalin created a famine. He blockaded the Ukraine and would not let food in, and he sent cadre on systematic forays against the peasants to uncover any food they might be hiding. Even warm bread was taken off peasants tables and seed grain for the next planting was expropriated; dogs and cats were shot. About 5,000,000 Ukrainians died from hunger and disease as a result.
But, there was another source of nationalism, its culture-carriers. The communists therefore shot Ukrainian writers, historians and composers, Ukrainian officials too considerate of the Ukraine; and even itinerant, blind folk singers. Those with "bourgeoisie sensitivities" might find the following from the memoirs of composer Dmitri Shostakovich to have its own chilling horror.
Since time immemorial, folk singers have wandered along the roads of the Ukraine....they were always blind and defenseless people, but no one ever touched or hurt them. Hurting a blind man-what could be lower?
And then in the mid thirties the First All-Ukrainian Congress of Lirniki and Banduristy [folk singers] was announced, and all the folk singers had to gather and discuss what to do in the future. "Life is better, life is merrier." Stalin had said. The blind men believed it. They came to the congress from all over the Ukraine, from tiny, forgotten villages. It was a living museum, the country's living history. All its songs, all its music and poetry. And they were shot, all those pathetic blind men killed.
Why was done?...here were these blind men, walking around singing songs of dubious content. The songs weren't passed by the censors. And what kind of censorship can you have with blind men? You can't hand a blind man a corrected and approved text and you can't write him an order either. You have to tell everything to a blind man. That takes too long. And you can't file away a piece of paper, and there's no time anyway. Collectivization. Mechanization. It was easier to shoot them. And so they did.
Turning now to communist China, its Cultural Revolution during the 1960s was a tumultuous period. The communist party was split between those who supported Mao?s desire to continue the glorious communist revolution and those who were more pragmatic, the so called "capitalist roaders." No one could be neutral in the bloody conflict for power between these two groups. Military units fought each other, even with cannon and tanks; students waged pitched battles with machine guns and grenades given them by military sympathizers. The victors in one battle or another would then systematically purge the opposition, subjecting them to torture and mass execution. How many died in this internal conflagration cannot be counted.
In this struggle, Mao and his supporters could trust no intellectual or scientist of any sort, especially in the governing of any organization. For this reason it was customary in these years to put fanatical communist radicals, regardless of their lack of experience or knowledge of their job, in charge of universities, schools, scientific institutes, hospitals, and intellectual associations of one sort or another. Consider the following experience related by a Chinese scientist when Shan Guizhang, a fanatic and ignorant radical, was appointed to head one of China's most prestigious of institutes, the Institute of Optics and Precision Instruments in Changchun.
Now Shan had read Tales of the Plum Flower Society, a spy thriller about an entirely fictional effort to break a Kuomintang espionage network in the Academy of Sciences. The chief Kuomintang agent was named Peng Jiamu, also a name, unfortunately, of a real scientist working at the institute. Incredibly, Shan believed that scientist Peng was in fact the real life spy in the book. So, fully understandable in the context of the "Cultural Revolution," Shan had 166 scientists at the institute arrested as spies, along with local accountants, policemen, workers, and even nursery attendants. Some were beaten to death; some others committed suicide. Sufficient proof of spying was the existence of a radio or camera at home or the ability of a person to speak a foreign language. After thus purging the institute of these "spies," Shan was promoted to a provincial Party committee.
In China, millions suffered and died because of Mao Tse-Tung's ideas. Like the Great Leap Forward of 1958: totally unrealistic food production quotas were created. Production figures were thus falsified. Under the delusion that the country had plenty of food, Mao demanded that the people make steel. They did, often using homemade furnaces. The steel, of course, was worthless, the country had not been growing food while producing steel, and the result was a massive famine.
It was the same as the total suppression of the agricultural free market by the Soviets, an identical gigantic human experiment with productivity by command. Unwilling to learn from these disastrous results, blinded by their love of Marxism, the Chinese communists did the same thing once they had gained complete control over mainland China and had prepared their peasants. Within a few years all land and farms were taken over by the government, collectives called communes were built, and all farmers became, in effect, not only factory workers, but forced conscripts in a national agricultural army. In many communes they lived in dormitories, woke to bugles, ate their food in mess halls, and lined up after breakfast to be marched off with flags flying to carry out their group tasks and meet the communes quota.
This was true communism. It was the dream of those who believed that government could build a society to improve the lot of the poor and feed the needy. Here was total reconstruction, the revolution for which Mao tse-tung had worked and fought. Of course, what this meant was that those communist officials put in charge of a commune or agricultural region, could not afford to underfill their quotas. All, thus, exceeded them and food production soared. China was becoming an agriculturally rich country. The experiment had worked, or so it seemed to the government and to well wishers abroad. But all these statistics were a sham. They were only on paper.
