Leaving Marx Behind

Liberty Depends on Telling the Truth About Communism

Earlier this year, someone commented that a Colson Center video, entitled “Am I On the Wrong Side of History?” contained false information about crimes committed by Communist regimes. In a way, the critic was correct. The video only mentioned 94 million casualties of Communist governments. According to the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, the actual number was much higher.

Though Marxism has inflicted unparalleled harm on humanity, many today still want it. Socialism and Marxism continue to gain traction, particularly among people too young to remember the 20th century. They are not old enough to have seen the Berlin Wall come down, or witness the victims of “Democratic Socialism” fleeing to the West, or to have heard stories about how bad things were in the “workers’ paradise.”

Still Blaming Capitalism

Instead, they’ve been taught in school and on social media a different set of causes for the problems of modern society. A recent post on X declared, “You don’t hate Mondays … you hate being exploited by capitalism.” This is silly, of course. Any study of economic growth shows that prosperity increases in step with free markets. But still, many fall for it.

Lucy Biggers used to be one of them. She worked for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and saw the New York Congresswoman as a more attractive Bernie Sanders with social media savvy. In an article in The Free Press, Biggers explained how young people are taught to blame all of life’s problems on capitalism. “[M]ost of them,” she said, “don’t have any idea that they are supporting horrible ideas that literally ruin civilization.”

The false promises of Marxism are compelling. Utopias always are. But, as Os Guinness has said, there’s always a gap between the utopia that is promised and the reality that is achieved. Throughout history, that gap is filled by violence, as those in power seek to bring in by force the world they envision. Marxism, when applied, is state-sponsored oppression in the form of technocratic rule, which is why Marxism has been responsible for the worst crimes in human history, though all in the name of a good cause.

Destruction & Death Tolls

When Lenin came to St. Peters­burg in April 1917, he preached “Peace, Land, and Bread!” What the people actually got was war, tyranny, and famine. In his short time in power, millions starved, millions more were killed in the civil war, and the rest lost what little freedoms they had. Stalin slaughtered an estimated 20 million people. In what’s come to be known as the Holodomor, two million died in Ukraine from his forced collectivization in the 1930s. China under Mao Zedong recorded the most deaths. Mao killed somewhere between 45 and 65 million of his own people. Forty million died just between 1958 and 1962, victims of the deeply flawed economic policy known as The Great Leap Forward.

Everywhere Marxism has been tried, the story is the same. Between 1975 and 1979, Pol Pot murdered as many as three million Cambodians, or 25 percent of the population. The Ethiopian famine of the 1980s was the result of flawed Marxist practices. From the thousands of students killed at Tiananmen in 1989 to the 2020 suppression of protests in the once-free city of Hong Kong, China’s Marxism always returns to tyranny.

Truth for Life & Liberty

Marxism is the embodiment of three well-used phrases: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions”; “Ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have victims”; and “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” It’s vitally important that those of us old enough to remember history share that memory with rising generations. The lives and liberties of millions depend on it.

—This article first appeared at Breakpoint.org. Used with permission of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview.