The following is an edited transcript of a Daily Wire interview with Bill Whittle on his new, in-depth docuseries on the rise of the Soviet Union: &#8220;<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/apollo-11-what-we-saw" target="_blank" rel="noopener">What We Saw: An Empire of Terror</a>.&#8221; 
Daily Wire: Bill, you’ve now produced multiple “What We Saw” documentaries for The Daily Wire: “<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/apollo-11-what-we-saw" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Apollo 11</a>” and “<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/apollo-11-what-we-saw" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Cold War</a>.” Why did you choose the rise of the Soviet Union as your next project?
Bill: Shortly after the invasion of Ukraine I received a call from Jeremy Boreing at The Daily Wire. I just finished covering a fair amount of Russia with &#8220;The Cold War&#8221; series. Given the research for &#8220;The Cold War,&#8221; and my previous readings, I&#8217;ve always been kind of morbidly fascinated with the mechanisms of the Soviet Union — fascinated and disgusted and appalled and intrigued by governments that have to terrorize their people in order to remain in power, antithetical to the American system. And no matter how bad we think things get here, there&#8217;s nothing that&#8217;s happened or is happening now in this country that even approaches this scale.
DW: Why is it important to remember Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution?
Bill: Several years after World War I, Winston Churchill said that the Germans had transmitted a “Bacillus” into Russia in the form of Lenin. I think he got that exactly right. It (Lenin) was a biological weapon. And it was designed to destroy Russia as a great power in World War I. That&#8217;s why the Germans not only allowed Lenin to travel through Germany during the height of the war, but in fact paid his expenses for many, many years afterwards.
This regime is interesting to me for two reasons: the main reason is how intellectual it was — and I have a very low opinion of intellectuals. Intellectualism is for people who think they are intelligent and are so certain of themselves and so certain of what they believe that they feel the right to enforce their theories on other people.
What fascinated me about this horrific system was the theoretical aspect of everything. There was nothing about the system that was practical. There was nothing based on common sense, experience, reason, kindness, decency — nothing. It was all based on the theory of a German philosopher named Karl Marx. His writings appealed to people looking for some sort of justice, but they also appealed to people who had any sort of envy for the people in power but didn&#8217;t want to do any work in order to achieve it.
<h4><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/apollo-11-what-we-saw" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: &#8220;An Empire of Terror&#8221; on DailyWire+</a></h4>
The other remarkable quality about all of the Soviet leaders is just how useless they were. Prior to finding themselves in the middle of the system, none of them had jobs. Lenin’s only job was as a failed attorney, very briefly. As a lawyer he lost, I think, 13 out of 14 cases and never really worked a day in his life. Prior to the revolution, he sat around for 16 years, sitting in cafes in safe places like Berlin and Munich and London and Zurich, sipping tea and discussing theory. 
He developed in his massive forehead this idea of how a society should work and there was no real world evidence that would change his mind. If it turned out that there was a difference between the map he had in his head and reality, then the reality had to be well, he would then go about doing whatever he had to do with the lovers of state power to beat reality into line with the theory. And this is why the Soviet state was a terror state. They never had legitimacy. 
The Bolsheviks were a minority every single time they held a so-called “election;” they were a tremendous minority. And you can’t even accuse the Nazis of that.
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DW: In &#8220;An Empire of Terror&#8221; you mention the leader of Russia’s provisional government, Alexander Kerensky. Why wasn’t he able to mount a good defense against the growing Bolshevik threat?
Bill: Someone once wrote that Lenin was “lucky with his enemies.” And that was exactly the case. I have very high regard for Alexander Kerensky’s principles and for what he wanted for the Russian people. But as an actor, Kerensky had two qualities that actors often bring to the world: First, he was spectacularly naive when it came to the real world. And second, he was tremendously vain. These two blind spots led him to believe he was in control when in fact, Lenin was ready to do everything up to and including murder when Kerensky was simply looking out the window at the daisies. He was a good man and history was kind to him but he was no match for Lenin’s ruthlessness. This is the thing about the Soviet state — it&#8217;s designed in such a way that you have to keep the population under control through terror. The people that end up running the machine, by definition, become the most ruthless and terroristic of the bunch.
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DW: What were some of the challenges you faced making this new series?
Bill: All roads lead back to Lenin. When I began to realize the magnitude of the crimes that these people committed, I began to feel a tremendous sense of historical responsibility to the people who disappeared without photographs.
800,000 people were killed in one of the gulags called Kolyma. 800,000 people. That makes it second on the leaderboard from hell: Auschwitz is first, Kolyma is second, and Treblinka is third. So, more than anything, I wanted every single episode to have as many photographs of the faces of individual people. And most importantly, we can never use the same face twice. I just wanted faces because, as Stalin said, “One death is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic.”
So my biggest challenge was to find a way to try and personalize this. Make people understand that this could just as easily be you or your family, and then try to give them some idea of what the size of 20 million people looks like.
For example, about 100,000 people attend the Super Bowl every year. Imagine that everybody had to exit the stadium, single file, through one gate and you had to stand there and look at every single face as they left the stadium. When you were finished, hours and hours and hours later, you would have only 199 more Super Bowls to look at before you reached 20 million and saw the face of every person killed by this “idea.” And if it&#8217;s killed that many people, maybe it&#8217;s not such a good idea.
DW: Did you come across any surprises in your research?
Bill: The most astonishing story in &#8220;An Empire of Terror&#8221; is a true story. I&#8217;ve worked exceedingly hard and long to make sure that not only everything I wrote was true, but that I also had the receipts for everything.
But the most astonishing coincidence in the entire series is this: Lenin and Stalin were both known to be extremely paranoid, and very, very private people. They kept a very tight circle and they were constantly on the lookout for assassination and betrayal. So when Lenin finally arrives in Moscow from St. Petersburg, and eventually gets himself a little mansion, he is living with his sisters, his wife, and two secretaries. He also has four bodyguards and a private cook named Comrade Spiridon.
Comrade Spiridon went from being the only person that lived with Lenin, who was not related to him, to becoming the only person who lived with Stalin. And he lived with Stalin for the duration of Stalin&#8217;s reign in the Soviet Union. The only person who shared the insight into the entire thing — from the rise from agrarian peasantry to nuclear superpower. Comrade Spiridon was the only man who was on the inside. He would serve dinner to people who were the heads of the secret police one night and then the next night they were gone. They&#8217;d been killed and replaced. The genuinely remarkable part of this story is that Comrade Spiridon’s last name was Putin. This was Vladimir Putin&#8217;s grandfather.
Vladimir Putin learned about the Soviet Union on his grandfather&#8217;s knee. And so the perspective Vladimir Putin received of the Soviet Union was the most elevated inside perspective that was possible to obtain. No one else in the entire history of the Soviet Union, ever, got that close to both of those men. And to think that it was possible for Vladimir Putin to turn out any other way is insane.
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DW: In light of the upcoming presidential election, do you see elements of communism at play in our politics?
Bill: Well, the first thing I think that stands out about the upcoming election is the lawfare that&#8217;s being conducted against Donald Trump. If these people who are committing these atrocities against him genuinely believed in democracy, if they genuinely believed that their democratic values were better than Republican values, they wouldn&#8217;t be trying to lock up Trump. They&#8217;d be doing everything they could to get him to keep talking. If you feel like your only way to win an election is by having your opponent put in jail, you are well on your way to this kind of totalitarian empire of terror. That&#8217;s number one.
Number two is cancel culture. The Left is using cancel culture as a strong-arm tactic to get people to shut up. And we all know the way it works: “You&#8217;re racist” or “we&#8217;re going to call your boss” or “we&#8217;re going to boycott your product” or whatever. But the point is that the only people who feel they need to shut up the opposition are people who know that their opposition has a better argument. And if they don&#8217;t shut them up, they&#8217;re going to win. One of my favorite sayings is that liberals want conservatives to shut up and conservatives want liberals to keep talking. And that&#8217;s the essence of the difference between these two parties.
I have seen a concerted effort in America over the last several years to silence people. This whole idea of cancel culture is as close as we&#8217;ve come so far to taking people out to the Gulag and shooting them in the back of the head. But there are people who do want other people silenced. And the one thing I did realize is that there comes a tipping point when too many people are too quiet for too long. The social proof is to be quiet. The longer everybody is quiet, the harder it is to speak up. Eventually, it will lead to a situation like the Soviet Union, or the Nazi state. With &#8220;An Empire of Terror,&#8221; I was determined to do my best to make sure that doesn’t happen.

