The Truth About Communism

Now, Nietzsche said back in the late 1800s that after he said that God was dead—and I suppose that would also mean the theory of suffering that I outlined at the beginning that is at the basis of Judeo-Christian civilization—that God was dead and that people had killed him and that we'd never find enough water to wash away the blood. It's a paraphrase, but I've got the basic message right.

He also said there'd be two consequences of that nihilism: because there's no Transcendent meaning and a move to totalitarianism; because people can't tolerate nihilism. He said the most likely pathway to totalitarianism would be communism. Essentially, he didn't quite use those words, but he meant that—the words are close enough. He said socialism, but I'm going to use communism to distinguish it from democratic socialism. He said that probably tens, hundreds, tens of millions of people would die in the 20th century as we played out that experiment. Then he said, "But it might be worth it if we learn something from it." Rough man! I mean, unbelievable. I cannot figure out how in the world he knew that that was going to happen, especially so far in advance.

But Dostoevsky knew the same thing. He wrote this book called "The Devils" or "The Possessed." You could read that; it's a great book. It takes about 150 pages to get going, but once it does, everything snaps together after that, you know? Then it moves. It's basically his prophecy about an examination of the kind of person who had arisen in the aftermath of the death of God in Russia who would lead the Communist Revolution. That's essentially it. It's brilliant. It's terrifying, and it's a great intro to Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago," which describes what did happen when those sort of people took over the revolution.

So, let's look at what happened after the revolution. We might say, "Well, how about we replicate the experiment a few times?" Because, you know how it is; if you're running a scientific experiment, you want to find out what something does if you allow it to behave. You don't want to just run it once because maybe there was something specific about those conditions that led to the outcome. You want to generalize it across multiple circumstances.

So we might say, "Well, let's take this set of ideas, and let's run it on a large scale over a very long period of time in a variety of exceptionally diverse cultures and languages." So let's do that.

Okay, well, we could first start with the Soviets. People even now, because it's like the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, are celebrating Lenin. It's like, "That's not good! That's like celebrating Hitler." Okay, I'm dead serious about that. It's not good. And the fact that people can dare to think that that's okay means that there's something wrong with the way that we look at history.

Lenin was a monster. If you want to know about that, you can read Solzhenitsyn's writings about Lenin. Because the Communist apologists say, "Well, it wasn't Lenin. Lenin was a good guy; he was all motivated by love of the working class." It's like, well, his henchman was Stalin, and if your henchman is Stalin, you're not a good guy. Lenin was around during the early collectivization, and if you read what he wrote, you'll find out that he was perfectly willing to have any number of people die as long as his ideological system could be brought into being. So there's no celebrating Lenin.

There's no "We're cool young Marxist hip revolutionaries, and he's our idol." It's like there's none of that—not if you know anything, not if you're decent. There was the death of the kulaks; I told you about that. There was a Ukrainian famine—that's six million gone. There was the rise of the gulag state because it turned out that Russia, the Soviet Union, couldn't run on the principles that it had laid down as sacrosanct—they just didn't work. So you had to enslave everybody and run your economy as a slave state, essentially, and try not to kill the people in the gulags so fast that you can't suck some productive labor out of them.

There's the death of tens of millions of people. We don't even know; the estimates range from 15 to 60 million. And like, we won't get too picky even about the numbers because after the first 10 million, you kind of made your point. And the fact that we don't know between 15 and 60 is actually an indication of the horror above it because our count is off by tens of millions, and that's only within the last century.

Then there was the 1956 crackdown on Hungary and the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. Then there was the whole thermonuclear Holocaust thing that was going on at the same time. The fact that in 1962 and in 1984, we were seconds away from complete annihilation—right during the Cuban Missile Crisis—the keys were in the intercontinental ballistic missile release systems. Castro, as he admitted to Jimmy Carter—in case any of you are Castro fans, which you shouldn't be—said he was perfectly willing to have Cuba annihilated if it would have meant the defeat of the United States.

Then in 1984, approximately— I may have the date exactly wrong—the Russians received an indication from their early warning systems that the Americans had launched five thermonuclear missiles. One Russian decided that it was a mistake and refused to launch the retaliation, and he just died about two weeks ago. So, you know, that was pretty close.

So that was experiment number one. Let's say that that wasn't good—that experiment. Let's put it that way; it wasn't good. It was exactly the antithesis of good. It was precisely the antithesis of good. But that wasn't all. I mean, there’s the People's Republic of China. That's a different country—like, seriously a different country, right? Different tradition, different language. How many people died in China under Mao? No one knows—same issue with the Soviet Union, although Mao was a bigger monster than Stalin. And that's impressive, you know, because there's Hitler, there's Stalin, and there's Mao. Of the three, Mao was probably the worst.

He's still revered in China. Maybe that accounts for their affinity for North Korea, which could still destroy us all, the remnants of that horrible state. Maybe a hundred million people died in China during the Great Leap Forward—that's a hell of a leap forward. Well, maybe it wasn't 100 million; you know, maybe it was only 40 million. But as I said before, when you're counting in the tens of millions, your point's already made.

And then there was Cambodia and The Killing Fields and Bulgaria and East Germany and Romania and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea—that's North Korea—and Vietnam and Ethiopia, Hungary, etc., etc., etc. It was never a successful communist state. Cuba, I suppose, came closest, but it was radically—the Soviets poured money into Cuba, so that doesn't really count.

So then the first question was: well, are these Marxists motivated by love or hatred? Well, is it love or hatred that produces 100 million dead people? And is that enough evidence or not? And if it's not enough evidence, if you think to yourself, "Well, that's not enough evidence. It was never really given its proper try." It's like, well, what would have been a proper try?

See, I always think when I hear someone say that, I know what you think. You think in your delusional arrogance that you understand the Marxist doctrines better than anyone else ever has and that if you were the one implementing those doctrines, you would have ushered in the utopia. That's what you mean when you say that. And you know, they say, and there's an idea in the New Testament that there's a sin—it's the sin against the Holy Ghost. If you commit that sin, no one really knows what it is, and you can't be forgiven.

I would say, well, if you want a candidate for the sin against the Holy Ghost in the 21st century, the statement "Communism, real communism, was never tried," with the underlying idea that if you had been the person implementing it, it would have worked. I think that's a pretty good contender for something for which you should never be forgiven.