Socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders speaks during a rally in Boston in October. (Photo: Darren McCollester/Getty Images)
Once again I am straying away from my traditional role of numbers-cruncher at People’s Pundit Daily to do what the media won’t. As journalists, we have a duty to force Bernie Sanders to explain to the American people why he supports a murderous, failed statist system of government.
I will continue to regurgitate the truth over-and-over whether it ultimately proves effective or not.
The truth is that socialism not only never works–an intellectual argument we often hear from the Right–but a lot of people have died in the pursuit of fulfilling it’s impossible “utopian schemes,” as Samuel Adams characterized them.
It’s time we tell their story, put the human argument before the intellectual one. Socialism and other leftwing governments killed hundreds of millions of people in the 20th century, alone. They continue to do so in North Korea, Latin America and other regions to this very day.
It’s called democide.
Democide, as defined by the seminal work of R.J. Rummel, Death by Government, is “the murder of any person or people by a government, including genocide, politicide and mass murder; and although the figures are dynamic, six times as many people died as a result of democide during the 20th century than in all that century’s wars combined.”
Let’s put this in context and slap a face on it.
In 1988, when Bernie Sanders decided to honeymoon with his wife Jan in the Soviet city of Yaroslavl, located 160 miles northeast of Moscow, an estimated 20 million (on the low end) to 70 million (on the high end) had died in forced labor camps–Gulags. In fact, Gulags continued to operate outside of agency sanction at the very same time that then-Mayor Sanders was enjoying his honeymoon and forming a city alliance between his town of Burlington and Yaroslavl.
“Of all religions, secular and otherwise,” Rummel wrote, leftwing statism (particularly Marxism) is “by far the bloodiest–bloodier than the Catholic Inquisition, the various Catholic crusades, and the Thirty Years War between Catholics and Protestants. In practice, Marxism has meant bloody terrorism, deadly purges, lethal prison camps and murderous forced labor, fatal deportations, man-made famines, extrajudicial executions and fraudulent show trials, outright mass murder and genocide.”
Need more?
In pursuit of their utopian schemes, Rummel wrote in an op-ed for World Net Daily, leftwing statists frame their cause as “a war on poverty, exploitation, imperialism and inequality–and, as in a real war, noncombatants would unfortunately get caught in the battle. There would be necessary enemy casualties: the clergy, bourgeoisie, capitalists, ‘wreckers’, intellectuals, counterrevolutionaries, rightists, tyrants, the rich and landlords. As in a war, millions might die, but these deaths would be justified by the end, as in the defeat of Hitler in World War II. To the ruling Marxists, the goal of a communist utopia was enough to justify all the deaths.”
Whatever. They weren’t paying their “fair share,” right?
In total, during the era of “progress” in political thought, which spawned a dangerous and un-American collective trust in government, 262 million human beings became a distant memory to a loved one, a statistic for those of us who study the horrific realities of democide; 262 million precious, human lives lost along with all of their god-given potential.
“No cause, ever, in the history of all mankind, has produced more cold-blooded tyrants, more slaughtered innocents, and more orphans than socialism with power,” Alan Charles Kors wrote in The Atlas Society in 2003. “It surpassed, exponentially, all other systems of production in turning out the dead. The bodies are all around us. And here is the problem: No one talks about them. No one honors them. No one does penance for them.”
Why are so many Americans ignorant to the basic fundamental principles and truths regarding the nature of human beings, politics and government?
My six year-old son this week relayed to me his history lesson on Tuesday, during which the teachers called “Barack Obama the greatest president in history” and declared how “Bernie Sanders is awesome!” They also proceeded to tell him that Mr. Obama holds the same views on government and society as “Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglas and Martin Luther King Jr.,” which of course, is totally false.
But my son, who is not your average six-year-old boy (he’d rather watch the history channel with Dad than Spongebob), knew it was nonsense and quickly pointed out that “President Lincoln, Mr. Douglas and Mr. King were Republicans.”
He then reported the “history” lesson to me. It didn’t go over well.
But his misguided teachers are right about one thing. In reality, Sanders is like Obama. You can call him a statist, a corporatist, or even–as economists and PPD columnists Dan Mitchell and Tom Sowell both correctly argued–a fascist.
“A genuine socialist believes in government ownership of the means of production,” Mitchell said. “In other words, nationalized factories, government-run businesses, and collective farms. If Sanders believes in these policies, he’s remarkably reluctant to share his perspective.”
Well, if I believed in a mass-murdering immoral system of government, I probably would be, too. But my job–and the job of the rest of the media–is to force him to share and, if we are moral and in favor of truth, to challenge it. It is a system of government that rises to power on popular support driven by hate, envy, weakness and other forms of victimization.
It’s time to force Bernie Sanders to address the real victimhood felt by millions around the world who fell for utopian schemes and false promises of “political revolution.”
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I'd also remind the leftwing state-run media that laugh at my warning that you are always the first to get lined up against the wall.