EOT – Key Art – 16×9 (1)

‘An Empire Of Terror’: Bill Whittle On The Rise Of The Soviet Union

Bill Whittle

Communism

Documentaries

Josef Stalin

Opinion

Readers Pass

Russia

Soviet Union

Vladimir Lenin

As Vladimir Putin and the war in Ukraine continue to dominate political discourse and presidential agendas this election year, DailyWire+ announced on Wednesday the launch of “What We Saw: An Empire of Terror,” the latest iteration of its <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/apollo-11-what-we-saw" target="_blank" rel="noopener">popular anthology docuseries</a> hosted by renowned storyteller Bill Whittle.
Now in its third season, the show’s newest episodes investigate the class-based genocide perpetrated by communist Soviets in the early 20th century under the reigns of Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, unveiling a chilly reality of fear and violence.
The first episode of “What We Saw: An Empire of Terror” is now streaming on DailyWire+, with new episodes dropping weekly on Wednesdays.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/innocent-people" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH ‘WHAT WE SAW: AN EMPIRE OF TERROR’ ON DAILYWIRE+</a>
Russia’s relationship with the United States has long been a complicated one, and though the countries have been allies at times, relations are again strained following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. To comprehend Putin’s motivations in the modern global landscape, Whittle guides viewers through Lenin and Stalin’s regimes, exploring the historical context that shaped the current Russian president’s behaviors.
“Putin wanted to join the KGB from the time he was a small child, but why? I can’t tell you what goes on in Putin’s head, no one can. I thought the next best thing was to show you the horror of what was in front of his eyes growing up,” Whittle says in episode 8.
Whittle&#8217;s core message of common sense and decency has earned him a devoted following among those who value reasoned thought, civil dialogue, and vigorous laughter. His powers of vivid storytelling, relentless logic, and self-deprecating humor join forces to apply time-tested principles in memorable ways.
“What We Saw” is an exclusive <a href="https://get.dailywire.com/subscribe/plus?utm_campaign=dwplus&amp;utm_medium=paid&amp;utm_source=googlesearch&amp;utm_content=na_subscriptions&amp;mid=g&amp;cid=dailywire&amp;xid=0&amp;gad_source=1&amp;gclid=CjwKCAiAopuvBhBCEiwAm8jaMe6RmlPijLsp3ZTnuxrm6cvHV_fqd9ibYczyBD8MSDUCoQBzpdNGkhoC7QgQAvD_BwE" target="_blank" rel="noopener">DailyWire+</a> anthology series that presents pivotal historical events as a creative cinematic adventure. Subscribe now to watch the full Apollo 11 and Cold War seasons and catch new episodes of An Empire of Terror weekly on dailywireplus.com.
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Empire of Terror

DailyWire+ Launches ‘An Empire Of Terror,’ Third Installment Of Hit Docuseries ‘What We Saw’ Hosted By Bill Whittle

