You Want a Hate Crime? Well, Socialism Is A Hate Crime

    It is remarkable that, despite its long record of failure, and despite its putrid record of helping its citizens prosper, Socialism is now more popular than ever among America’s college students and not only in progressive precincts of the Democratic Party, but in the Democratic mainstream; at least judging by the cult status of figures such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and how Charles Schumer and his ilk are throwing out phrases like “big-tent.”  Actually, I have seen dopes put pictures of the aforementioned Sanders on social media as someone with ideas to be admired instead of scorned, or even laughed at. It is clear these people refuse to read a book other than Harry Potter, or maybe the video games in their parents basement are just too important. Now, an avowed socialist/communist (yes, I am combining the two) has been elected mayor of New York City, the commercial capital of the United States and home to that great capitalist institution, the New York Stock Exchange. I mean, did you ever think that the current occupant of the Oval Office would have competition for “Biggest Asshole in American Politics?” Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani. Even more recently, socialists here and abroad are still speaking out in unison against the arrest of Nicolás Maduro, the socialist dictator, and all-around piece of shit human being, of Venezuela. And before some of you start typing, that is in no way an applause for HOW he was “removed” from office. But I digress.

    It is ironic that these socialists, along with their supporters and fellow travelers, like to censor people like me, for allegedly, promoting “hate” and “division.” On that basis, they have banned conservative speakers from appearing on college campuses, and just a few years ago urged Twitter and Facebook to close the accounts of conservatives who spoke out against socialism. I mean, c’mon, can you imagine a world without The Golf Room?! 

    This raises an interesting question: Given the historical record, why don’t we label socialism a “hate crime”? Now, to be fair, I am ardently and philosophically opposed to people being convicted of so-called “hate crimes.” A free state has absolutely no business convicting people of what they are thinking. Let us leave that to the communists, Nazis, and other totalitarian regimes, shall we? However, just this once, let me use that phrase for this particular example. After all, the evidence for socialism’s malignant effects is obvious to anyone with sufficient curiosity to actually open a history book and READ. Socialists are responsible for the murder, imprisonment, and torture of many millions and perhaps hundreds of millions of innocent people during the ideology’s heyday in the middle of the 20th century. That history of murder and tyranny continues on a smaller scale today in the handful of countries living under the misfortune of that hideous ideology — Cuba, North Korea, and, at least until recently…Venezuela. But we shall see how that last one turns out.  

    Now, you may ask, “Hey Hall, how DO socialists escape the indictment that they are purveyors of tyranny and mass murder?” Well, some of them deny that Stalin, Mao, and others were true socialists or, even more absurdly, assert that true socialism has never really been tried. But socialism has been tried many times in many places and has always failed.

    Senator Sanders, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Mayor Mamdani claim that they are in favor of something called “democratic socialism,” a “kinder, gentler” version of the doctrine, but that’s what Lenin, Mao, and Castro said until they seized power and immediately began singing a different tune. “Democracy” and “diversity” are what they say when out of power; tyranny and raw power are what they practice once in power. Trust me, that is the tried-and-true technique of all socialist movements. Forgive me, but I’m going to type for a while longer. 

    R. J. Rummel, a noted scholar of political violence and totalitarian movements, coined the term “democide” to describe large-scale government killings for political purposes — in other words, politically motivated murder. While communists and socialists have not had a monopoly on democide, these movements have been responsible for far more political killing than any other political movement or form of government in the modern era.  

    After looking at the facts, Rummel, writing in 1993, drew this conclusion: In sum, the communists probably have murdered something like 110,000,000, or nearly two-thirds of all those killed by all governments, quasi-governments, and guerrillas from 1900 to 1987. Of course, the total itself is shocking. It is several times the 38,000,000 battle-dead that have been killed in all this century’s (the 20th century) international and domestic wars. Yet the probable number of murders in the Soviet Union alone — just one communist country — well surpasses the human cost of wars.

    Rummel suspected that the estimate of 110 million killed may be too low. In fact, he believed the death toll from socialist democide in the 20th century may be as high as 260 million. 

    The Soviet Union was the first large-scale experiment in socialism, commencing with the Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917. For those who like to think there is a meaningful distinction between communism and socialism, it should be noted that USSR stands for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Whatever Lenin and Stalin thought they were doing, they agreed they were engaged in a socialist enterprise.  

