"Although it is difficult to determine the exact number of individuals murdered during the Stalinist terror of the 1930s, the most recent figures indicate that more than 100,000 religious leaders were executed between 1937 and 1941. […] Alexander Yakovlev, a former advisor to Gorbachev, explained the extent of the terror in the early days of the Soviet Union:
"What communism does is to carry the liberal principles to their logical and practical extreme: the secularism; the rejection of tradition and custom; the stress on science; the confidence in the possibility of molding human beings; the determination to reform all established institutions; the goal of wiping out all social distinctions; the internationalism; the belief in the welfare state carried to its ultimate form in the totalitarian state. The liberal’s arm cannot strike with consistent firmness against communism, either domestically or internationally, because the liberal dimly feels that in doing so he would be somehow wounding himself."
— James Burnham, Suicide of the West : An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism (via zerogate)
"The death of Kim Jong-Il also nicely illustrated the principle of how curious it is that liberals, despite taking great offense if anyone as much as suggests that there is any similarity or even outright co-operation between liberalism and communism, always instinctively take the side of communism in any dispute. Since liberals tend to be utterly ignorant of science and have never even heard of Friedrich Hayek and the role that free market prices play in relaying information required to make the billions of daily decisions of how to allocate various resources, they proclaim that communism is “beautiful in theory” and fails in practice only because people are too selfish. They are too smug and dumb to understand that communism is no different from believing that if you have to get a group of people through an obstacle course, you should tie their hands together and make them obey the random commands of a blindfolded central planner who, frustrated by your lack of progress, occasionally randomly shoots one of you for being a “saboteur”."
"
No one questions that Havel, who went to prison twice, was a brave man who had the courage to stand up for his views. Yet the question which needs to be asked is whether his political campaigning made his country, and the world, a better place.
Havel’s anti-communist critique contained little if any acknowledgement of the positive achievements of the regimes of eastern Europe in the fields of employment, welfare provision, education and women’s rights. Or the fact that communism, for all its faults, was still a system which put the economic needs of the majority first.
"—
Neil Clark. Václav Havel: another side to the story (in The Guardian’s Comment is Free)
Only a pampered socialist idiot of the West would think that Communism put the needs of the majority, rather than the needs of the Nomenklatura, first. Perhaps a few years in a Gulag would change his mind about the “achievements” of Communism.
"In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control."
— Theodore Dalrymple (emphasis mine)
(Source: johnderbyshire.com, via eugenicist)
