The specter of communism did not disappear with the disintegration of the Communist Party in Eastern Europe
Introduction
It has been fully one century since the Communist Party seized power in the Soviet Union. According to records compiled by the U.S. Congress, communist regimes were responsible for the deaths of at least 100 million people. [1] The Black Book of Communism details this history of murder. [2]
From documents declassified by the governments of nations in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, as well as official records on the victims of communist political campaigns in China and North Korea, the public has gained a good picture of the Communist Party’s addiction to killing.
Communist totalitarianism is often compared to that of the Nazis. While there are many parallels to be found, there is one crucial distinction that is often overlooked: The Nazis aimed to eliminate the Jewish people, but the goal of communism goes beyond physical slaughter.
People of faith do not consider physical demise to be one’s true death, since the soul goes to heaven or is born again in the cycle of reincarnation. The Communist Party uses killing as an instrument to plant the seeds of terror in the minds of the people, forcing them to accept its evil ideology. Through the destruction of morality, people’s souls are fated to damnation. The Communist Party aims to destroy not just a man’s physical body, but also his soul.
An additional characteristic of the Communist Party is the intensity with which it carries out internal purges and selects for the cruelest of leaders. It is difficult for many to understand the rationale behind the barbarity inflicted by the Communist Party upon its own ranks, including those who became victims simply for deviating from the Party on specific issues, while otherwise being wholly loyal to the Party and its leadership.
One reason is that the Communist Party, in its rebellion against gods and humankind, possesses an instinctual fear that its doom is always around the corner. To reinforce itself, the Party needs to recruit individuals with no regard for moral right and wrong. These individuals are distinguished in the process of mass killing, and their elevation to positions of leadership enables the specter of communism to ensure the perpetuation of its earthly tyranny.
In 1989, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) cadres who refused to participate in the June 4th Tiananmen Square massacre were purged. Jiang Zemin, who demonstrated his cruelty during the events, was promoted to become leader of the CCP. After Jiang began the persecution of Falun Gong in 1999, he promoted officials such as Luo Gan and Zhou Yongkang to high positions, as they had demonstrated their ability to commit the most brutal crimes in the persecution.
Another motive for killing is to recruit participants from general society, as was done during the Cultural Revolution. By committing murder and other crimes, the masses implicated themselves as accomplices to the CCP’s savagery, and the most brutal perpetrators became the staunchest followers of the Party. Even today, many former Red Guards who committed assault and murder during the Cultural Revolution express no remorse for their crimes, saying that they have no regrets about the events of their youth.
Furthermore, by killing its victims openly and deliberately, the Communist Party cows the general population into obedience.
All this allows us to expound on a general principle: Throughout history, killing has occurred under tyrannical governments or during times of war because there was an enemy to be defeated. It is the characteristic of the Communist Party that it must have an enemy, and if there are no enemies, it must invent them so that it can continue to kill.
In a country like China, with its long history and rich culture, the Communist Party could not achieve its aims without continuous killing. Traditionally, the Chinese people believed in and revered the divine. Steeped in a cultural heritage of 5,000 years, the Chinese people would not otherwise tolerate the existence of the barbaric and blasphemous Communist Party. The CCP’s sole means of maintaining its rule, as learned from the Soviet trial run, is the use of mass murder.
1. The Violent Foundations of Communist Rule
Being the embodiment of an evil specter, communism’s starting point could not be anything other than dishonorable. After Karl Marx proclaimed that “a specter is haunting Europe—the specter of communism,” bandits and ruffians established the Paris Commune, laying waste to the French capital and its unparalleled works of art and culture. In Russia and China, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and the CCP seized power through despicable acts of conspiracy and bloodshed.
a. The Rise of the Soviet Communists
In February 1917, food shortages and deteriorating working conditions drove Russian industrial workers to go on strike. As the turmoil spread across the country, Czar Nicholas II abdicated, and the Russian Provisional Government was established. Learning of these events, Vladimir Lenin immediately returned to Russia from exile in Switzerland.