    Rummel wrote that “the Soviet Union appears the greatest mega-murderer of all, apparently killing approximately 61,000,000 people,” with Stalin being directly responsible for at least 43 million of these deaths, mostly via forced labor camps and government induced famines. Who knew that Hitler would come in a distant third. But, and there is always a “But.” Hitler attempted to eliminate a single people. However, we can get back to that at a later date.  

    In what has come to be known as the Holodomor, in the early 1930s Stalin’s government killed millions of peasants, most of them Ukrainians, who resisted collectivization or failed to meet mandated production quotas. Several distinguished historians have documented this catastrophe. Robert Conquest, in the Harvest of Sorrow (1986), estimated that 11 million people died of starvation or outright murder in European sections of the Soviet Union between 1932 and 1934. Anne Applebaum, in her book The Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (2017), agreed with Conquest’s estimate and showed that these deaths arose as a consequence of deliberate Soviet policy. 

    A few years later, between 1936 and 1938, Stalin orchestrated a campaign of repression and terror that, according to Conquest’s The Great Terror (1990), led to the murder of some 700,000 people who were judged to be opponents of the socialist regime. Many of those killed were leaders of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution whom Stalin came to regard as traitors or rivals for power. Some historians judge the toll of Stalin’s terror to have been greater than 1,000,000 killed.

    At the time, and for decades thereafter, Western apologists either denied that killings on this scale had occurred or justified them as necessary to maintain the regime. It was only in 1956, when Nikita Khrushchev admitted to some of Stalin’s crimes, that Western fellow travelers reluctantly acknowledged their monstruous scale. 

    Adding up all of these estimates, Rummel calculated that the total number of political killings in the Soviet Union under Lenin, Stalin, and their successors may reach as high as 126,000,000. 

    Then there is the awkward example of Nazi Germany, a regime rivaled in horror and mass murder only by Stalin’s Soviet Union and Mao’s China. Rummel does not include the Nazis in his calculations of socialist democide, though this may be judged an oversight on his part, because Nazism was in fact a socialist movement. The term “Nazi” was shorthand for Hitler’s political party, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP in German). Hitler and his henchmen were socialists, albeit of a somewhat different stripe than Lenin and Stalin.  

    The scale of Nazi murder across nearly the whole of the European continent is difficult to quantify. Rummel, whose estimates mirror those of other scholars, concluded that the Nazis killed perhaps 21,000,000 innocent people via outright murder, including 6,000,000 Jews murdered in concentration camps and many other groups killed by Nazi institutional practices such as forced labor, “euthanasia,” forced suicides, and medical experimentation.

    We now come to the deadliest socialist regime of them all: Communist China. Following the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War in 1949, Mao Zedong launched a series of campaigns that put him in the same league as Stalin and Hitler in terms of the number of people murdered, tortured, and imprisoned.  

    In the first phase of Mao’s rule, from 1948 to 1951, Mao sought to destroy the property-owning class by killing at least one landlord in every village via public execution. One of Mao’s deputies said in 1948 that as many as 30,000,000  landlords would have to be eliminated. Hundreds of thousands were shot, buried alive, dismembered, and otherwise tortured to death in the early years of the regime. Mao and his comrades killed at least 4.5 million Chinese during this period, according to estimates compiled by Rummel and confirmed by other scholars. 

    Mao, alas, was just getting started. During the 1950s the Chinese Communists carried out murder campaigns against Christians and other undesirables, causing the deaths of thousands and perhaps hundreds of thousands of innocent people. 

    In the so-called Great Leap Forward (1958–62), a misnomer if ever there was one, Mao accelerated his campaign for collectivization and industrialization, emulating Stalin’s policies of the 1930s, and with eerily similar results. Frank Dikotter’s carefully researched book Mao’s Great Famine (2010) concludes that a staggering 45,000,000 Chinese were killed via murder, torture, starvation, and imprisonment over that four-year period. In Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958–62 (2012), the journalist Yang Jisheng, using government sources, placed the number of “unnatural” deaths at 36,000,000, as Communist officials seized land and produce from peasants to redistribute elsewhere and systematically killed any and all who stood in the way of the regime’s collectivist policy. Some have described this episode as the single greatest mass murder in the recorded history of the world. 

    In 1966 Mao launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, designed to purify Communist Chinese ideology by purging remaining capitalist and traditional elements. This is the stock response among socialists when confronted with the failure of their schemes: counterrevolutionary elements are to blame. The brutal campaign of state-sponsored murder, torture, and persecution went on for a full decade through different phases of insanity, finally ending with Mao’s death in 1976.  

    Merrill Goldman, a noted scholar of modern China, estimates that as many as 100,000,000 people were persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, and between 5,000,000 and 10,000,000 people were killed via executions, communal massacres, and starvation. Rummel placed the death toll from the Cultural Revolution at 7,700,000, with many millions more suffering persecutions of various kinds. The Chinese government today is understandably embarrassed by this barbaric episode in its recent history and has withheld records that would allow scholars to arrive at a more exact estimate of the numbers killed, injured, and persecuted. Thus, over a period of just three decades, Mao’s socialist government was responsible for the killing of some 50,000,000-60,000,000 Chinese, most of those casualties being incurred in three brutal episodes of political cleansing and socialist “reform.”   

    So, for those of you counting...in total, the three “super socialists” — Stalin, Hitler, and Mao — were thus responsible for the murders of well over 100,000,000 people between the years 1930 and 1976. For those of you on the West Coast, that’s a 1 followed by 8 zeros. Trust me, I am not making light of these numbers. I am just utterly amazed and appalled at the enormity of it all. In the Hall of Fame of socialism and mass murder, these three men occupy exalted platforms.  

    There is a junior varsity, as it were, of heinous socialist murderers. They come from countries like Cuba, Cambodia, Venezuela, and North Korea, whose nations or anti-government guerrillas were led by men such as Castro, Pol Pot, Kim, and Hugo Chavez followed by Maduro in Venezuela. The numbers in these countries wander into the tens of millions murdered or left starving.

    The question has often been asked: Why does the same thing happen over and over again wherever socialism has been tried? Socialist plans and policies — central planning, five-year plans, collectivization of agriculture, nationalization of industry, the concentration of power into the hands of a few — lead inevitably to economic collapse and repression, and often large-scale killing. Socialism always and everywhere begins with idealistic promises and ends in barbarism. 

    F. A. Hayek answered this question as long ago as 1944 when he published The Road to Serfdom, his classic critique of socialism. At that time, the socialist experiment was still in its early stages with just two examples from which to draw lessons, the Communist regime in Russia and Hitler’s Nazi regime in Germany. The brutal history of socialism was yet to play out fully in the post-war era, but the lessons Hayek drew from Stalin and Hitler would turn out to apply perfectly to Mao, Castro, the Kim dynasty, and all of the socialist tyrants that came later. 

    As Hayek pointed out, in a socialist movement, there is a tendency for the most brutal and unscrupulous people to rise to the top because they are the types who are willing to take the necessary steps to seize and relish exercising absolute power. Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot were not the kinds of people one might have encountered in faculty lounges or middle-class town meetings. They were blackguards and thugs one and all, which is the key trait needed to rise to the top in a movement in which power goes to those willing to use extreme measures for the sake of “progress.”  

    Socialist policies, moreover, are always going to fail because it is impossible for central planners to allocate capital, goods, and services efficiently across a large economy.  Capitalism has the price system to aggregate that information; socialism has planners who know little about how the economy actually works. When there arose shortages of food or housing or military equipment—when socialist policies failed—leaders were faced with a choice of admitting failure and abandoning the socialist path or doubling down on their policies and preserving their power. It was in their nature to choose the latter course and thus to press forward with more extreme measures, which typically involved the identification of “counterrevolutionary” scapegoats. From there it was but a few steps to the catastrophic outcomes described above: show trials, terror famines, mass starvation, cultural revolutions, killing fields, and democide.

    New York voters who elected a socialist mayor are unlikely to face the worst of these consequences, since they reside in just one city in a free country where mass arrests or mass killings of the kind cited above will not be permitted. But, if history is a guide, they are likely over the next few years to deal with rising crime, deteriorating city services, failed experiments, wasted public funds, people and corporations fleeing the city, and extremist rhetoric designed to cover for the accumulating failures. It is possible that the damage done will reach the point where New York’s decline becomes irreversible. 

    To return to the question I posed at the beginning: Is socialism a hate crime? I believe the record speaks for itself. Socialism is a hate crime (in the context that I am using that phrase here), a doctrine of tyranny, mass murder, and human suffering on a vast scale. What should be done about it is a different matter. The important thing for now is to identify the crime.  

Write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com