DailyWire+

Vladimir Putin

Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler may be the most infamous villain in world history. He perpetrated the Holocaust, unleashed a reign of totalitarian oppression over most of Europe, and initiated the most destructive conflict the world has ever seen.
Ian Kershaw, a distinguished historian widely regarded as one of the foremost experts on Hitler and the Nazi regime, has <a href="https://www.firstthings.com/article/2001/03/hitler-nemesis" target="_blank" rel="noopener">referred</a> to him as &#8220;the embodiment of modern political evil.&#8221; The accuracy of that assessment is showcased by the fact that partisans of all political stripes (though it is especially favored by the Left to refer to anything even remotely Right-of-center) use <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/biden-says-trump-is-a-nazi-thats-not-going-to-work" target="_blank" rel="noopener">comparisons to Hitler</a> and his ideology as the ultimate slander against their opponents.
In fact, as many have pointed out, the comparison has become <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/facts-ep-3-fascism" target="_blank" rel="noopener">so ubiquitous</a> that in many ways it has lost its effectiveness as a political epithet. Additionally, to rely on a single historical reference to embody evil diminishes public awareness of other psychopathic despots (especially Left-wing ones) who have rampaged through history, even in the last century.
So, here is a non-exhaustive list of tyrants of the 20th Century who we can reference besides Hitler.
<h4>Vladimir Lenin</h4>
Vladimir Lenin orchestrated the first, but by no means last, successful communist revolution and forged what would become the Soviet Union in a tide of violence and repression.
The Bolsheviks <a href="https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/october-revolution/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">launched</a> the October Revolution of 1917 to overthrow the Provisional Government of Russia, which had ruled the country since Tsar Nicholas II abdicated during the February Revolution earlier in the year. The communists quickly seized control of Petrograd (today St. Petersburg) and Moscow, but the country soon descended into a bloody and chaotic <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Russian-Civil-War" target="_blank" rel="noopener">civil war</a> as anti-communist factions — ranging from moderate socialists to monarchists to anarchists and separatists — resisted the new government.
<div id="attachment_680029" style="width: 791px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-680029" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="wp-image-680029 size-large" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/01/GettyImages-515384712-781x576.jpg" alt="Credit: Bettmann / Contributor via Getty Images" width="781" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/01/GettyImages-515384712-781x576.jpg 781w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/01/GettyImages-515384712-300x221.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/01/GettyImages-515384712-768x567.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/01/GettyImages-515384712-1536x1133.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/01/GettyImages-515384712-2048x1511.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 781px) 100vw, 781px" />Credit: Bettmann / Contributor via Getty Images</div>
On the orders of Lenin and other top Bolsheviks, soldiers of the newly formed Red Army seized food, property, and other valuables from peasants in order to support the war effort, creating famine and destitution throughout large swathes of the country.
Lenin oversaw the creation of <a href="https://history.blog.gov.uk/2017/12/20/whats-the-context-20-december-1917-formation-of-the-cheka-the-first-soviet-security-and-intelligence-agency/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">the Cheka</a>, the Soviet Union&#8217;s first secret police, and during the civil war it carried out mass arrests, torture and executions in order to suppress any political opponents of the new regime. The Cheka also founded and ran the USSR&#8217;s infamous prison labor system — the gulags.
Lenin also endorsed the murder of the former tsar, his wife, and their five children in July 1918 as anti-communist forces approached the location where they were being held prisoner by the Bolsheviks.
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The Russian Civil War lasted more than 5 years and <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Russian-Civil-War" target="_blank" rel="noopener">caused</a> the deaths of up to 10 million people — five times the number of Russians who died in World War I.
Though his reign over the nascent Soviet Union was relatively short, a little over 6 years, Lenin&#8217;s ruthlessness provided a blueprint for Left-wing dictators who rose to power throughout the century, most infamously his successor.
<h4>Joseph Stalin</h4>
Joseph Stalin&#8217;s rise to power in the aftermath of Lenin&#8217;s death in 1924 foreshadowed his own brutal tenure as the leader of the Soviet Union. He <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Joseph-Stalin">supplanted</a> and eventually exiled Lenin&#8217;s preferred successor, Leon Trotsky, and had several of his other opponents demoted and replaced by allies.
Once he secured his position as leader of the Soviet Union, Stalin embarked on a program of collectivization, the forced consolidation of individual farms into large, state-controlled collectives. Along with this policy, Stalin <a href="https://soviethistory.msu.edu/1929-2/collectivization/collectivization-texts/stalin-on-the-liquidation-of-the-kulak/">called</a> for the elimination of prosperous peasants known as kulaks &#8220;as a class.&#8221; Though these farmers were rarely much better off than their neighbors, Stalin designated them as class enemies, and the new secret police, the NKVD, carried out mass arrests and deportations of the kulaks, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Soviet collectivization of agriculture under Stalin also caused a massive famine that afflicted Ukraine and southern Russia from 1930 to 1933. Known as <a href="https://cla.umn.edu/chgs/holocaust-genocide-education/resource-guides/holodomor">the Holodomor</a> in Ukraine, the Great Soviet Famine killed an <a href="https://www.nber.org/digest/202110/disproportionate-death-ukrainians-soviet-great-famine">estimated</a> 10 million people, of which roughly 4 million were Ukrainians. The legislatures of dozens of countries, including the <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-resolution/435">United States</a>, recognize the Holodomor as a genocide against the Ukrainian people.
Though he had dealt with Trotsky (eventually having him assassinated in Mexico in 1940), Stalin still feared internal opposition to his rule, causing him to instigate <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Great-Purge" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Great Purge</a> in 1936.
Stalin once again deployed the NKVD to hunt down and terrorize his enemies, real and imagined. Dozens of high-ranking Soviet officials, including several original Bolsheviks who had helped Lenin seize power in 1917, were found guilty in show trials and executed for supposedly conspiring to overthrow Stalin.
The purge unleashed a wave of paranoia throughout the country, and suspicion soon extended to the military, ethnic minorities, and even the general population. By the time Stalin declared in 1938 that the internal threat to the Soviet Union had been suppressed, at least <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/european-history/great-purge" target="_blank" rel="noopener">700,000 people</a> had died.
<div id="attachment_680033" style="width: 1034px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-680033" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="wp-image-680033 size-large" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/01/GettyImages-515177218-1024x532.jpg" alt="Bettmann / Contributor via Getty Images" width="1024" height="532" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/01/GettyImages-515177218-1024x532.jpg 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/01/GettyImages-515177218-300x156.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/01/GettyImages-515177218-768x399.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/01/GettyImages-515177218-1536x797.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/01/GettyImages-515177218-2048x1063.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" />Bettmann / Contributor via Getty Images</div>
