March 1, 2013, 12:12 pm ET
I have written several pieces about China, from my most recent post on “birth tourism” to my coverage of the It’s A Girl documentary and the work Women’s Rights Without Frontiers is doing to save baby girls.
China is a Communist country. The wealthy live lavishly; the poor live in the Stone Age. Many aspects of life in China are tightly controlled, most famously reproduction. The government’s commitment to population control has led to forced abortion and sterilization, sex-selection abortion of females or “gendercide,” and rampant infanticide, also usually targeting females.
The horror of such a place is difficult for us to imagine, but it is a reality, every day, for over one billion people.
How? How could such a nightmarish Orwellian state exist in 2012, when every day we pride ourselves on moving forward and becoming more and more enlightened?
The answer is simple: Communism.
Nowadays, Communism is seen as more of a punchline than a threat. You probably have an uncle on Facebook who is always ranting that Obama is a Communist, and he probably types in all caps and embarrasses your family.
Or maybe you were taught in school that the “Red Scare” of the mid-20th century was a shameful period in our nation’s history. You probably read Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and heard “McCarthyism” compared to the Salem Witch Trials.
In college, a wise, bearded professor may have explained that Communism got a bad rap. Maybe he even had you read some carefully chosen passages from Marx, and you thought, “This doesn’t sound so bad! It sounds fair and reasonable!”
And then maybe you saw a movie, like Good Night and Good Luck, and felt outraged by the injustice of blacklisting in Hollywood – all those innocent people accused of Communism and their careers destroyed!
The truth, unfortunately, sounds like something written by a conspiracy theorist in a tinfoil hat. The truth is that Communists really did infiltrate the government and institutions of higher learning. The truth is that many entertainers really were Communist spies and sympathizers. The extent of the infiltration is vast and complex.
The Venona papers, released in 1995, revealed detailed communiqués between Moscow and her spies in our government. You have probably never heard of the Venona papers.
The truth is that you have personally been influenced by Communism, precisely because Communists wanted you to be.
How many people were killed in the Holocaust? What was the name of the evil Nazi doctor at Auschwitz? Name two concentration camps.
You could probably answer all three of those without too much effort. Try these:
How many people were killed in the Great Terror? Who was the founder and first leader of the Red Army? Approximately how many Gulag slave labor camps were there in the USSR?
My guess is you can’t answer more than one of those questions, if that many. (For the record: anywhere from 13 to 20 million; Leon Trotsky; about 30,000.)
In high school, I was assigned one novel about the Russian Gulag: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Beyond that, I don’t recall ever learning much about the horror that was Soviet Russia.
I was shown multiple documentaries on Hitler, the Third Reich, and the concentration camps. I was inundated with literature about the Holocaust and how evil it was, from The Diary of Anne Frank to Elie Wiesel’s Night to Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. I should have been taught these things. I’m glad that I was.
I was an attentive student. I wanted to learn. But at the age of 30, with 13 years of public school education and two years of public college under my belt, I knew next to nothing about the horrors of Communism in the USSR and beyond. All I “knew” is that we were the bad guys in Viet Nam, and our shameful history should serve as a cautionary tale. I didn’t know how/when China fell to Communism. I didn’t know what happened in Venezuela, Chile, or Cuba. I didn’t know what the GRU was, or who Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss were, or about the relationship between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
I can tell you the name of Hitler’s wife, the German legend hanging above the gates at Auschwitz, and the type of gas used in the “showers.” But I did not know who Vladimir Lenin was.
Then I met a man – he is now my husband – who is basically a Tazmanian devil of military and world history. He is the most well-read person I have ever met. Compared to him, I am the intellectual equivalent of Honey Boo Boo’s mama.
It was from him that I finally became exposed to the terrifying history of the Soviet Union, and learned how the ideas that led to tens of millions of deaths began to infiltrate our own culture. The more I learned, the more I began to realize why I hadn’t learned it before.
The Black Book of Communism, written by a group of distinguished European historians, compiled with great care a body count of the regime’s victims and came up with a staggering number: between 85 and 100 million people were killed by Communist regimes in the 20th century.
Today, the former official state newspaper of the Soviet Communist party, Pravda, is urging Americans to turn away from the road we are on, to reject the socialist policies we have begun to espouse. They are warning us because they have learned the hard way what Communism is and what it does to people. They are warning us that Communism is infiltrating our culture, as it has all along.
So what does all this have to do with abortion? Absolutely everything. China boasts both a Communist government and 7.9 million abortions annually – more than any other country. Eastern Europe, much of which retains strong Communist influences in both government and culture, has the highest abortion rate in the world. In Communism’s atheistic, collectivist philosophy, the liberties of the individual are superseded by the “common good,” and human life becomes disposable.
When there is no God, it is up to man to create paradise on earth. This is called Utopianism. And if there is no immortal soul, it becomes okay to eradicate some people to make life better for others. This is the disturbing worldview that led mankind to atrocities such as terror famine, death camps, and rampant – sometimes forced – abortion.
It is dangerous that we now find it laughable to see Communism as a menace. In fact, there is a new show premiering soon on the FX Network, “The Americans,” in which Communist spies in the U.S. are the series’s heroes.
The horrors of Communism aren’t over, and the people of China – especially the unborn – continue to be victimized, amassing a body count that will dwarf the approximately 65 million killed under Mao Zedong.
It’s time we recognize we have been duped into viewing Communism as a silly, antiquated, harmless curiosity. The truth is that it’s a serious threat to life and liberty, destroying both wherever it goes.
For an easy and inexpensive way to help women and the unborn in China, join the Save A Girl Campaign at Women’s Rights Without Frontiers.
For more on the history and consequences of Communism, check out Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder; Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million by Martin Amis; The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine by Robert Conquest; Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies by M. Stanton Evans; and most especially Witness by Whittaker Chambers.
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