COMMUNISM

Famine

• The title slide of this presentation shows a poster of a starving Russian with the word “HELP” below it. It is from the 1921 famine resulting from Bolshevik confiscation of food crops from the Kulaks (peasant farmers) The photo at left is a more grim depiction of the result. Famine came to be a “policy” used to “control” troublesome populations.

Joseph Stalin

(a.k.a. Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili) • Supreme leader of the Soviet

Union from 1929 to 1953 • Denied civil rights, housing

rights, and health care to all suspected "enemies"

• Sought to entirely liquidate the clergy

• Nationalized all aspects of Russian industry and commerce via disastrous collectivization policies that ravaged the country's economy

• Intentionally engineered famine in Ukraine during 1932-33, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 10 million people

The Ukrainian Famine known as “Holodomor” was Stalin’s use of starvation as a political

means of subjugating Ukraine

Six Million people were Murdered in the NaziHolocaust. Every studenthas studied that monstrous crime.

Have you ever even Heard about Stalin’s“Holodomor”?

Why areStalin’s crimes andcommunistatrocities less well known than those ofthe Nazis?

Stalin Quotations:

• “One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.”

• “Gratitude is a sickness suffered by dogs.”

• “Death is the solution to all problems. No man - no problem.”

• “Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.”

• “Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas.”

The Gulag System

• Stalin deported millions to forced labor camps, or Gulags, where inhuman conditions resulted in the deaths of some 2.7 million people

The ruins of a Gulag slave labor camp in Siberia

This slide and the 5that follow are from the journal of a prisoner in the camps,Eufrosinia KersnovskayaNote the graphicdrawings of life inthe Gulag

The Great Terror

During Great Terror of

1936-39, millions were imprisoned,  enslaved, deported, or executed; the death toll during this period was approximately 700,000, or 20,000 per month. 

Alexander SolzhenitzynNobel Prize for Literature 1970

Imprisoned inthe Gulag1945

Just beforeHis death in2008

Solzhenitsyn’s best known worksrevealed the abuses of the Soviet labor camp system and won him a Nobel Prize.

Many Gulag camps were so harsh and remote that no walls,fences, or towers were required. There was simply no wayto escape.

Margaret Werner Margaret Werner (1921-

1997), an American citizen living in the Soviet Union, was 17 years old when the secret police came for her father, whom she never saw again. Left destitute, she and her mother fought extreme cold and near starvation, taking whatever jobs they could find. Seven years later, in 1943, the police came for Margaret. Accused of espionage, she was sentenced to 10 years' hard labor.

The hut where Margaret Werner spent ten years imprisoned

Mao Zedong• Mao Zedong was the leader

of the Chinese Communist Party from 1935 until his death in 1976.  Chairman Mao, as he became known to generations of admiring Western leftists, is arguably the greatest mass murderer in history, eclipsing even the murderous Joseph Stalin in this regard.  Some 70 million Chinese perished at his hands during his long and brutal reign. Why don’t students learn about

Communist China and Mao in theSame context as the Holocaust?

"We are prepared to sacrifice 300 million Chinese for the victory of the world revolution." -Mao Zedong, 1957

• The “Great Leap Forward” program, 1958-1963, was a forced agricultural collectivization plan that resulted in a state supervised famine and the deaths of between 20-43 million Chinese. Mao, in 1944

A Legacy of Murder

“Perhaps no man is responsible for as many deaths in this century as Mao. More than 50 million people starved to death in the vast famine he visited on his country in 1960 and 1961. And 30 years ago, fighting for his political life, he issued a stream of exhortations that led China into the Cultural Revolution -- 10 years of madness, forced labor, exile, countless suicides and millions of killings. As Mao sought to tear down the Communist Party he had built, he managed to savage Chinese society, to obliterate its culture, to turn student against teacher, friend against friend, children against parents, all in a frenzy of political hysteria and denunciations.”

-Edward Gargan, NY Times, 1996.

Mao in his own words:

"Emperor Qin Shihuang was not that outstanding. He only buried alive 460 Confucian scholars. We buried 460 thousand Confucian scholars. Some democratic personages have accused us of being Emperor Qin Shihuang. This is not true, I told them. We are a hundred times worse than Emperor Qin.