At the time, World War I was raging. The countries between Russia and Switzerland were all belligerents. In late 2007, the German magazine Der Spiegel revealed a 90-year-old secret: Kaiser Wilhelm II, who regarded Russia as a grave threat, realized that Lenin could bring disaster to Russia, so he allowed Lenin to travel through Germany to Sweden, then Finland, and eventually back to Russia. Wilhelm II also provided money and munitions to Lenin. By the end of 1917, Lenin had received 26 million marks from Germany. [3]
Winston Churchill had this to say about Germany’s role in Lenin’s return: “They used the most lethal weapon in Russia. They shipped Lenin back in a tightly sealed truck as if shipping a type of plague virus to Russia.” [4]
Lenin carried out a coup on November 7, 1917, or October 25 by the traditional Julian calendar. With the October Revolution, Lenin overthrew the provisional government and established the world’s first communist regime.
But in the democratic election for the Russian Constituent Assembly, the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) won a plurality of national votes over Lenin’s Bolshevik Party, which controlled the government administration. Out of an electorate of 44.4 million people, 40 percent voted for the SRs, with the Bolsheviks losing by a 20 percent margin.
After this setback, in the Russian Constituent Assembly meeting on January 5, 1918, Lenin trampled on his promises and declared the Constituent Assembly an “enemy of the people.” Having prepared in advance to enact martial law on the day of the Assembly’s meeting in the Russian capital of Petrograd, the Bolsheviks mobilized troops and disbanded the Constituent Assembly by force, destroying the democratic process in Russia.
The October Revolution and subsequent Leninist takeover was the origin of all violent communist movements throughout the world in the 20th century. It triggered the international rise of communism and the countless catastrophes that followed.
b. The Chinese Communist Party Seizes Power
After 1917, when the Soviet Union was just established, it exported revolution to China by making use of the fact that the Republic of China had joined the Third Communist International, or Comintern.
The Bolsheviks dispatched Grigori Voitinsky to China to establish a local communist organization. Then it sent Mikhail Borodin to engineer an alliance between the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) and the Soviet Union. Under this arrangement, the nascent Chinese Communist Party was given opportunities for rapid growth by subverting the Kuomintang.
During World War II, in the eight years that the Kuomintang waged all-out war against the invading Japanese army, the CCP used the conflict as cover while it expanded its forces. When the Japanese invaded China, the Red Army was on the verge of defeat, but at the time of China’s victory, the communist forces boasted 1.32 million regular troops and a 2.6 million-strong militia force. Following Japan’s surrender, the CCP used the cover of peace talks with the Kuomintang to covertly expand its forces further.
Meanwhile, the CCP’s diplomatic efforts led the United States and the Soviet Union to abandon their policies that supported the Nationalists. In 1949, the CCP finally defeated the Kuomintang government forces, founding the evilest totalitarian communist regime on earth.
At this high point in the history of the world communist movement, it controlled one-third of humanity and the world’s land area, as it comprised Russia and China, the world’s largest nations by size and population. Communist governments extended across large swaths of Europe and Asia, and many countries in Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia became clients or allies of the CPSU or CCP.
Millions of people gave their lives on the battlefields of World War II, yet the unexpected result was the meteoric expansion of totalitarian communism.
2. The Slaughter of the Working Class
From Marx’s theories to the rhetoric of the totalitarian communist regimes, all were replete with the principle of reliance on the proletarian workers and peasants, and promises to represent their interests. But in practice, it was the working class that suffered the greatest abuses under the communist system.
a. Suppressing the Soviet Workers and Peasants
In 1918, after Lenin illegally disbanded the Constituent Assembly, it was the workers who were the first to resist the communist dictatorship. Protesting the dissolution of the assembly, tens of thousands of workers from Petrograd and Moscow held parades and demonstrations. Bolshevik soldiers cracked down on the unrest with lethal force, gunning down demonstrators and filling the streets of Petrograd and Moscow with the workers’ blood.
