- Many critics like to pick on big government. They say
it's so huge and bureaucratic that it can't get anything done right. That
may be true. But there's one thing that big government does well: kill
people. The blood-soaked 20th century proved that.
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- Among the most brutal big government killers of that
time was the communist Soviet Union. Ten years ago this month it marked
the anniversary of its collapse. That remarkable event in 1991 will be
remembered as a great victory for liberty, even if there is little evidence
that a conversion to the true Faith is underway, as Our Lady of Fatima
said there would be if her requests of 1917 were met. Of course, Russia
today is no Eden-it's still in the early stages of recovery after 74 years
of totalitarian self-destruction. But the terror and bleakness of communism
no longer dominate every facet of life there.
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- And the dead? The millions murdered for the State? They
are resurfacing, in photographs and documents from Soviet archives, and
in countless mass graves being discovered all over the vast Russian land.
A cold harvest of corpses.
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- They should not be forgotten. Tens of millions of people-women,
children, fathers, families-were murdered by the biggest big government
in history. The nationalized, planned economy-socialism in one country-ran
itself on terror. A free market, a laissez faire economy, could not and
has not done what the iron fist of the Soviet State did. And we should-we
hope-learn from this.
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- Hitler and the Nazis did not build the first concentration
camps of the 20th century. Lenin and Stalin and the Bolsheviks built them.
By the 1950s, hundreds of these camps-the Gulag Archipelago-darted the
landscape. So-called enemies of the State, including religious (Jews, Catholics,
Orthodox), were sent to the camps, along with criminals. There they were
literally worked to death. A conservative estimate puts the number of camp
deaths at 16 million. Many of the camps were still operating under Mikhail
Gorbachev.
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- In 1919, hundreds of thousands of Cossacks, who had served
as cavalrymen in the czarist army, were murdered by the Cheka, the forerunner
of the KGB.
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- In Ukraine in 1932-33, an estimated 5 million peasants
were intentionally starved to death because of a grain-quota system crafted
by Soviet bureaucrats and Stalin. The people were deliberately killed
as part of state planning.
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- In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration-riddled
with communist sympathizers and agents, as Soviet and U.S. documents now
confirm-officially recognized the Soviet government. In the mid- to late-1930s,
the infamous Soviet Show Trials began. This launched the Great Terror,
in which an estimated one million Russians were killed. Stalin signed execution
orders daily. In one, culled from Soviet archives and published in "The
Black Book of Communism," Stalin signed an order authorizing the death
of 6,600 political opponents.
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- Things got so bad, reported historian Robert Conquest,
that sometimes up to 200 people a day were being shot at the Lubyanka prison
in Moscow. At the same time, about 6.5 million kulaks-better off peasants
opposed to the state policy of collectivization-were murdered by the Cheka,
according to historian R.J. Rummel.
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- In 1939, the Soviets entered into a "non-aggression
pact," i.e., treaty, with the Nazis and launched World War II. The
German army invaded Poland from the west and the Red army invaded from
the east. The national socialist Soviets brutalized Poland. They murdered
some 15,000 Polish army officers and buried them in mass graves in the
Katyn forest. They also marched more than one million Poles back to Russia
and on to the Gulag. Rape was standard Soviet practice for soldiers, and
countless Polish women and girls were violated and died from the brutality.
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- After Hitler turned on Stalin in 1941, President Roosevelt
and his administration started to aid "Uncle Joe" and the Soviets.
A lot of the military and material aid provided-paid for by American taxpayers-was
used to enforce the terror and genocide in the USSR. The aid went to Soviet
state officials and departments. It was used to defend and strengthen
Stalin and the Soviet government. (Lenin and Stalin had already killed
more than 12 million "enemies of the state" before Hitler and
the Nazis took power in 1933.)
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- By the time Stalin died in 1953, about 25-30 million
people had died as a result of government policies in the USSR. From the
1950s and through the 1980s, countless Russians continued to suffer because
of State policies. "Enemies" were still sent to the Gulag or
to psychiatric hospitals for "treatment." And the people, in
general, had to endure a near-Third World existence because socialist planning
did not work. Even today, potable water is rationed in Moscow.
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- Neo-socialist critics, many of whom dominate America's
universities and centers of influence, often complain that the invisible
hand of capitalism is ruthless-that the less advantaged suffer because
of it. But compare a free market, a laissez faire economy and limited
government with a Soviet style socialist economy and what does one see?
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- Unlimited government is the most efficient killer.
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- Remnant columnist Michael Chapman is a writer in Washington,
D.C. Send him email at fatima1917@hotmail.com.
- http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/REMNANT/
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