Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth, for the Colson Center. I'm John Stone Street. A few weeks ago, someone commented that a Colson Center What Would You Say video. entitled, Am I on the Wrong Side of History, had falsified the crimes committed by communist regimes.
Now in a way, the critic was correct. The video only mentioned that 94 million people were killed by Communist governments. According to the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, the actual number is much higher. Though Marxism has inflicted unparalleled harm on humanity, there are many today, especially young people, who still want it. In July, the Minnesota Democratic Party endorsed Omar Fateh to be the next mayor of Minneapolis.
His self described Democratic Socialist agenda foreshadowed the rise of Zoran Mandani, a leading candidate to be the next mayor of New York City. Though Fattei's endorsement was later revoked with accusations of irregularities at the convention, the very fact that he made it that far is certainly cause for alarm. Not to mention they're still mom donning. These young politicians did not come out of left field.
Well, they did, pun intended.
Socialism and Marxism continue to gain much traction today among people too young to remember the 20th century. They're not old enough to have seen the Berlin Wall come down. They're not old enough. To have witnessed the victims of democratic socialism fleeing to the West, or to have heard all the stories about how bad things really were in the so-called workers' paradise. No, they've been taught in school and on social media a different set of causes for the problems of modern society.
Like a recent post on X declared, and I quote, you don't hate Mondays, you hate being exploited by capitalism. That's silly, of course. Any study of economic growth shows that prosperity increases in step with free markets. But still, many fall for this kind of line. Lucy Biggers used to be one of them.
She worked for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and believed that the New York Congresswoman would be a more attractive Bernie Sanders with social media savvy. In a recent interview in the Free Press, Biggers explained how young people today are taught to blame all of life's problems on capitalism. Most of them, she continued, don't have any idea that they are supporting horrible ideas that literally ruin civilization.
Now, why are the false promises of Marxism so compelling?
Well, that's because utopias always are. But as Osguinis said recently in the Truth Rising documentary, there's always a gap between the utopia that's promised and the reality that's achieved. Throughout history that gap is always filled by violence, as those in power seek to force the world they envision to come true. Marxism, whenever it's been applied, becomes state sponsored oppression in the form of technocratic rule, which is why Marxism has been responsible for the worst crimes in human history. though all in the name of a so called good cause.
For example, when Lenin came to Saint Petersburg in April of nineteen seventeen he preached peace, land, and bread. But the people actually got war, tyranny, and famine. In his very short time in power millions starved, millions more were killed in the Civil War, and the rest lost what little freedoms they had, all this in the name of the Revolution. Between taking control in the 20s and his death in 1953, Joseph Stalin then slaughtered an estimated 20 million people. In what's come to be known as the Holodomor, and 2 million died in Ukraine from his forced collectivization campaigns of the 1930s.
Even if you survived, you lived in fear. His paranoid tyranny was mocked recently in the dark comedy The Death of Stalin. China, under Mao, recorded the most deaths. He killed somewhere between 45 and 65 million of his own people. Probably about 40 million died just between 1958 and 1962.
victims of the deeply flawed economic policy known as the Great Leap Forward. his Cultural Revolution enshrined the worst kinds of intolerance, oppression, and torture imaginable. And the story is the same wherever and everywhere that Marxism has been tried. Between 1975 and 1979, Pol Pot murdered as many as 3 million Cambodians, 25% of the entire population. The Ethiopian famine of the early 80s was the result of flawed Marxist practices.
From the thousands of students killed at Tiananmen Square in 1989 to the 2020 oppression of protest in the once-free city of Hong Kong, China's Marxism always goes back to tyranny. In the end, Marxism is the reason we have three well-known phrases. First, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Second, ideas have consequences and bad ideas have victims. And third, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Now it's vitally important that those of us who are old enough to remember history share that memory with rising generations. Be able to talk about ideas, their consequences, and their victims, and not let good intention get in the way of good thinking. The lives and liberties of millions actually depend on it. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint. Today's Breakpoint was co-authored by Dr.
Timothy Padgett. If you're a fan of Breakpoint, leave us a review wherever you download your podcast. And for a version of this commentary that you can download, print out, or share with others, go to Breakpoint.org.