The country’s largest labor union, the All-Russian Union of Railwaymen, announced a strike to protest the Bolshevik coup and gained the broad support of many other labor organizations. As it did with the workers of Petrograd and Moscow, the CPSU put down the strikers with its armed forces, and the All-Russian Union and other independent unions were banned.
Remaining labor organizations were gradually forced under the control of the CPSU. In the spring of 1919, starving workers in cities across Russia went on strike several times to demand the same rations as Red Army soldiers, the rights to free speech and democratic elections, and the abolition of political privileges afforded to the communists. All these movements were handled by the Cheka secret police, who jailed or shot the strikers.
In the summer of 1918, Russia faced a massive food shortage due to the ongoing civil war. In June, with the country on the verge of famine, Lenin dispatched Josef Stalin to Tsaritsyn to seize grain from the Volga basin, traditionally a breadbasket of Russian agriculture.
The tyranny of the CPSU invited resistance from the peasants. In August 1918, peasants in the Penza region rose up in an armed revolt, and the uprising quickly spread to the surrounding areas. The CPSU sent troops to suppress the uprisings, and Lenin sent a telegram to the Penza Bolsheviks. Here is British historian Robert Service’s translation of the original Russian telegram:
- Hang (and make sure that the hanging takes place in full view of the people) no fewer than 100 known landlords, rich men, bloodsuckers.
- Publish their names.
- Seize all their grain from them.
- Designate hostages in accordance with yesterday’s telegram.
Do it in such a fashion that for hundreds of kilometers around, the people might see, tremble, know, shout … [5]
Before the October Revolution, Tambov was one of the richest provinces in Russia. In order to seize its grain, the Soviet Union organized many “grain-requisitioning teams” and sent them to the region. Over 50,000 Tambov farmers formed local militias to fight the CPSU’s requisitioning teams.
In June 1921, faced with the task of suppressing the Tambov Rebellion, the Soviet regime suggested that military commander Mikhail Tukhachevsky fight the “hooligans” with poison gas. Tukhachevsky’s use of chemical weapons, combined with fires that burned across the region, rendered much of Tambov completely desolate. An estimated 100,000 Tambov peasants who took part in the resistance and their relatives were imprisoned or exiled. Around 15,000 people died in the insurgency.
The widespread slaughter in the Soviet Union served as a comprehensive model for the CCP’s coming persecution of the Chinese workers and peasants.
b. Following the Soviet Model
China has a broad and profound culture with a history of 5,000 years. Its people are steeped in a tradition of worshipping gods and revering the divine. The specter of communism, incapable of conquering 5,000 years of tradition using conspiracy alone, dealt with traditional Chinese culture using systematic violence.
The CCP targeted the elites of society who served as the bearers of traditional culture, destroyed the physical artifacts of Chinese civilization, and severed the connections between the Chinese people and their gods. China’s traditional heritage was replaced with a “Party culture” to be spread among the survivors of the CCP’s mass killings, turning the young into treacherous “wolf cubs” who serve as the specter’s pawns in the continued destruction of humanity.
Immediately after taking power, the CCP began to invent enemies, beginning with the murder of elites. In the countryside, it slaughtered landlords and gentry. In the cities, it killed businessmen, creating an atmosphere of terror and looting the wealth of civil society.
To rouse the peasants to kill landlords and “rich farmers,” and support the new communist regime, the CCP implemented a so-called land reform that promised the peasantry their own land. But after murdering the landowners, the CCP claimed the land was to be turned over to the peasants in the form of “cooperatives.” In practice, this meant the land still did not belong to the peasants.
In March 1950, the CCP issued the Directive on the Strict Suppression of Counter-Revolutionary Elements, also known as the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries, which focused on killing the landlords and rich peasants in the countryside. The CCP announced that by the end of 1952, more than 2.4 million “counterrevolutionaries” had been eliminated. In fact, more than 5 million people, accounting for nearly 1 percent of the total Chinese population, had been murdered.
