Seeing the Light...

awareness and importance of history...seeing yesterday in today's happenings

Several of my buddies served in the Vietnam War, and I have the deepest respect, admiration, and gratitude for their service. In the same breath, I will also admit that, as a young man, I was against U.S. involvement in the war. Perhaps because of my youthful idealism, I even had leftist leanings with a romantic view of the communist mantra of creating classless societies. According to Marx, it was capitalism that was responsible for all inequality and suffering.

It took me several years to see the light. But it saddens me now to realize that our country and many of our youth are ignorant of the evil inherent in communist ideology. I was recently made aware of a Prager University video that asked the question, “Why Isn’t Communism as Hated as Nazism?”

After all, Communism has deprived more people of human rights. It has tortured, starved, and killed more people than any other ideology in history. According to “The Black Book of Communism,” published by Harvard University Press, the numbers of people murdered—not people killed in combat, but ordinary civilians living in communist regimes were

· Latin America 150,000;

· Vietnam 1,000,000;

· Eastern Europe 1,000,000;

· Ethiopia 1,500,000;

· North Korea 2,000,000;

· Cambodia 2,000,000;

· The Soviet Union 20,000,000;

· China 65,000,000.

Most scholars believe these numbers are conservative. For example, in the Ukraine alone, the Soviets starved 5 to 6 million people within a 2-year period. Ukrainians are now coming forward and confessing that many of them ate the flesh of their own children to survive. Vietnamese also describe how peasants were buried alive if they didn’t support the communists. And we now know that Mao Zedong regularly tortured opponents who refused to accept his absolute control.

Why are we in this country so reluctant to condemn such evil?