This Ideology Has Taken 100 Million Lives, It’s Time to Stop Glamorizing It

If you have been to a college campus lately, you may have seen things that made you scratch your head.  Order a drink at the college coffee stand, the barista might be wearing a shirt with Ché Guevara’s face on it.   Walk through the quad, and you might see Marxist posters or graffiti.  Read the school newspaper and a student writer might lament how hard it is to meet other Communists around campus.

Laura M. Nicolae, a Harvard student studying Applied Mathematics, wrote, “My classmates will graduate with the impression that communism represents a light-hearted critique of the status quo, rather than an empirically violent philosophy that destroyed millions of lives.” She knows the evil of communism.  Her parents both narrowly escaped a Romanian Communist regime that beat, tortured, and brainwashed its citizens.  “Roughly 100 million people died at the hands of the ideology my parents escaped. They cannot tell their story. We owe it to them to recognize that this ideology is not a fad, and their deaths are not a joke.”

Nicolae continues:

Last month marked 100 years since the Bolshevik Revolution, though college culture would give you precisely the opposite impression. Depictions of communism on campus paint the ideology as revolutionary or idealistic, overlooking its authoritarian violence. Instead of deepening our understanding of the world, the college experience teaches us to reduce one of the most destructive ideologies in human history to a one-dimensional, sanitized narrative.

American college students are not learning this very important fact. Nicolae writes:

According to a YouGov poll, only half of millennials believe that communism was a problem, and about a third believe that President George W. Bush killed more people than Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, who killed 20 million. If you ask millennials how many people communism killed, 75 percent will undershoot.

Perhaps before joking about communist revolutions, we should remember that Stalin’s secret police tortured “traitors” in secret prisons by sticking needles under their fingernails or beating them until their bones were broken. Lenin seized food from the poor, causing a famine in the Soviet Union that induced desperate mothers to eat their own children and peasants to dig up corpses for food. In every country that communism was tried, it resulted in massacres, starvation, and terror.

It’s time for professors and students to look reality in the face and tell the truth about this horrific, evil ideology.  Communism, however, is not a way to develop edginess points to impress your hipster friends.  It’s responsible for the deaths of a hundred million people.

American college students, grow up and face the facts.

Image Credit: Manuel Faisco

Hat Tip: The Harvard Crimson