Is Communism moral? In a new video for PragerU, author and talk radio host Dennis Prager breaks down why the left-wing ideology is anything but.
Prager, who founded PragerU, begins his video by laying out something that we all know to be true: “Motives are much less important than behavior.”
“We all know this: If someone has good intentions, but treats people badly, those good intentions mean nothing,” says Prager. “As it is with individuals, so it is with governments. Capitalism might sound less noble than communism — the individual pursues success to the best of his abilities (that’s capitalism) versus everyone shares everything equally (that’s communism).”
Prager then explains that, while capitalism “enables a decent society,” communism has led to evil despite the intentions of those who pursue it. Prager notes that, troublingly, many people aren’t even aware of communism’s devastating track record, either out of ignorance or willful blindness.
But there are three reasons why everyone should be aware of communism’s track record of devastation.
The first reason, argues Prager, is that we have a moral obligation to remember the roughly 1 billion victims of communism around the world, much in the same way Americans are morally obliged to remember the victims of slavery. This obligation to remember the victims of communism particularly applies to the 100 million people who were murdered under communist regimes.
The second reason to know about the ideology’s track record? By confronting an evil, we are better suited stop it in the future. “The best way to prevent an evil from occurring is to confront it in all its horrors,” says Prager.
The final reason is that many communist leaders around the world were simply ordinary people, and those who enabled them were ordinary people too, says Prager. And since many of the brutal actions taken under communist regimes — torture, enslavement and murder — were carried out by ordinary people, any society can be susceptible to the ideology or an “analogous evil.”
After establishing the importance of remembering the track record of Communism, Prager explains some of the most evil facts about Communism that not enough people know — a tragic problem he attributes to the “sad state of our education system.”
Prager notes that, even by conservative estimates, communism killed millions of people in various countries across the world. Over in the Soviet Union, 20 million people were murdered by communism — an additional 1 million were murdered in eastern Europe — and in the African country of Ethiopia, 1.5 million people were murdered. And over in Asia, 70 million people were murdered by communism, including 1 million in Vietnam, 2 million in Cambodia, 2 million in North Korea, and a staggering 65 million in China.
As Prager emphasizes, these millions of victims weren’t soldiers at war— they were simply ordinary people.
These millions of deaths don’t even cover the misery of the millions of people who, while living under communism, were forbidden from engaging in other freedoms, such as speaking out, worshipping freely, or traveling without permission from the Communist Party. “These numbers don’t tell you about the frozen millions in the vast Soviet Siberian prison camp system known as the Gulag Archipelago, or the Vietnamese communists’ routine practice of burying peasants alive to terrorize other peasants into supporting the communists,” says Prager.
So how should we think about communism?
The PragerU founder explains that we should associate evil with brightness and not darkness. Why? Because it’s much harder to look into brightness than darkness. “One should therefore associate evil with extreme brightness, given that people rarely look at real evil,” says Prager.
Prager concludes:
The Book of Psalms states: “Those of you who love God must hate evil.”
If you don’t believe in God, here’s another way of putting it: “Those of you who love people must hate evil.”
If you don’t hate communism, you don’t care about, much less love, people.
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The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.