A couple of weeks ago Prager U., which bills itself as an online educational platform dedicated to pro-American values, stated: Wherever Karl Marx’s ideas were practiced, life got worse—-not by a little, but by a lot. There is not a single exception to this rule.
Subsequent to the Russian Revolution, approximately 4 million people starved to death under Lenin’s leadership. Another 6 million succumbed to the same fate in the early years of Stalin’s reign. Ten years after the Communist Party took over in China, well over 30 million people died in a famine which many have described as a man-made disaster though it is now euphemistically referred to by Communist apologists as “The Three Years of Difficulties.” Yes, natural factors contributed to The Great Famine, but no Capitalist regime rooted in the free exercise of each Individual’s will to prosper has ever been ravaged by the sort of devastation that almost inevitably occurs in Autocracies run by Elites who have arrogantly chosen to put their arbitrary definition of social justice ahead of the Rights of the Individual.
I have read dozens of articles over the years in the N.Y. Times, Toronto Star, etc. inveighing against the scourge of “unbridled” Individualism. In typically Leftist fashion they invoked only those aspects of reality favorable to their agenda, focusing on the Evil to which Man is prone while ignoring his amazing capacity for creativity and benevolence which has gifted us with the wonderful lifestyles enjoyed by so many millions here in the Democratic West.
As to the millions who died in the 20th Century due to Communism, each and every one was a thinking, feeling human being. The statistics cited above don’t begin to touch the horrific tragedy of so many lives needlessly lost at the hands of a bunch of autocratic monsters led on by the pseudo-intellectual musings of that simpleton Karl Marx.