After killing the landlords and rich peasants in the countryside, the CCP launched the Three-Anti and Five-Anti campaigns to slaughter wealthy urbanites. In Shanghai alone, 876 people committed suicide during the movement, from January to April 1951, according to incomplete statistics. Among them, many capitalists committed suicide with all of their family members.
The CCP did not stop with the extermination of landlords and capitalists; it also robbed the wealth of peasants, small merchants, and craftsmen. After the mass slaughter, the vast majority of the working class remained impoverished.
3. The Absolute Brutality of the Communist Party
a. Atrocities of Soviet Communism
The Gulags: Inspiration for Hitler’s Death Camps
On September 5, 1918, Lenin ordered the establishment of the first Soviet concentration camp on the Solovetsky Islands for the incarceration, torture, and slaughter of political prisoners and dissidents who opposed the October Revolution. The CPSU followed this up with a constellation of concentration camps across the Soviet Union — the notorious gulag labor camps of the Stalinist era.
The gulag system (the term “gulag” being an abbreviation in Russian for the Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Settlements) grew to a monstrous scale under the leadership of Stalin as the CPSU intensified its political terror and carried out ever greater purges. By the time of Stalin’s death in 1953, there were 170 gulag administrations containing over 30,000 individual camps scattered across the Soviet Union, in what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn would famously describe as “the Gulag Archipelago” in his book by the same name.
In his documentary work, Solzhenitsyn listed 31 different methods that the Soviet secret police used to exhaust their prisoners’ strength and force them to confess to any crime. [6]
Those sent to the gulags suffered from a constant shortage of food and clothing while being forced to perform heavy labor 12 to 16 hours a day in the freezing cold of Russian winters. The death toll was enormous. Many people were imprisoned along with their entire families, with husbands incarcerated and wives exiled. Not even the elderly, some already in their 80s, were spared. The condemned ranged from high-ranking Party elites, state leaders, and military commanders, down to completely ordinary citizens from every walk of life, including religious believers, engineers, technicians, doctors, students, professors, factory workers, and peasants.
It is common for people to believe that concentration camps were a Nazi creation, but in reality, the Soviet gulag system was the precursor to similar forms of repression around the world, in both communist and non-communist regimes. According to former Soviet military intelligence officer and popular historian Viktor Suvorov, before World War II, Hitler sent Gestapo officers to Russia to tour and study the experiences accumulated by the Soviets in building the gulag.
According to conservative estimates, over 500,000 prisoners perished in the gulag system between 1930 and 1940, during the years of Stalin’s prewar terror. The system was disbanded in 1960. In 2013, a website of the Russian state media reported that more than 15 million people had been sentenced and imprisoned in the gulag labor camps, and more than 1.5 million had died.
Killing by Famine
Communist regimes often killed people through famine. Between 1932 and 1933, the Ukrainian region suffered from a genocidal mass starvation, known as the Holodomor, caused by the Soviet regime.
After the civil war, the CPSU’s imposition of collective farming met with widespread resistance from the Ukrainian peasantry. To deal with this, the Soviet regime classified a majority of skilled farmers as “kulaks” and exiled them to Western Siberia and the republics of Central Asia. The removal of the kulaks was a huge loss to Ukrainian agriculture, and in 1932, production plummeted.
In the winter of 1932–1933, the Soviet government cut off food supplies to Ukraine and set up security fences along the borders of the republic. At first, Ukrainians survived on the stored vegetables and potatoes in their homes, but these were soon requisitioned by Party authorities. A large number of farmers starved to death. In desperation, people turned to eating the dug-up carcasses of cats, dogs, and livestock—and even cannibalism.
The authorities prevented villagers from traveling to the cities in search of food. Many people starved to death as they walked along the railways.
The Holodomor famine turned more than 1 million Ukrainian children into orphans. Many of them became homeless and had no choice but to beg for food in the cities. To eliminate this embarrassment, Stalin signed orders authorizing police to shoot children as young as 12.
Estimates of the death toll during the Holodomor range from about 2.5 million to 4.8 million. During the famine, bodies of the victims could be seen all over the streets of Kharkov, the Ukrainian capital.