As a result of the Great Purge, the gulag system founded under Lenin exploded into the infamous &#8220;Gulag Archipelago&#8221; as more and more people were accused of being counter-revolutionaries. Of the estimated 17 million people who <a href="https://apnews.com/general-news-b2adacb992004f4aaa4c739ec3f4629a" target="_blank" rel="noopener">were sent</a> to the gulags between 1930 and 1953, between 1.2 and 1.7 million <a href="https://www.britannica.com/place/Gulag" target="_blank" rel="noopener">died</a> in the camps.
The Soviet Union invaded Poland along with Nazi Germany in September 1939 as part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which facilitated the partition of Eastern Europe between the two countries and their cooperation until the German invasion of Russia in 1941. Stalin <a href="https://www.archives.gov/research/foreign-policy/katyn-massacre" target="_blank" rel="noopener">ordered</a> the mass execution of Polish prisoners-of-war who had been captured during the invasion, and NKVD agents killed over 20,000 Poles during the Katyn Massacre in April and May 1940.
Stalin continued his totalitarian policies during World War II, in which anyone accused of questioning his leadership was severely punished and collaborators with the Nazis were killed or sent to the gulags. Arrests of political dissidents, carried out by a succession of increasingly monstrous NKVD directors, continued right up to Stalin&#8217;s death.
After he rose to power in the wake of Stalin&#8217;s death in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev <a href="https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/khrushchevs-secret-speech-cult-personality-and-its-consequences-delivered-twentieth-party" target="_blank" rel="noopener">denounced</a> Stalin&#8217;s barbarity and embarked on a campaign of de-Stalinization to dismantle his policies. Estimates on exactly how many people during the Stalin era vary greatly, with most historians placing the <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/european-history/joseph-stalin" target="_blank" rel="noopener">death toll</a> between 6 million and 20 million.
<h4>Mao Zedong</h4>
In 1949, the Chinese communists led by Mao Zedong — after a decades-long civil war — forced the Chinese Nationalists under Chiang Kai-Shek to retreat to Taiwan, cementing communist control over the Chinese mainland.
After a period of relative openness designed to bait opponents of the regime into publicly criticizing the CCP, Mao <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-silence-that-preceded-chinas-great-leap-into-famine-51898077/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">declared</a> the Anti-Rightist Campaign in 1957 to root out anyone who opposed communist rule or collectivization. Between half a million and 2 million people were arrested during the campaign, and hundreds of thousands died due to starvation or ill-treatment during captivity.
Mao&#8217;s most destructive program was <a href="https://www.britannica.com/money/topic/Great-Leap-Forward" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Great Leap Forward</a>, which was intended to transform China from an agriculture-based economy to an industrial powerhouse that could compete with the Soviet Union and the West. The central government set unattainable production quotas for both industry and agriculture, causing lower-level bureaucrats overseeing the programs to take more food from peasants and overwork factory laborers. Out of fear of being labeled anti-communist or, more importantly, anti-Mao, many officials refused to report failures and fabricated data to meet the quotas.
Anyone who opposed the Great Leap Forward could be arrested, tortured, conscripted into forced labor battalions, or summarily executed by the communist overseers. The program was a complete economic disaster, plunging tens of millions of Chinese into grinding poverty.
Because the cadres didn&#8217;t report food shortages and took more food from peasants to fill the outlandish quotas, famine broke out across China. The Great Chinese Famine lasted from 1959 to 1961 and is widely considered one of the worst famines in human history. Scholars continue to debate the exact death toll, but <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1127087/#:~:text=Extent%20of%20famine&amp;text=More%20detailed%20later%20studies%20came,totals%20closer%20to%2040%20million." target="_blank" rel="noopener">most estimates</a> fall between 15 and 55 million deaths from the famine alone.
It wasn&#8217;t until 1981, 5 years after Mao&#8217;s death, that the CCP officially <a href="https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/resolution-certain-questions-history-our-party-founding-peoples-republic-china" target="_blank" rel="noopener">recognized</a> that the famine had been primarily caused by policies implemented during the Great Leap Forward.
Much like Stalin, Mao eventually became paranoid about the threat of internal threats to his absolute power. He insisted that capitalists and conservatives had infiltrated Chinese society and called on young people to purge the country of any elements that might threaten communism, launching the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Cultural-Revolution" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Cultural Revolution</a>. Units of Red Guards, usually comprised of university students, targeted local government officials, teachers, community elders, and even parents who were accused of not being sufficiently dedicated to Chairman Mao.
<div id="attachment_680035" style="width: 784px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-680035" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="wp-image-680035 size-large" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/01/GettyImages-517262776-774x576.jpg" alt="Bettmann / Contributor via Getty Images" width="774" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/01/GettyImages-517262776-774x576.jpg 774w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/01/GettyImages-517262776-300x223.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/01/GettyImages-517262776-768x571.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/01/GettyImages-517262776-1536x1143.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/01/GettyImages-517262776-2048x1524.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 774px) 100vw, 774px" />Bettmann / Contributor via Getty Images</div>
Though struggle sessions, in which someone accused of disloyalty to communism was forced to admit their crimes and subjected to public ridicule and abuse, had been a tactic used by the CCP to force ideological conformity for decades, the practice became infamous during the Cultural Revolution. Heretofore committed Chinese communists were suddenly accused of not being ideologically pure enough or being secret capitalists, hauled out into a public space, and harangued by their neighbors. They were most often imprisoned afterward, but in many instances they were executed by the government or killed on the spot by the mob.
Massacres of suspected traitors took place across China, and in the southern province of Guangxi hundreds of instances of cannibalism were <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1993/01/06/world/a-tale-of-red-guards-and-cannibals.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">reported</a>. Millions were imprisoned or persecuted by the Red Guards, driving thousands to suicide. Overall, between 500,000 and 2 million people died as a result of the Cultural Revolution.
Much like Stalin&#8217;s Great Purge, the Cultural Revolution served to cement Mao&#8217;s position as the undisputed leader of the country.
By the time Mao died in 1976, an <a href="https://www.heritage.org/asia/commentary/the-legacy-mao-zedong-mass-murder" target="_blank" rel="noopener">estimated</a> 65 million people had died as a result of his regime of terror and subjugation.
Lenin, Stalin, and Mao are all synonymous with communist brutality in the 20th century. Each of them displayed just as much cruelty, ruthlessness, and disregard for human life as Hitler did during his vicious domination of Europe. Though references to Stalin and Mao are made in political discourse, they pale in comparison to those accusing someone or an idea of being Hitler-esque. And the crimes of these men deserve just as much scrutiny and public awareness as those of Hitler and the Nazis. More frequent references to these despots not only phases out the tired Hitler trope, but it can also help point out the horrendous atrocities carried out in the name of communist utopia.