The actual results were absolutely disastrous. Catastrophic. Men, women, and children starved to death in the communes and fields, in the villages and towns, and cities. While food production records were being broken the emaciated bodies began to pile up and soon their numbers, even to top party rulers, became undeniable. By 1962 the worst famine in world history was underway.
How many died in this is much in dispute. There are figures as high as 40,000,000 dead. A well documented estimate is 27,000,000. If we take this figure as close to the actual number, it is as though the total population of Canada had starved to death in two or three years.
Beyond that, the Cultural Revolution, which took off during 1966 and finally screeched to a halt with the death of Mao in 1976, involved young people continuing to beat, threaten, terrorise those in positions in power -- specifically, those in positions of power who stood opposed to Mao's radical ideas. Red Guards, students who had mobilised in the name of Mao, killed those they considered "capitalists" and when doctrinaire disputes burst out, each other.
Pol Pot created the setting for the "Killing Fields." It was the "year Zero" and random murder was part of creating the new society. Cambodia is still coming to terms with the Khmer Rouge and their crimes, though Pol Pot himself is thankfully dead.
This is but a sample of the crimes committed in the name of socialism. We must not forget those imprisoned or killed in Eastern Europe. There are the martyrs of East Germany and Poland in 1953, the freedom fighters who fought for Hungary's freedom in 1956, the Czech protesters squashed by Soviet power in 1968, the brave members of Solidarity suppressed in 1980-1981, and we should not allow ourselves to forget those shot trying to cross the Berlin Wall.
Socialism in other parts of the world has been just as murderous. There was the Red Terror in Ethiopia, under Halie Mariam Mengistu. Angola and Mozambique were torn to shreds by Communist movements, often with the help of the Soviet Union and satellite states. There has been murderous Red repression in Nicaragua and Cuba.
In short, wherever communism was tried, it meant murder, terror, repression and the subjugation of the individual by the state. Yet this world wide holocaust, whose estimated dead range from 100 million to upwards of 150 million, is barely remembered.
The primary reason for this lack of remembrance is the connivance of Western socialists. The ideas which they advocate: that the state can be the primary agent for change and ensuring equality in society, their contempt for the individual and their total unwillingness to allow individuals freedom are strikingly similar in form, if not in content to what the Red murderers wished. As sympathy for socialism exists in all important institutions in the West, from government to academia, it has been difficult to clear the air about the crimes from the Left, certainly a far more difficult struggle than detailing the crimes of Nazi Germany.
However this struggle should not be abandoned. It is necessary that the millions who have died are remembered; what happened was a warning.
If we forget it, it will only open the door for the nightmare happening again in the new millennium.
That ESR would not want to be in any way associated with these Butchers is well taken.
Slashdot Mirror
The German Workers' Party name was changed by Hitler to include the
term National Socialist.
Thus the full name was the National Socialist German Workers' Party
Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP)
called for short, Nazi.
By the end of 1920 it had about three thousand members.
While the victims of the Nazi Holocaust are continuing to receive
their just place in history, it is important to note that they are
not the only victims of mass murder. A far greater holocaust was
committed by those supposedly working in the name of all humanity,
rather than those working in the name of the "master race." This is
the Red Holocaust, committed by socialist dictators from Stalin to Mao
to Pol Pot. Their victims have not yet received their full measure of
remembrance, those who supported these dictators have not yet received
their full measure of disgust.
The crimes are immense in scale and in magnitude. The USSR was founded
on a basis of mass murder and deliberate starvation: the Russian Civil
War, the Red Terror and the Reds' forced confiscation of food from the
peasants, lead to millions of deaths. This was prior to Stalin: upon his
succession, he began to use the security apparatus in order to arrest
and kill people on a virtually random basis. Much like the factories
under central planning, the security organs had quotas to fulfill:
one of the artifacts to have survived the era shows that Stalin drew
up lists of each region, with two categories. One category would
indicate imprisonment, going to the slave labour camps. The other
category would indicate immediate death. Stalin often would put notations
on the list, such as "A further 6,000 for the Krasondar region,"
with a stroke of the pen, wiping out a further 6,000 lives.
It was believed among top communists that there was a certain percentage
of the population that opposed the regime and had to be done away with.
But in typical communist fashion, this was not something that could be
left to the discretion of low level cadre. After all, iron, steel, pigs,
wheat production, and virtually everything else economically had to be
defined by a quota to assure that lower level cadre were guided in their
work.
It may be utterly incomprehensible to those outside such a totalitarian
system that such cadre were also given quotas of people to murder, but
it was consistent with the idea of central planning and control.