The Great Terror Turns on the Soviet Elite
The purpose of the communist specter is to destroy all of mankind, including eventually its own followers. This played out during the Stalinist era, as the CPSU carried out bloody purges across its own ranks. Beginning in 1928, Stalin targeted the upper echelons of the communist leadership.
Out of the 1,966 delegates to the 17th Congress of the CPSU in 1934, 1,108 were arrested on charges of counter-revolutionary activity. Of the 139 members of the Central Committee elected at the 17th Congress, four out of every five were shot.
The Soviet Politburo had elected 31 members between 1919 and 1935, of whom 20 were killed in Stalin’s purges. Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s secret police chief, once said, “Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.” Except for Stalin, all of the Politburo members remaining at the time of Lenin’s death in 1924 — Lev Kamenev, Grigory Zinoviev, Alexei Rykov, Mikhail Tomsky, and Leon Trotsky — were executed or assassinated by 1940.
No section of society was spared in the Great Terror — repression in the religious, scientific, educational, academic, and artistic fields preceded the purges that gutted the military and political elite. The main victims of Stalin’s terror were ordinary Soviet citizens.
How many were arrested, killed, imprisoned, or exiled by Stalin in the Great Terror? Even today there are no complete records or answers. On the eve of the dissolution of the Soviet Union in June 1991, KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov said that between 1920 and 1953, about 4.2 million people were “suppressed” — including 2 million during the Great Terror alone.
Alexander Yakovlev, a reformist politician in the Soviet and Yeltsin eras, said in a 2000 interview that the victims of the Stalinist repression numbered at least 20 million. [7]
b. Atrocities of the CCP
From 1949 — the year the CCP regime was established — to 1966, tens of millions of Chinese lost their lives in the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries, the Three-Anti and Five-Anti campaigns, the Anti-Rightist Campaign, and the great famine caused by the Great Leap Forward.
This period was followed by bloody struggles within the CCP. As a new generation of Chinese — raised to be atheist “wolf cubs” indoctrinated in the education and Party culture of communism — came of age, the communist specter launched a campaign of even more rampant killing and destruction to wipe out 5,000 years’ worth of traditional Chinese culture.
The Great Chinese Famine
Between 1959 and 1962, China experienced the world’s deadliest famine. To deceive the world, the CCP still claims it was “three years of natural disasters.”
In fact, in 1958, the CCP had rashly begun the People’s Commune movement and the Great Leap Forward campaign. These wild schemes, which depleted grain stocks and decimated Chinese agricultural production, were supported by a deluge of false reports written by officials across all levels of leadership, from rural regions to the cities. The CCP used these reports as justification for collecting grain from the peasants, who were forced to turn in their food, seeds, and animal feed to the regime.
The CCP’s administrative organs at all levels sent teams to the countryside. They used torture and interrogations to squeeze the last morsels of food from the hapless peasants. Following the example set by the Soviet communists, the CCP prevented villagers from entering cities in search of food, causing the mass death of families and even whole villages. Cannibalism was widespread, and the corpses of famine victims littered the countryside. When peasants were caught stealing to survive, they were killed.
The grain seized by the government was traded for large amounts of Soviet weaponry or for gold that the CCP used to pay off debts as it turned a blind eye to the loss of Chinese lives. In just three years, the Great Chinese Famine had wiped out tens of millions of people.
The Cultural Revolution’s Fanatical Slaughter and Cultural Genocide
On May 16, 1966, the CCP published the “Notice of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party,” which marked the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. In August, with the children of high-ranking CCP cadres leading the way, students from secondary schools in Beijing formed a band of Red Guards. The mob went on a rampage across Beijing, in a frenzy of ransacking, assault, and killing. By the end of the month, known as “Red August,” thousands of people in Beijing had been murdered.
In the Beijing district of Daxing, 325 people were killed in six days, between August 27 and September 1, across 48 production brigades of 13 people’s communes. The dead varied in age from just 38 days to 80 years, and 22 families were wiped out completely. The Red Guards bludgeoned, stabbed, or strangled their victims. They killed infants and toddlers by stepping on one leg and tearing the child in two.