-Mao Eighth Party Congress, May, 1958

Ernesto “Che”Guevara

Many young peopleRegard Che as a popularIcon, a hero. Thousandsthink its “cool” to honor him by wearing T-shirts with his image…

But, He was chief executioner for the Castro regime, responsible for the murder of thousands…THAT IS NOT COOL.

Would you wear a shirt with Adolph Hitler’s face on it?

"Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any enemy that falls in my hands! My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood. With the deaths of my enemies I prepare my being for the sacred fight and join the triumphant proletariat with a bestial howl! Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine.” -Che Guevara

• Would you mock Native Americans destroyed on the Trail of Tears?

• Would you tell jokes about the Armenian Genocide or the horrors of the Irish Potato Famine ?

• Torture and Murder are not “trendy”

"One morning the horrible sound of that rusty steel door swinging open startled us awake and Che's guards shoved a new prisoner into our cell. His face was bruised and smeared with blood. We could only gape. He was a boy, couldn't have been much older than 12, maybe 14. "'What did you do?' We asked horrified. 'I tried to defend my papa,' gasped the bloodied boy. 'I tried to keep these Communist sons of b**tches form murdering him! But they sent him to the firing squad.'" Soon Che's goons came back, the rusty steel door opened and they yanked the valiant boy out of the cell. "We all rushed to the cell's window that faced the execution pit," recalls Mr. San Martin. "We simply couldn't believe they'd murder him! Then we spotted him, strutting around the blood-drenched execution yard with his hands on his waist and barking orders – the gallant Che Guevara." Here Che was, finally in his element. In battle he was a sad joke, a bumbler of epic proportions (for details see "Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant"), but up against disarmed and bloodied boys he was a snarling tiger. "Kneel Down!" Che barked at the boy. "ASSASSINS!" We screamed from our window. "MURDERERS!! HOW CAN YOU MURDER A LITTLE BOY?"

"I said, KNEEL DOWN!" Che barked again. The boy stared Che resolutely in the face. "If you're going to kill me," he yelled. "You’ll have to do it while I'm standing! MEN die standing!" "COWARDS! MURDERERS! Sons of B**TCHES!" The men yelled desperately from their cells. "LEAVE HIM ALONE!" HOW CAN ...?!" "And then we saw Che unholstering his pistol. It didn't seem possible. But Che raised his pistol, put the barrel to the back of the boy's neck and blasted. The shot almost decapitated the young boy.

-Pierre San Martin, eyewitness, La Cabana Prison, Havana

Santiago Valdeolla Pérez

A prisoner of Castro and Che, wrote this message on a Cuban flag in his ownblood. The flag was smuggled out by his fellow prisoners. Maybe this should be on a T-Shirt.

Manzanillo Prison

Cells are designed to prevent prisoners from being able to ever stand upright.Note the prisoner’s hand reaching outfrom beneath the cell door.

Thousands of CubansHave left Castro’sCommunist “paradise”;rowing across the shark infested FloridaStraits in rickety,makeshift boats.

If communismis so great, whydo they risk everything to leave?

Cambodia’s Killing Fields

Pol Pot

• Leader of the Khmer Rouge, the brutal Communist organization that ruled Cambodia from 1976-79

• Strongly influenced by the French Communist Party

• Turned Cambodia into a massive gulag of slave labor

• Poverty, starvation, and terror were the hallmarks of Cambodia during his rule

Pol Pot’s purge of all opposition in Cambodia may have resulted in as many as

4 million deaths.

The photograph above shows one of many monuments that Pol Pot erected to display the extent of his policies

For further research and understanding of the events in Cambodia, try viewing the film The Killing Fields, 1984.

The Berlin Wall

LEAVING IS NOT AN OPTION

No other vestige of Communism is as powerful asymbol of its tyranny as the hated Berlin Wall. ItWas begun in 1961 to keep Germans from fleeingTo the freedom of West Berlin. The monument in the photoIs in memory of those shot attempting to escape

Today, near where the crossing from East to West Berlin “Checkpoint Charlie” was located, there is a memorial of over a thousand crosses to remember those who were shot trying to “go over the wall” to freedom.

1989

Berliners tear down The Wall

“ …And I went out and walked the street, and there were people out in nightgowns, their curlers, everybody brought out what they had for drinks in the house, and we wandered through the night and cried and hugged. It was beautiful."

Tiananmen Square

Pro-democracy protestors were

Massacred in June of 1989 afterthe Berlin Wall fell. Note the lonestudent blocking the tanks.

Protestors and bicyclists are no match for tanks.

Romania

Nicolae Ceausescu was Communist dictator of Romania from 1965-1989

Ceausescu regarded Vlad Tepes "Dracula" (1431-1476) as a national hero.  He even commemorated Dracula on a postage stamp in 1976, on the 500th anniversary of Dracula's death. In fact, he ordered a Dracula theme park built, believing it would attract international tourism.

Protesters often portrayed him as a vampire. 

Ceausescu instituted a policy to spread communism by increasing the population of Romania to 30 million by the year 2000.

• To attain this goal, he required that every family have 5

children, banned contraceptives, and abortions.

• Nearly 200,000 unwanted children lived in state operated orphanages.

The Vampire Legacy

Those who were healthy were groomed for service in Ceausescu’s special police units, the Securitate. The less fortunate were left to languish in filth and squalor. Upon Ceausescu’s execution, the world was shocked by images of starving children, often mere skeletons, who had been subjected to daily beatings, sexual abuse, malnutrition, and an absence of medical care.

“It was the most horrific place I have ever visited. Two things stuck in the mind. One was the complete silence. If children have been left long enough, they give up crying. The second was the stench: these children were left in their own filth all day, every day. There were children of 10 or 11 who couldn't walk because they had never been lifted out of their cots."

-Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow, Scottish Volunteer aid worker

North Korea

Kim IL Sung

• State planned famine caused Deaths of one million North Koreans.

• Invaded South Korea in 1950. Korean War resulted in the deaths of About 3 million Koreans

• Established “Kwan-li-so”, labor camps

Kim Jong IL

• Assumed role as “president for eternity” upon his father’s death in 1994.

• Famine of 1995-1997: 2.5-3 million North Koreans starve

• Kim Jong Il is referred to as “Dear Leader”

Famine is widespread in North Korea, especially among children. UNICEF finds 42% of North Korean children have ‘stunted’development due to malnutrition.

Are You Starting to see a pattern?

The UN estimates over 200,000 North Koreans are in Labor Camps

“Factionalists or enemies of class, whoever they are, their seed must be eliminated through three generations.” This decree means that those sentenced to the labor camps will have their children and grandchildren complete their sentences. One can receive a life sentence for such offenses as “reading a foreign newspaper” or singing a song that is not “approved.”

Life Under a Psychotic Ruler

• Dear Leader” routinely makes wild claims in state-run media such as: dunking a basketball from the half court line, scoring three or four ‘holes-in-one during a single round of golf, or having written six operas.

• Kim Jong Il is a film fanatic with over 20,000 movies in his personal collection. He watches Godzilla while his people starve.

• Kim kidnaps foreign citizens and enslaves them to perform specific tasks for him. For example he abducted a Japanese chef to cook for him, and a film director/actress couple from South Korea to produce propaganda films. The chef escaped and is in hiding in Japan. The film couple was held for eight years.

When Khrushchev stood up in the UN andthreatened America by shouting “We willBury you!” as he pounded his shoe on the Desk, we didn’t take him literally…but We should have…

Mass graves, starvation, andmurder are a common theme.

The Final Cost

The Nazi Holocaust claimed about six million Jewish victims. This is the number of peasants Stalin starved to death in Ukraine alone, as cited by British scholar Dr. Frank Ellisin the National Post. The total number of communism's victims is about 12 times greater. These human beings were murdered by communists, or perished in gulag-type camps in various communist regimes, or in the cellars of their secret police. The total, taking the lower estimates, is more than 73 million people.

THE DEADThe Soviet Union: 20 million China: 65 million Vietnam: 1 million North Korea: 2 millionCambodia: 2 million Eastern Europe: 1 millionLatin America: 150,000 Africa: 1.7 million Afghanistan: 1.5 million

Leaving Cuba

Leaving Vietnam

Freedom

• The Communist legacy of famine, slavery, refugees, torture, imprisonment, and mass murder is undone by the human hunger for liberty. Can you see it?

• Listen for it now…this man is playing its sweet music…can you hear it?