Here's the problem with communism (and sometimes socialism).  If you study these subjects, you will encounter lots of abstract theories about how best to organize society, money, property, and so on.  Some ideas might sound appealing.  But they have little to do with communism as this ideology has existed in the real world.

Better to think of these theories as maps and guidebooks for people who want to rule others.  Communism appeals to dead souls hungry for power.  These are not normal, healthy people.  When they finally seize power, everyone else becomes a victim, even as never-ending propaganda promises the perfect society.

The last people you want in control of your life are control freaks eager to be your masters.  They think it's natural they should dictate your activities.  The word slave does not appear in the contract, but that is your job in their world.  

Everyone should reflect on the bloody history of socialism and communism, so often with beautiful banners and abundant promises, but a decade later, most of the wannabe bosses are dead or missing in action, replaced by others like themselves.  The smell of death hangs over this history.  The bigger the government, the more power is taken from the people and given to commissars and bureaucrats.  These people work to increase the concentration of power in fewer hands — their hands. 

If you were a follower of Germany's Hitler, Russia's Stalin, Cambodia's Pol Pot, or China's Mao, you naturally expected to participate in their success.  But these four visionaries killed people, including devoted followers, by the millions.  Indeed, the real common denominator of the top socialists and communists is their extreme comfort level with imprisonment, suffering, and death.

Here is the essence of the matter.  Communists want you to think their theories and plans are concerned with you and your happiness.  That's a lie.  Their theories are concerned with helping them gain control of you.  A lot of these theories came from Karl Marx, a nobody around 1850, but he was the leader of a tiny socialist party.  I think he saw his theories, grandiose and highly intellectual, to be his passport to the top of the pyramid.  But he was not a nice man.  Disagreeing with his fellow socialists, he often shouted, "I will annihilate you!"  That arguably is the spirit of his teachings.

A U.K. historian writing about Hitler and Stalin concluded: "TWO SIDES OF THE SAME COIN."  These mass killers are described as "narcissistic and antisocial."  Stalin, always thinking big, mused: "The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic."  A leader like this won't notice whether you live or die.

Wikipedia indicates that both men were comfortable with torture.  The peak of totalitarian terror was reached with the Nazi concentration camps.  These ranged from labor camps to extermination camps, and they are described as aiming to "eliminate all actual, potential, and imagined enemies of the regime."

Experts refer to the camps as involving "extreme viciousness."  They also compare these camps with the Soviet Gulag system, and they highlight the use of such camps as a method of punishment and execution by Nazi and Stalinist regimes alike.  Pol Pot and Mao were similar.

Another scholar focused on the violence and terror employed by Hitler and Stalin.  The Stalinist USSR underwent an "extraordinary brutalization" of the relations between state and society "for the purpose of rapid modernization and industrialization."  Other experts discuss "mass violence, and the way that it was used by both Stalinism and Nazism."

All levels of Soviet society were affected by Stalinist repression.  At the top, high-ranking members of the Communist Party were arrested and executed under the claim that they had plotted against Stalin.  At the bottom, the peasantry suffered the artificial famine that killed many millions in Ukraine.

Point is, normal people don't want to torture people.  Live and let live — that's the central philosophy of Western culture.  Sadly, normal people are slow to see the threat from totalitarian players.  The essence of the people at the top of socialist and communist governments tends to be exploit and let die.

Looking at the track records of socialist and communist governments, you really appreciate how brilliant George Orwell was.  Both of his famous books explore the monsters at the top.  Think of the lead characters in Animal Farm: swine in every sense.

And consider the extraordinary candor of O'Brien, the Party boss in 1984.  He explains that constant pain is essential; otherwise, how do the bosses know that ordinary citizens are submitting, not merely pretending?

You probably have noticed that our public schools seem determined to teach everything that makes America look bad.  In reality, American history contains almost nothing comparable to the vast, relentless Terror that is the norm in most historical socialist and communist countries.

All the bad things done in these countries result in massive rates of alcoholism, depression, divorce, suicide, and early death.  Every good thing is promised, but in reality, there is a slow, grinding desperation in these far-left paradises, as in Venezuela today.

Teachers who seriously want to teach the history of this planet have to include material about communism.  Some say communist governments killed 100 million people; some estimates go as high as 150 million.  Schools should teach students how to recognize the oncoming catastrophe.

Another resource is a museum in Washington, D.C. called Victims of Communism.  Its website contains lots of interesting information.

The corruption and decline of our schools are thoroughly exposed by the increase in students supporting totalitarian tendencies.  It's disgusting, at least to me — young people who have everything working to take everything away from everybody else.

Black Lives Matter announced they were "trained Marxists."  That's enough to know you want to stay far away from them.

Bruce Deitrick Price's new book is Saving K–12: What happened to our public schools?  How do we fix them?  Price deconstructs bogus theories and methods on his ed site, Improve-Education.org.

Image via Flickr, Public Domain.

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