From Moscow NKVD (a predecessor to the KGB) headquarters an order would go
out to some small towns or villages to kill so many "enemies of the people,"
and soon enough the local henchmen would report back that the task was
completed.
That such orders would be given is incredible enough. That the local
official would obey them is unbelievable. Why did "quite ordinary decent
human beings, with a normal hatred of injustice and cruelty" carry out
these merciless purges and executions? Simple: through sweating, trembling,
fear. Consider what Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov, in their book appropriately
titled Empire of Fear, wrote about what a friend, who is called M-, said of
his experience,
as an N.K.V.D. official in a country town in the Novo-Sibirsk region. The
number of victims demanded by Moscow from this town was five hundred.
M-went through all the local dossiers, and found nothing but trivial
offenses recorded. But Moscow?s requirements were implacable; he was
driven to desperate measures. He listed priests and their relatives;
he put down anyone who was reported to have spoken critically about
conditions in the Soviet Union; it was more than M-'s life was worth
not to fulfill his quota. He made up his list of five hundred enemies
of the people, had them quickly charged and executed and reported to
Moscow: "Task accomplished in accordance with your instructions."
M-...detested what he had to do. He was by nature a decent, honest,
kindly man. He told me the story with savage resentment. Years
afterwards its horror and injustice lay heavy on his conscience.
But M- did what he was ordered. Apart from a man's ordinary desire
to remain alive, M- had a mother, a father, a wife and two children.
Throughout this period Stalin was particularly concerned about Ukrainian
nationalism and their opposition to collectivization. This was a major
reason for Ukrainian opposition to Moscow and a source of support for
Ukrainian exiles abroad planning for an independent Ukraine, and being
given aid to that end by Nazi Germany. One strong base for this opposition
was the peasant. In the early 1930s Stalin created a famine. He blockaded
the Ukraine and would not let food in, and he sent cadre on systematic
forays against the peasants to uncover any food they might be hiding.
Even warm bread was taken off peasants tables and seed grain for the
next planting was expropriated; dogs and cats were shot.
About 5,000,000 Ukrainians died from hunger and disease as a result.
But, there was another source of nationalism, its culture-carriers.
The communists therefore shot Ukrainian writers, historians and composers,
Ukrainian officials too considerate of the Ukraine; and even itinerant,
blind folk singers. Those with "bourgeoisie sensitivities" might find the
following from the memoirs of composer Dmitri Shostakovich to have its own
chilling horror.
Since time immemorial, folk singers have wandered along the roads of the
Ukraine....they were always blind and defenseless people, but no one ever
touched or hurt them. Hurting a blind man-what could be lower?
And then in the mid thirties the First All-Ukrainian Congress of Lirniki
and Banduristy [folk singers] was announced, and all the folk singers had
to gather and discuss what to do in the future. "Life is better, life is
merrier." Stalin had said. The blind men believed it. They came to the
congress from all over the Ukraine, from tiny, forgotten villages. It was
a living museum, the country's living history. All its songs, all its music
and poetry. And they were shot, all those pathetic blind men killed.
Why was done?...here were these blind men, walking around singing songs
of dubious content. The songs weren't passed by the censors. And what
kind of censorship can you have with blind men? You can't hand a blind
man a corrected and approved text and you can't write him an order either.
You have to tell everything to a blind man. That takes too long. And you
can't file away a piece of paper, and there's no time anyway.
Collectivization. Mechanization. It was easier to shoot them.
And so they did.
Turning now to communist China, its Cultural Revolution during the 1960s
was a tumultuous period. The communist party was split between those who
supported Mao?s desire to continue the glorious communist revolution
and those who were more pragmatic, the so called "capitalist roaders."
No one could be neutral in the bloody conflict for power between these
two groups. Military units fought each other, even with cannon and tanks;
students waged pitched battles with machine guns and grenades given them
by military sympathizers. The victors in one battle or another would then
systematically purge the opposition, subjecting them to torture and mass
execution. How many died in this internal conflagration cannot be counted.
In this struggle, Mao and his supporters could trust no intellectual or
scientist of any sort, especially in the governing of any organization.
For this reason it was customary in these years to put fanatical communist
radicals, regardless of their lack of experience or knowledge of their job,
in charge of universities, schools, scientific institutes, hospitals,
and intellectual associations of one sort or another. Consider the following
experience related by a Chinese scientist when Shan Guizhang, a fanatic and
ignorant radical, was appointed to head one of China's most prestigious of
institutes, the Institute of Optics and Precision Instruments in Changchun.
Now Shan had read Tales of the Plum Flower Society, a spy thriller about an
entirely fictional effort to break a Kuomintang espionage network in the
Academy of Sciences. The chief Kuomintang agent was named Peng Jiamu,
also a name, unfortunately, of a real scientist working at the institute.