Portraits de théoriciens et de dirigeants communistes

Tired Of Comparing Your Political Enemies To Hitler? Here Are Some Other Evil Despots Worth Mentioning – Part I

Tired Of Comparing Your Political Enemies To Hitler? Here Are Some Other Evil Despots Worth Mentioning - Part I

Adolf Hitler

China

World

&#8220;Harry Potter&#8221; author <a href="https://dailywire.com/news/i-was-angry-j-k-rowling-knew-her-trans-comments-would-land-like-a-hand-grenade/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">J.K. Rowling</a> fired right back at a critic who accused her of &#8220;aligning ideologically&#8221; with the brutal former Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.
Rowling has often found herself the target of <a href="https://dailywire.com/news/cnn-responds-to-witch-trials-of-j-k-rowling-podcast-by-burning-the-author-at-the-digital-stake/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">hateful posts</a> and threats from radical trans rights activists because they claim her defense of biological women — and their right to have spaces where biological males are not allowed — makes her a TERF (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist).
But when one critic attacked Rowling in a tweet suggesting that her ideology matched Stalin&#8217;s, the author shot back, tongue in cheek.
&#8220;Very excited to announce that after a long stretch of being Literally Hitler I&#8217;ve become Ideologically Stalin,&#8221; Rowling joked. &#8220;With luck, hard work, and your continued support, I believe I can make Vlad the Impaler by Christmas.&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Very excited to announce that after a long stretch of being Literally Hitler I&#39;ve become Ideologically Stalin.
With luck, hard work and your continued support, I believe I can make Vlad the Impaler by Christmas. 🙏❤️ <a href="https://t.co/0Y4Q1KVAKo">pic.twitter.com/0Y4Q1KVAKo</a>
&mdash; J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) <a href="https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1641486452222570501?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 30, 2023</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
The criticism, posted by climate journalist Dave Vetter, appeared to land rather wide of the mark. He was responding to a thread in which Rowling highlighted an argument between left-wing activist Owen Jones and the Communist Party of Britain over gay rights and abortion access.
Rowling, who is decidedly left of center, tweeted, &#8220;Owen Jones versus actual communists is the top quality Twitter content I&#8217;m here for.&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Congratulations on aligning ideologically with Stalin, I guess
&mdash; Dave Vetter (@davidrvetter) <a href="https://twitter.com/davidrvetter/status/1641446667097604097?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 30, 2023</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
In the argument, Jones noted that Stalin had banned both abortion (1933) and made homosexuality a criminal offense (1934) — while the CPB argued that it was the Communist Party that had been first to stand for gay rights and abortion access.
Vetter followed that by claiming that Rowling, who supports both gay rights and abortion access, somehow aligned with Stalin.
The &#8220;Harry Potter&#8221; creator has also said that she absolutely supports adults who choose to go through gender transition. Where she draws the line is in allowing biological males who self-identify as trans-women to, absent any surgical interventions, insist on being allowed into all-female spaces.
&#8220;Women are the only group, to my knowledge, that are being asked to embrace members of their oppressor class unquestioningly with no caveat,&#8221; Rowling said on a <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/media/jk-rowling-confronted-critics-past-trans-comments" target="_blank" rel="noopener">recent episode</a> of the podcast series &#8220;The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling.&#8221; &#8220;Many people of my generation particularly think that we&#8217;re talking about old school transsexuals, people who&#8217;ve been through full sex reassignment because of profound gender dysphoria, and I feel 100% compassion for such people and I would absolutely respect their pronouns — always have, always will — and would want, as I say, to have comfortable, easy lives.&#8221;
&#8220;This [new] movement, though, is pressing for something different, very different,&#8221; she continued. &#8220;This movement has argued, continues to argue, that a man may have had no surgery whatsoever but if he feels himself to be a woman, the door of every woman&#8217;s bathroom, changing room, rape center should be open to him. And I say no. I&#8217;m afraid I say no.&#8221;

JK Rowling

J.K. Rowling Levels Critic Who Says She’s Aligned ‘Ideologically With Stalin’

J.K. Rowling Levels Critic Who Says She's Aligned 'Ideologically With Stalin'

Celebrities

Harry Potter

Transgender

History, as we all know, tends to favor the victors of wars. This in part explains why two of the greatest architects of 20th Century genocide, Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler, have been treated very differently in the more than 50 years since they held power. Hitler is so universally reviled that he canceled his own first name. Stalin on the other hand is presented as a more complicated and nuanced figure. It’s not just that Stalin’s Soviet Union defeated Hitler and Germany (with Allied help), Uncle Joe also had powerful and smart friends in the West, high among them was the celebrated Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw.
In fairness to Shaw, at least in his younger days, the Soviet Union, and before it, Russia in general held a heady appeal to Western artists. Even prior to the Bolsheviks, the pump had already been primed, in theater by the plays of Chekov and the directing style of Stanislavski, and in literature more generally, Tolstoy, who at the start of the 20th Century was wildly praised and mimicked. So it was natural for Shaw, himself a <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/287405140_BERNARD_SHAW_AND_POLITICS">socialist</a> with progressive ideas, to see the USSR not as a red menace, but as a hope for humanity.
Shaw’s work, notably in “Pygmalion” and “Man and Superman,” deals with political and cultural issues, especially surrounding class and gender. Of humble birth himself, Shaw distrusts the hierarchical system of England and Ireland, unlike his contemporary, Oscar Wilde, born nearby him in Dublin, Shaw was not the manor born. We can see why this storyteller of working-class stock took a shine to the notion of a workers&#8217; paradise. 
In “The Revolutionist&#8217;s Handbook,” Shaw writes “Now we have yet to see the man, who, having any practical experience of Proletarian Democracy, has any belief in its capacity for solving great political problems or even for doing ordinary parochial work intelligently and economically.” So, he was not a huge fan of democracy. Shaw preferred the idea of being ruled by perfect systems. And he thought the Soviet Union was well on its way to achieving just that.
Had Shaw been ignorant of the atrocities committed by Stalin, we might easily forgive him for falling into the soft lies and propaganda of the Soviet state. But by the 1940s the scale and scope of Stalin&#8217;s crimes were becoming known, yet Shaw <a href="https://fee.org/articles/george-bernard-shaw-was-so-enamored-with-socialism-he-advocated-genocide-to-advance-it/">stayed</a> a stalwart ally. So much so, in fact, that anti-authoritarian (and <a href="https://thewire.in/books/remembering-george-orwell-the-socialist">socialist</a>) author George Orwell, acting as an informant to the British government, would <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/27929796">name</a> Shaw as “reliably pro Russia on all major issues.” Orwell named names. 
So how was it that Shaw, and not just him, but so many of the brightest artists and writers of his time, were willing to look past murder and even genocide? We ask this not in the spirit of canceling George Bernard Shaw, but of truly understanding what led him to this dark compromise.
There is a tendency in our time to imagine that the first 2 decades of the 21st Century saw the fastest and most profound technological expansion in history. Yet, the opening 20 years of the 20th Century might have us beat in terms of the structural changes to physical and cultural spaces. The wide adoption of the light bulb, automobiles, planes, the phonograph, and moving pictures transformed the plastic of reality. The bright, shiny London of young Bertie Wooster in the 1920s was nothing like the dark and murky, gas-lit city of Sherlock Holmes just a few decades before. Shaw experienced both. 
It is easy to see why he and his contemporaries imagined that material needs could soon be furnished without the punishing demands put upon a capitalist labor force. In Stalin, Shaw saw a true man of the age. He didn’t fiddle around with legislatures, courts, or markets, he announced five-year plans and got them done. Shaw would go to his death in 1950 truly believing that, in the long run, the unfortunate deaths of millions would be for the common good. Above the bed where he died was a framed picture of Josef Stalin. 
Before we are too harsh in our historical judgment of Shaw, we ought to take a square look at his descendants in the entertainment industry today. Hollywood has become famously beholden to a China that is credibly accused of genocide and has committed an ocean of human rights abuses. This fealty to China might be more motivated by money than Shaw&#8217;s love of Soviet Communism, but it is also about control. This is true with regard to the progressive or “woke” messaging so pervasive in Hollywood’s products, but also a general insistence on obedience to the state, so long as it is controlled by Democrats.
In some ways, our country’s relationship to China is very similar to Shaw’s with the Soviet Union. We accept inconvenient tragedy because in the grand scheme of things we need what China is offering, and trust that in the end, everyone will benefit. Even our own technology advancements echo the Irish playwright. Just as Shaw had his doubts about the efficacy of proletarian democracy, so we sometimes wonder if algorithms can produce better, more humane results than human voices and votes.
Beware the man whether politician or playwright who offers perfection. Their systems are never quite complete, even though they promise they will be soon. That was the trap that Shaw fell into in his adoration of Stalin. We can criticize that decision if we choose to, but far more important is that we learn from it, and not fall into utopian traps ourselves.
David Marcus is a writer and theater artist based in Brooklyn, NY.
The views expressed in this piece are the author&#8217;s own and not necessarily those of The Daily Wire.

