The Bloody Red Flag
Trending online news topics often cough up amusingly odd juxtapositions, such as when ?Auschwitz? was #2 behind ?LeAnn Rimes? and right ahead of ?Holiday Bread Recipes? on Yahoo!?s home page. Although I didn?t get a screen capture, I swear to whatever God will listen to me that a few days ago, Kristallnacht was trending on Yahoo! amid a pack of similarly weighty topics such as Justin Bieber and Snooki.
What the hell was Kristallnacht doing in the news?
I won?t deny that it was horrible?I mean, especially if you were Jewish. But apparently it was trending because November 9th was the 73rd anniversary of the ?Night of Broken Glass.? Only two more years, and they?ll be celebrating the Diamond Anniversary. Or the Platinum. I?m not sure. I always get those two confused.
Either way?long time ago, no? Why are we still ?celebrating? it? Godwin?s Law dictates that ?As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.? Godwin?s Law should be extended to include online news sites?check enough headlines, and you?ll inevitably see something about the Holocaust. It?s inescapable. When they?and by ?they,? I of course mean ?the Jews??said ?Never forget,? they weren?t kidding!
Godwin?s Lawmen invoke their law as a sort of reductio ad absurdum argument to discredit anything perceived as even slightly to the political ?right? of center. If you believe that some people in your mid-sized Midwestern city exploit their welfare checks, well, you obviously want to roast Jews alive and naked in open-pit barbecues while force-feeding them pork.
?Goadwin?s Law: Any time someone mentions Nazi atrocities, remind them that the communists killed more people.?
To counteract its lamentably pervasive effects, I propose Goadwin?s Law: Any time someone mentions Nazi atrocities, remind them that the communists killed more people.
One could split hairs on dead scalps all day and night about moral equivalencies and methods of execution, but the communists killed more than the Nazis?a lot more, actually. This is an important fact for multiple reasons, not least of which is that it makes your standard-issue pierced-nose scruffy-haired lightly bearded coffee-shop leftist who invokes Godwin?s Law 20 times daily very uncomfortable. There is joy to be had in that fact alone.
Being labeled a ?commie? doesn?t carry nearly the hornet-sized sting that being smeared as a ?Nazi? does, but why is that, especially if the commies killed more? On every city block you?ll see the earnestly confused irony-mongers sporting a goofball CCCP soccer shirt here, a wacky Lenin shirt there, and a solemn Che sweatshirt everywhere, but none of them would be caught dead in a Hitler shirt. Actually, the way things are these days, if anyone was caught in a Hitler shirt, they might wind up dead.
For the last couple generations we?ve been brainwashed?just as when I was a kid, my mother told me the communists brainwashed their citizens?into thinking the whole hubbub about ?commies? was one ridiculously overblown prematurely ejaculatory squirt of right-wing Red Scare paranoia and that the communists truly were as humane as the sheltered masses of mushy-minded American leftists had been deluded into thinking they were.
That?s really a nice sentiment, but then you have to deal with ?the 100 million.? Granted, 100 million is a round number?even smoother and rounder than six million?but for propaganda purposes, it?ll suffice.
Based on a rough mishmash of multiple historical estimates, 100 million is the number of people that communist regimes murdered in the 20th century. The Black Book of Communism claims a body count of around 95 million. R. J. Rummel, an expert in ?democide? and ?deka-megamurderers? (his neologism for those who kill in the tens of millions) suggests the total may be as high as 150 million. Estimates vary widely, but no historian worth their britches would say it?s under 50 million. Whatever way you slice the omelette, that?s a whole lotta broken eggs.
So the next time some horn-rimmed slack-shouldered left-wristed snark-monster dribbles that they represent the compassionate, caring, and pro-human side of the political spectrum, remind them of all the inhumanities perpetrated by the blind adherents to Mr. Marx?s Gospel of Universal Love.
Remind the world?s na?vely utopian ?fellow travelers? of how Marx endorsed ?revolutionary terror? and Engels gleefully foresaw ?the disappearance from the face of the Earth?of entire reactionary peoples? and how Lenin called for ?ruthless extermination? of ?ideological enemies? and how Trotsky said ?We have to run a hot iron down the spine of the Ukrainian kulaks? and how Mao said ?Deaths have benefits? because ?They fertilize the ground.?
Remind them of the Soviet Union?s unsung horrors?the emaciated children of the Holodomor and the mass murder in Katyn Forest, and the million or so executions during the Great Terror and gulag workers forced to eat their own feces and their skulls squeezed with iron rings and NKVD officers good-naturedly referring to their practice of shooting prisoners in the back of the head and watching their blood swirl down the drain as ?wet work.? Remind them of the hundreds of thousands of clergy beaten and tortured to death, crucified on gates and left in the cold to freeze into ice columns. Refresh their recollection about the stranglings and the machine-gunnings and the interrogations and the mental torture and the electric shocks and the tens of millions ground into oblivion in the state psychiatric hospitals and Siberian slave camps. Remind them of the engineered mass famines where peasants reverted to cannibalizing their own infants.
Remind them of the 20-40 million Chinese peasants who starved to death when Mao stubbed his toe during his Great Leap Forward, of the Cultural Revolution where ?enemies? were paraded, taunted, and thrashed to death in public. Of Red Guardsmen randomly selecting ?black elements? to pounce upon and club to a paste. Of ?enemies of the people? being mobbed, set ablaze, and bludgeoned with cold steel shovels. Of ?class enemies? having their organs cut from their bodies while they were still alive, then eaten in psychotic ?human flesh banquets? of class-war triumphalism. Of the estimated 20 million who perished in the forced-labor camps of Chairman Mao?s workers? paradise. Of re-education, forced confessions, and threats?all in the name of vague humanitarianism and eternally unverifiable delusions of socially enforceable equality.
NEVER let them forget.
It?s said that both Hitler and Stalin remarked on how easily ex-members from the other side converted to and assimilated into their respective new sides. Sounds about right to me.
?From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs? also sounds swell?that is, if you?re disabled and needy. Otherwise, it sounds unfair. Utopian schemes are by definition unrealistic and unworkable. State-sanctioned egalitarianism will always lurch into totalitarianism because it?s based on a fundamentally flawed id?e fixe?the nursery-school notion that everyone is equal. In its infantile insistence that not only is life unfair, but that something can be done about it, communists threw a tantrum that led to historically unprecedented bloodshed. They destroyed 100 million square pegs by vainly trying to squeeze them into round holes.
The atheistic folk religion of Marxism inevitably became totalitarian in practice because it is unflinchingly scriptural in its assumptions. It postured itself as the scientific culmination of the historical process, then, in the name of this higher calling, it murdered anything that got in the way. This movement of ?the people? wound up killing a hundred million of them.
So if you insist on waving your little red flag, don?t forget why it?s red.
http://takimag.com/article/the_bloody_red_flag#axzz1dDx0VQvs 