Incredibly, Shan believed that scientist Peng was in fact the real life
spy in the book. So, fully understandable in the context of the "Cultural
Revolution," Shan had 166 scientists at the institute arrested as spies,
along with local accountants, policemen, workers, and even nursery
attendants. Some were beaten to death; some others committed suicide.
Sufficient proof of spying was the existence of a radio or camera at
home or the ability of a person to speak a foreign language. After thus
purging the institute of these "spies," Shan was promoted to a provincial
Party committee.
In China, millions suffered and died because of Mao Tse-Tung's ideas.
Like the Great Leap Forward of 1958: totally unrealistic food production
quotas were created. Production figures were thus falsified. Under the
delusion that the country had plenty of food, Mao demanded that the people
make steel. They did, often using homemade furnaces. The steel, of course,
was worthless, the country had not been growing food while producing steel,
and the result was a massive famine.
It was the same as the total suppression of the agricultural free market
by the Soviets, an identical gigantic human experiment with productivity
by command. Unwilling to learn from these disastrous results, blinded by
their love of Marxism, the Chinese communists did the same thing once they
had gained complete control over mainland China and had prepared their
peasants. Within a few years all land and farms were taken over by the
government, collectives called communes were built, and all farmers
became, in effect, not only factory workers, but forced conscripts
in a national agricultural army. In many communes they lived in
dormitories, woke to bugles, ate their food in mess halls, and lined up
after breakfast to be marched off with flags flying to carry out their
group tasks and meet the communes quota.
This was true communism. It was the dream of those who believed that
government could build a society to improve the lot of the poor and
feed the needy. Here was total reconstruction, the revolution for
which Mao tse-tung had worked and fought. Of course, what this meant
was that those communist officials put in charge of a commune or
agricultural region, could not afford to underfill their quotas.
All, thus, exceeded them and food production soared. China was
becoming an agriculturally rich country. The experiment had worked,
or so it seemed to the government and to well wishers abroad. But all
these statistics were a sham. They were only on paper.
The actual results were absolutely disastrous. Catastrophic.
Men, women, and children starved to death in the communes and fields,
in the villages and towns, and cities. While food production records
were being broken the emaciated bodies began to pile up and soon their
numbers, even to top party rulers, became undeniable. By 1962 the worst
famine in world history was underway.
How many died in this is much in dispute. There are figures as high as
40,000,000 dead. A well documented estimate is 27,000,000. If we take
this figure as close to the actual number, it is as though the total
population of Canada had starved to death in two or three years.
Beyond that, the Cultural Revolution, which took off during 1966 and finally
screeched to a halt with the death of Mao in 1976, involved young people
continuing to beat, threaten, terrorise those in positions in power --
specifically, those in positions of power who stood opposed to Mao's radical
ideas. Red Guards, students who had mobilised in the name of Mao, killed
those they considered "capitalists" and when doctrinaire disputes burst
out, each other.
Pol Pot created the setting for the "Killing Fields." It was the "year Zero"
and random murder was part of creating the new society. Cambodia is still
coming to terms with the Khmer Rouge and their crimes, though Pol Pot
himself is thankfully dead.
This is but a sample of the crimes committed in the name of socialism.
We must not forget those imprisoned or killed in Eastern Europe. There
are the martyrs of East Germany and Poland in 1953, the freedom fighters
who fought for Hungary's freedom in 1956, the Czech protesters squashed
by Soviet power in 1968, the brave members of Solidarity suppressed in
1980-1981, and we should not allow ourselves to forget those shot trying
to cross the Berlin Wall.
Socialism in other parts of the world has been just as murderous. There was
the Red Terror in Ethiopia, under Halie Mariam Mengistu. Angola and
Mozambique were torn to shreds by Communist movements, often with the
help of the Soviet Union and satellite states. There has been murderous
Red repression in Nicaragua and Cuba.
In short, wherever communism was tried, it meant murder, terror,
repression and the subjugation of the individual by the state. Yet
this world wide holocaust, whose estimated dead range from 100 million
to upwards of 150 million, is barely remembered.
The primary reason for this lack of remembrance is the connivance of
Western socialists. The ideas which they advocate: that the state can be
the primary agent for change and ensuring equality in society, their
contempt for the individual and their total unwillingness to allow
individuals freedom are strikingly similar in form, if not in content
to what the Red murderers wished. As sympathy for socialism exists in
all important institutions in the West, from government to academia,
it has been difficult to clear the air about the crimes from the Left,
certainly a far more difficult struggle than detailing the crimes of Nazi
Germany.
However this struggle should not be abandoned. It is necessary that the
millions who have died are remembered; what happened was a warning.
If we forget it, it will only open the door for the nightmare happening
again in the new millennium.
That ESR would not want to be in any way associated with these Butchers
is well taken.