Readers Pass – Marcus – Why George Bernard Shaw Whitewashed Joseph Stalin16x9

Why George Bernard Shaw Whitewashed Josef Stalin

George Orwell

Ireland

Socialism

Theater

Paul Kengor is a professor of political science at Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania. He has just published &#8220;The Devil and Karl Marx,&#8221; a careful look at the diabolical side of Karl Marx. The book has come out during an important time in our history since so many Americans, particularly our youth, have fallen for the seductive siren song of socialism taught to them by the academic elite.
&#8220;The Black Book of Communism,&#8221; edited by Stephane Courtois details the Marxist-Leninist death toll in the 20th century. Here is the breakdown: USSR, 20 million deaths; China, 65 million; Vietnam, 1 million; North Korea and Cambodia, 2 million each; Eastern Europe, 1 million; and about 3.5 million in Latin America, Africa and Afghanistan. These figures understate those detailed by Professor R.J. Rummel in &#8220;Death by Government.&#8221; He finds that from 1917 until its collapse, the Soviet Union murdered or caused the death of 61 million people, mostly its own citizens. From 1949 to 1976, Communist China&#8217;s Mao Zedong regime was responsible for the death of as many as 78 million of its own citizens.
The world&#8217;s intellectual elite readily focus on Adolph Hitler&#8217;s murderous atrocities but ignore those of the world&#8217;s socialists. Mao Zedong has been long admired by academics and leftists across our country. They often marched around singing his praises and waving his little red book, &#8220;Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung.&#8221; President Barack Obama&#8217;s communications director, Anita Dunn, in her June 2009 commencement address to St. Andrews Episcopal High School at Washington National Cathedral, said Mao was one of her heroes.
Whether it&#8217;s the academic community, the media elite, stalwarts of the Democratic Party or organizations such as the NAACP, the National Council of La Raza, Green for All, the Sierra Club and the Children&#8217;s Defense Fund, there is a great tolerance for the ideas of socialism — a system that has caused more deaths and human misery than all other systems combined. Today&#8217;s leftists, socialists and progressives would bristle at the suggestion that their agenda differs little from those of Nazi, Soviet and Maoist mass murderers. Keep in mind that one does not have to be in favor of death camps or wars of conquest to be a tyrant. The only requirement is that one must believe in the primacy of the state over individual rights.
Kengor highlights another feature of Marx ignored by his followers. This feature of Marxism should be disturbing to Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors, who said that she and her fellow organizers are &#8220;trained Marxists.&#8221; I wonder whether she shares Marx&#8217;s views on race. Marx&#8217;s son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, was viewed as having Negro blood in his veins. Marx denigrated him as &#8220;Negillo&#8221; and &#8220;The Gorilla.&#8221;
Marx had similar hate for Jews. He referred to his fellow socialist labor organizer Ferdinand Lasalle as a &#8220;greasy Jew,&#8221; &#8220;the little kike,&#8221; &#8220;water polack jew&#8221; and &#8220;Jewish n——r.&#8221; In 1844, Marx wrote an essay titled &#8220;The Jewish Question&#8221; in which he asks, &#8220;What is the worldly cult of the Jew?&#8221; His answer: &#8220;Haggling. What is his worldly god? Money.&#8221;
Down through the years, leftists made a moral equivalency between communist/socialist totalitarianism and democracy. W. E. B. Du Bois, writing in the National Guardian (1953) said, &#8220;Joseph Stalin was a great man; few other men of the 20th century approach his stature.&#8221; Walter Duranty called Stalin &#8220;the greatest living statesman &#8230; a quiet, unobtrusive man.&#8221; George Bernard Shaw expressed admiration for Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith visited Mao&#8217;s China and praised Mao Zedong and the Chinese economic system. Michel Oksenberg, President Jimmy Carter&#8217;s China expert, complained that &#8220;America is doomed to decay until radical, even revolutionary, change fundamentally alters the institutions and values,&#8221; and urged us to &#8220;borrow ideas and solutions&#8221; from China.
Kengor does a yeoman&#8217;s job of highlighting the evils of Marxism. The question is whether Americans will heed his lesson or fall prey to the false promises and live the horrors of socialism. By the way, while Sweden and Denmark have a large welfare system, they have market economies — not socialist economies, as some leftists claim.
Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

Karl Marx statues

WILLIAMS: The Devil And Karl Marx

Karl Marx

Marxism

Bernie Sanders.

