CENTRAL VIEW for Monday, January 8, 2001

Communism: still our greatest threat

Looking back at the 20th Century, two contradictory realities stare us in the face. Major leaps forward were made in science, computer technology, medicine, aviation, space and agriculture. The 20th Century was the bloodiest century in recorded history.

While some think Hitler and his National Socialist Workers’ Party (the Nazis) were the major villains of the 20th Century, Hitler’s crimes against humanity pale when compared to the atrocities inflicted upon the world by despots operating under the banner of Marxist-Leninist Socialism (AKA Communism).

Stalin starved 20 million Ukrainians to death. After the collapse of the American effort to keep southeast Asia from falling to the communists, Cambodian despot, Pol Pot, slaughtered over two million Cambodians. All told, the communists killed over 150 million people in the 20th Century.

Belatedly, the western democracies realized the threat posed by Hitler and waged World War II to end it. But somehow we forgot how Hitler and Stalin were allies in the carving up of Poland to begin with. Stalin, instead of being punished for his crimes against Poland and his own people was, instead, rewarded when we came to his rescue with tons of World War II war materials.

Stalin was allowed to impose his communist system on dozens of neighboring nations as his “reward” for defending the Soviet Union against Hitler. The naivete of our politicians in believing Stalin’s promise of “free elections” in what became the Soviet satellite countries boggles the mind.

Resultantly, the USSR was allowed to occupy a huge mass of strategic geography from which it waged war on non-communist states around the world until it collapsed on November 9, 1989.

So why review this sad history at the dawn of the 21st Century? Because Marxist-Leninist Socialism is still alive and its unwitting allies or what Lenin called: “useful idiots” are still with us.

With the exception of the Fox News Channel, careful viewing of the so-called big-four TV news outlets reveals a not-so-subtle socialist bias. They tell us socialist-totalitarian regimes are more acceptable than capitalist-totalitarian regimes in particular and even non-totalitarian capitalist regimes in general. After all, the liberal pundits tell us, the socialists are trying to improve the human condition while the capitalists are only interested in making money. Yet, everywhere a socialist government and economy have been installed, its people have known nothing but abject poverty.

But what about the Scandinavian countries? They are socialist in name only. They use capitalism (How’s your Nokia cell phone?) to pay for a network of social welfare programs. True socialist systems always go belly up and cannot pay for anything except for more perks and privileges for their ruling elite or Nomenclatura.

Meanwhile, the western, capitalist democracies are held to an almost impossible standard of perfection by the liberal media establishment. Socialist dictators who condemn their subjects to lives of poverty are given a free ride because “they mean well” and are really for “peace.” But when the prosperity of a South Korea or a Taiwan or a Singapore is presided over by a less-than-perfectly democratic government, it is discounted as an aberration.

“Peace” is the most powerful word in the communist lexicon. But what communists mean by “peace” is a world in which everyone lives under communism. The reason is simple.

Wherever communism is imposed, its subjects flee toward freedom. Communism then, has no choice but to stamp out, by force if necessary, competing systems of government. While we, in 2001, would like to think that communism is dead, it is not. Mark these words: Communism will be the greatest threat to human freedom and safety in the 21st Century, just as it was in the 20th Century.

If this observer could lay just one book in the hands of President George W. Bush, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice, it would be Jean-Francois Revel’s How Democracies Perish. Revel says all of the above, only better.

William Hamilton is a nationally syndicated columnist and a featured commentator for USA Today.

Dr. Hamilton can be contacted at:

Email: william@central-view.com