As the specter of communism directed people to beat and kill, it erased their human compassion, brainwashing them with the slogan of “treating the enemy with the numb cruelty of the harsh winter.” With every crime against humanity, the CCP displaced the traditional culture and moral virtue of the Chinese. Envenomed by Party culture, many people became tools of murder.
When most people see or learn about the bloodthirsty deeds of the totalitarian communist state, they are at a complete loss as to how anyone could descend to such inhuman barbarism. The truth behind this is that they were possessed by rotten demons and degenerate spirits controlled by the communist specter.
Estimating the ravages of the Cultural Revolution is a daunting task. Most studies suggest a minimum death toll of 2 million. R. J. Rummel, an American professor who has researched mass killing, wrote in his book China’s Bloody Century that the Cultural Revolution claimed the lives of 7.73 million people.
Dong Baoxun, an associate professor of China’s Shandong University, and Ding Longjia, deputy director of the Shandong Party History Research Office, co-authored a 1997 book titled Exonerate the Innocent — Rehabilitate the Wrongly Accused and Sentenced. It quoted Ye Jianying, then vice chairman of the CCP Central Committee, as making the following statements during the closing ceremony of the Central Working Conference on December 13, 1978: “Two years and seven months of comprehensive investigation by the Central Committee have determined that 20 million people died in the Cultural Revolution, over 100 million suffered political persecution, … and 800 billion yuan were wasted.”
According to the Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping, from August 21 to 23, 1980, CCP leader Deng Xiaoping gave two interviews with Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci in the Great Hall of the People.
Fallaci asked, “How many people died in the Cultural Revolution?” Deng replied: “How many people really died in the Cultural Revolution? The figure is astronomical and can never be estimated.”
Deng described a typical case: Kang Sheng, the head of the CCP’s secret police, accused the party secretary of Yunnan Province, Zhao Jianmin, of treason and of being an agent of the Kuomintang. Not only was Zhao imprisoned, but his downfall also impacted 1.38 million people throughout the province, of whom 17,000 were persecuted to death and 60,000 were beaten to the point of disability.
Unprecedented Evil: The Persecution of Falun Gong
Decades of murderous violence and atheist indoctrination by the Chinese Communist Party have taken a massive toll on the moral fabric of society, bringing it far below the standards gods require of humanity. Even many of those who still believe in gods are ignorant of genuine faith, since they are trapped in the sham religious organizations controlled by the CCP. Should the situation continue to degenerate, humanity will face certain extinction, as prophesied in the holy texts of every ancient civilization.
During the spring of 1992, to restore human morality and provide a path to salvation, Mr. Li Hongzhi taught Falun Gong, also called Falun Dafa, a spiritual practice based on belief in the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance.
Uncomplicated to learn, Falun Gong spread across China in a few short years. As practitioners, along with their relatives and peers, experienced miracles of improved health and character, tens of millions of people took up the practice in China and around the world. With so many people practicing cultivation in Falun Gong and holding themselves to higher standards, society began to rediscover its moral bearings.
But the specter of communism is bent on preventing man from being saved by the Creator. For this reason, it destroyed traditional cultures and corrupted human moral values. Naturally, it sees Falun Gong as its greatest adversary.
In July 1999, then-CCP leader Jiang Zemin unilaterally ordered the systematic persecution of Falun Gong and its practitioners. In a brutal campaign that covered every corner of China, the CCP applied every method imaginable in its efforts to fulfill Jiang’s directive: “Kill them physically, bankrupt them financially, and ruin their reputations.”
Party mouthpieces subjected the Chinese people to constant propaganda filled with hatred and slander of Falun Gong, rejecting its principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance in favor of falsehood, wickedness, and struggle.
The evil specter brought society to new lows in moral degeneration. In an atmosphere of hatred and repression reactivated from dormancy, the Chinese people turned a blind eye to the persecution happening around them, betraying Buddhas and gods. Some sacrificed their conscience and participated in the campaign against Falun Gong, ignorant of the fact that they had damned themselves in the process.
The communist specter did not limit the persecution to China. It silenced the nations of the free world while the Chinese regime engaged in the frenzied jailing, murder, and torture of Falun Gong practitioners. Sated with economic incentives, the free world took in the Party’s lies, giving the persecutors free rein to commit the worst crimes.
In the persecution of Falun Gong, the CCP introduced an evil never before seen: live organ harvesting. As the largest group of people imprisoned for their faith in China, Falun Gong practitioners are killed on demand, vivisected on the operating tables of state and military hospitals, and their organs are sold for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
On July 7, 2006, Canadian lawyers David Matas and David Kilgour (former Canadian secretary of state, Asia-Pacific) published a report titled Bloody Harvest: The Killing of Falun Gong for Their Organs. Examining 18 types of evidence, they shed light on the CCP’s monstrosity, calling it “a disgusting form of evil … new to this planet.”
Matas and Kilgour, working with international investigators, published the report An Update to ‘The Slaughter’ and ‘Bloody Harvest’ in June 2016. Running over 680 pages and containing more than 2,400 references, it proved beyond any doubt the reality and scale of the live organ harvesting carried out by the Chinese communist regime.
On June 13, 2016, the U.S. House of Representatives unanimously passed Resolution 343, demanding the CCP bring an immediate end to the forced organ harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners and other prisoners of conscience.
The lucrative organ transplant business sustained support for the persecution of Falun Gong and attracted clients from China and around the world, making them complicit in the CCP’s mass murder.
Since it first seized power, the CCP has never relaxed its persecution of religious beliefs. We will return to this topic in Chapter Six.
4. Red Terror in Export
The introduction to The Black Book of Communism provides a rough estimate of the death tolls of communist regimes around the world. It verified a figure of 94 million, including the following:
20 million in the Soviet Union
65 million in China
1 million in Vietnam
2 million in North Korea
2 million in Cambodia
1 million in Eastern Europe
0.15 million in Latin America (mainly Cuba)
1.7 million in Ethiopia
1.5 million in Afghanistan
10,000 due to “the international communist movement and communist parties not in power” [8]
Apart from Russia and China, lesser communist regimes have shown themselves no less willing to engage in absolute evil. The Cambodian genocide is the most extreme mass murder carried out by a communist government. According to various estimates, the number of Cambodians killed by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime ranges from 1.4 million to 2.2 million — up to one-third of Cambodia’s population at the time.
Between 1948 and 1987, the North Korean communists killed more than 1 million of their own people through forced labor, executions, and internment in concentration camps. In the 1990s, famine killed between 240,000 and 420,000 people. In total, 600,000 to 800,000 North Koreans are thought to have died unnatural deaths between 1993 and 2008. After Kim Jong Un came to power, he committed more overt murders, with the victims including high-ranking officials and his own relatives. Kim has also threatened the world with nuclear war.
In just one century, since the rise of the first communist regime in Russia, the evil specter of communism has murdered more people in the nations under its rule than the combined death toll of both world wars. The history of communism is a history of murder, and every page is written with the blood of its victims.
References
[1] “Remembering the Victims of Communism.” Remarks by Rep. Christopher Smith before the House of Representatives on Nov. 13, 2017. https://www.congress.gov/congressional-record/2017/11/13/extensions-of-remarks-section/article/E1557-2.
[2] Stéphane Courtois, ed., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression. Translated by Jonathan Murphy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.
[3] Der Spiegel, “Revolutionär Seiner Majestät” (“Revolutionary of His Majesty”). Dec. 10, 2007. http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-54230885.html.
[4] Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, Vol. 5. 1931.
[5] Robert Service, translation of “the hanging order,” Lenin, a Biography (London: Macmillan, 2000), 365.
[6] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago: 1918–1956. 1973.
[7] Interview with Alexander Yakovlev (1992–2005), translated by Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
[8] Stéphane Courtois, ed., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, trans. Jonathan Murphy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 4.
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