WHITTLE: This Land Is His Land

2020 Election

Bernie Sanders

CNN contributor and former Clinton administration official Joe Lockhart compared remarks that Trump lawyer Alan Dershowitz made in defense of President Donald Trump on Wednesday to something that would be said by dictators Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.
CNN played a short clip of Dershowitz&#8217;s remarks from the Senate floor on Wednesday: &#8220;Every public official that I know believes that his election is in the public interest and mostly you&#8217;re right. Your election is in the public interest and if a president does something that he believes will help him get elected, in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.&#8221;
Lockhart responded, &#8220;What I thought when I was watching it was: this is un-American. This is what you hear from Stalin. This is what you hear from Mussolini, what you hear from authoritarians, from Hitler, from all the authoritarian people who rationalized, in some cases genocide, based what was in the public interest.&#8221;
CNN&#8217;s host Erin Burnett did not push back at all on Lockhart&#8217;s remarks.
CNN contributor Scott Jennings later pushed back when it was his turn to talk, saying, &#8220;By the way Erin, if I may, I just have to respond to something that my friend Joe said and I&#8217;m not there to elbow him in the ribs.&#8221;
&#8220;I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s appropriate frankly, to compare the president of the United States to Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, and people who commit genocide,&#8221; Jennings continued. &#8220;We can have political arguments about this, but I don&#8217;t think that anything this president&#8217;s done, that the Democrats have done, that either of their legal teams have done, rises to the level of Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and people who commit genocide.&#8221;
&#8220;I think to me, is not a proper comparison, honestly,&#8221; Jennings said.
WATCH:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
ABSOLUTELY UNHINGED.
Former Clinton Press Secretary Joe Lockhart just went on CNN and compared <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@realDonaldTrump</a> to Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini. 
Unsurprisingly, ZERO push back from CNN&#39;s <a href="https://twitter.com/ErinBurnett?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@ErinBurnett</a>. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/StopTheMadness?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#StopTheMadness</a> <a href="https://t.co/XNKtLmHwFj">pic.twitter.com/XNKtLmHwFj</a>
&mdash; Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) <a href="https://twitter.com/SteveGuest/status/1222678495547068416?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 30, 2020</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Last week, Lockhart admitted that he completely fabricated an entire conversation between two Republicans Senators.
Lockhart tweeted: “Overheard convo between two Republican Senators who only watch Fox News. ‘is this stuff real? I haven’t heard any of this before. I thought it was all about a server. If half the stuff Schiff is saying is true, we’re up shit’s creek. Hope the White House has exculpatory evidence.[‘]”
Lockhart later added, “Ok maybe I made up the convo, but you know that’s exactly what they’re thinking.”
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Ok maybe I made up the convo, but you know that&#39;s exactly what they&#39;re thinking.
&mdash; Joe Lockhart (@joelockhart) <a href="https://twitter.com/joelockhart/status/1220064298925461505?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 22, 2020</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
In August, a psychiatrist <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/media/cnn-guest-trump-hitler-stalin-mao-the-five">claimed</a> on CNN&#8217;s Brian Stelter&#8217;s show: &#8220;Trump is as destructive a person in this century as Hitler, Stalin, Mao were in the last century. He may be responsible for many more million deaths than they were. He needs to be contained but he needs to be contained by attacking his policies, not his person.&#8221;
Stelter offered no push back on the inflammatory claims.
The claim was so outrageous that even left-wing PolitiFact rated it as &#8220;Pants on Fire,&#8221; which the most damning rating any statement can be given.
PolitiFact <a href="https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2019/aug/26/allen-frances/pants-fire-claim-donald-trump-has-much-blood-his-h/">reported</a>:
<blockquote>The death toll for each of the three 20th century dictators is subject to some disagreement and margin of error, but authoritative accountings suggest that each was responsible for the deaths of at least 10 million or more.
Yale University historian Timothy Snyder estimated in 2011 that Hitler caused between 11 million and 12 million deaths of noncombatants, and that Stalin caused a similar number if you include deaths from disease and famine.
Meanwhile, one calculation by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum estimated more than 17 million deaths caused by Hitler. Combat deaths from World War II, would push the number higher still. (Since Hitler and Stalin faced off in World War II, there’s a risk of double-counting in such calculations.)
Mao, for his part, may have exceeded them both.
Ian Johnson, the author of &#8220;The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao,&#8221; estimated in 2018 that Mao was responsible for perhaps 42.5 million deaths, of which the largest number came from a preventable famine stemming from his Great Leap Forward policy.</blockquote>

White House Press Secretary Joe Lockhart reads a s

WATCH: CNN Compares Dershowitz To Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, People Who Commit Genocide

Alan Dershowitz

Donald Trump

A recent survey conducted by the Victims of Communism and polled by YouGov, a research and data firm, found that 70% of millennials are likely to vote socialist and that one in three millennials saw communism as &#8220;favorable.&#8221;
Let examine this tragic vision in light of the Fraser Institute&#8217;s recently released annual study &#8220;Economic Freedom of the World,&#8221; prepared by Professors James Gwartney, Florida State University; Robert A. Lawson and Ryan Murphy of Southern Methodist University; and Joshua Hall, West Virginia University, in cooperation with the Economic Freedom Network.
Hong Kong and Singapore maintained their lead as the world&#8217;s most economically free countries — although China&#8217;s heavy hand threatens Hong Kong&#8217;s top ranking. Rounding out the top 10 are New Zealand, Switzerland, the United States, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Mauritius. By the way, after having fallen to 16th in 2016, the U.S. has staged a comeback to being in the top five economically free countries in the world.
What statistics go into the Fraser Institute&#8217;s calculation of economic freedom? The report measures the ability of individuals to make their own economic decisions by analyzing the policies and institutions of 162 countries and territories. These include regulation, freedom to trade internationally, size of government, sound legal system, private property rights and government spending and taxation.
Fraser Institute scholar Fred McMahon says, &#8220;Where people are free to pursue their own opportunities and make their own choices, they lead more prosperous, happier and healthier lives.&#8221; The evidence for his assessment is: Countries in the top quartile of economic freedom had an average per-capita GDP of $36,770 in 2017 compared with $6,140 for bottom quartile countries. Poverty rates are lower. In the top quartile, 1.8% of the population experienced extreme poverty ($1.90 a day) compared with 27.2% in the lowest quartile. Life expectancy is 79.5 years in the top quartile of economically free countries compared with 64.4 years in the bottom quartile.
The Fraser Institute&#8217;s rankings of other major countries include Japan (17th), Germany (20th), Italy (46th), France (50th), Mexico (76th), India (79th), Russia (85th), China (113th) and Brazil (120th). The least free countries are Venezuela, Argentina, Ukraine and nearly every African country with the most notable exception of Mauritius. By the way, Argentina and Venezuela used to be rich until they bought into socialism.
During the Cold War, leftists made a moral equivalency between communist totalitarianism and democracy. W. E. B. Du Bois, writing in the National Guardian (1953) said, &#8220;Joseph Stalin was a great man; few other men of the 20th century approach his stature.&#8221; Walter Duranty called Stalin &#8220;the greatest living statesman &#8230; a quiet, unobtrusive man.&#8221; George Bernard Shaw expressed admiration for Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith visited Mao&#8217;s China and praised Mao Zedong and the Chinese economic system. Gunther Stein of the Christian Science Monitor also admired Mao and declared ecstatically that &#8220;the men and women pioneers of Yenan are truly new humans in spirit, thought and action.&#8221; Michel Oksenberg, President Jimmy Carter&#8217;s China expert, complained that &#8220;America (is) doomed to decay until radical, even revolutionary, change fundamentally alters the institutions and values,&#8221; and urged us to &#8220;borrow ideas and solutions&#8221; from China.
Leftists exempted communist leaders from the harsh criticism directed toward Adolf Hitler, even though communist crimes against humanity made Hitler&#8217;s slaughter of 11 million noncombatants appear almost amateurish. According to Professor R.J. Rummel&#8217;s research in &#8220;Death by Government,&#8221; from 1917 until its collapse, the Soviet Union murdered or caused the death of 61 million people, mostly its own citizens. From 1949 to 1976, Mao&#8217;s Communist regime was responsible for the death of as many as 76 million Chinese citizens.
Today&#8217;s leftists, socialists and progressives would bristle at the suggestion that their agenda differs little from that of past tyrants. They should keep in mind that the origins of the unspeakable horrors of Nazism, Stalinism and Maoism did not begin in the &#8217;20s, &#8217;30s and &#8217;40s. Those horrors were simply the result of a long evolution of ideas leading to a consolidation of power in the central government in the quest for &#8220;social justice.&#8221;
Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

Hammer and Sickel.

WILLIAMS: Young People Ignorant Of History

Speaking on the John Catsimatidis radio show, famed attorney and liberal Democrat Alan Dershowitz blistered CNN for its coverage of the impeachment proceedings against President Trump, saying, “CNN has banned me from their airwaves. CNN will not allow me on their network because they don’t want a liberal Democrat to be telling their viewers the truth about the Constitution.” Dershowiz also ripped Democrats, comparing them to the Russian secret police under the murderous Russian dictator Josef Stalin, asserting, “The Democrats are now making up crimes.”
Catsimatidis prompted Dershowitz by asking, “Do the Democrats today think that the American public is so stupid on some of the things they’re doing?”
Dershowitz replied:
<blockquote>They’re very scary. They’re very frightening to any civil libertarian. Whether you’re a Democrat or Republican; whether you come from New York or the middle of the country, you should be frightened by efforts to try to create crimes out of nothing. The latest twist was people on television, particularly CNN and MSNBC, are saying that if the president or somebody else was to name the whistleblower in the Ukrainian situation, that person would be guilty of a crime. I said in the afternoon yesterday — searching the federal criminal statutes from beginning to end — I couldn’t find the crime. It reminds me of Lavrentiy Beria, head of the KGB, said to Stalin, he said, “Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.” Which he really meant, I’ll make up the crime.</blockquote>
Beria was the chief of the murderous Soviet security and secret police organization NKVD, which was the predecessor to the KGB.
<blockquote>And so the Democrats are now making up crimes. First they made up collusion. “Ahh! Collusion. It’s a crime!” I searched the statute books. There’s no crime of collusion except when businessmen get together to collude against the anti-trust laws, but no crime of collusion with a foreign country.
Then after that, they said “obstruction of Congress.” No, no, no, no, no. Obstruction of justice is a crime; obstruction of Congress is part of our system of checks and balances. If you get a subpoena from Congress, and you’re the president or in the executive department, and you think you have an executive privilege, you have an obligation not to respond. That’s not “obstruction of Congress,” that’s checks and balances under our Constitution.
So what we’re seeing, in a desperate effort to try to find crimes against President Trump: they’re just making it up. And that means we are all in danger, because if we can make up a crime — Congressman Cohen of Tennessee said that me and others who appear on Fox essentially were co-conspirators; we’re in on it. He’s now threatening people who are commentators, a liberal Democrat like me, who’s a commentator, that we’re in on it, that we’re co-conspirators. It is such a dangerous development to civil liberties.
The ACLU should be up in arms, but they’re silent.</blockquote>
Catsimatidis commented, “The lawyer involved also was tweeting years ago or during 2017, 2018 on impeachment?”
Dershowitz replied, “Yeah, obviously this is weaponized. This is being used by people who want to weaponize it against a particular president.” He added that if the shoe were on the other foot, Democrats would be up in arms.
He continued, “CNN has banned me from their airwaves. CNN will not allow me on their network because they don’t want a liberal Democrat to be telling their viewers the truth about the Constitution. Instead, they have people out there who are just parroting the party line over and over and over again and misleading their viewers. They got virtually everything wrong on the Mueller report; they predicted everything wrong and their viewers suffer. And when their viewers are denied my voice and the voice of other people to present a somewhat different narrative, it’s just a terrible thing.”
Listen <a href="https://twitter.com/JCats2013/status/1193552789038911494">here</a>.

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