VAIDA: My parents escaped Communism. Young Americans must stop celebrating the murder and starvation it creates.
Communist regimes have led to starvation, torture, and tens of millions of deaths.
We owe it to the victims of these regimes to be honest about the atrocities of communism.
Communism is a cancer on history, and few other ideas have rivaled it for sheer human misery.
So it can be depressing to see someone like TikTok influencer Madeline Pendleton singing the praises of this toxic ideology to her followers.
Pendleton, who calls herself a “leftwing extremist,” has 1.6 million followers, to whom she gave a lecture in January about how fantastically communism is supposedly working for modern countries that have adopted it.
To her twisted thinking, “countries under communist Marxist-Leninist leadership are flourishing,” and communism is merely a “bogeyman” attacked by rich capitalists who are afraid of losing their wealth.
She concludes that “If you’re sick and tired of being sick and tired here in the United States, maybe give communism a try.”
Pendleton isn’t the only one catechizing people into communism.
As Campus Reform reported, some educators try to sugarcoat, downplay, or justify the atrocities of communist regimes, such as Aminda Smith, a Michigan State University professor who wrote an article–specifically for children–that argues that communism promotes “shar[ing] wealth so that no one is too poor, no one is too rich, and everyone has enough to survive and have a good life.”
“Communists are optimistic that humans can one day create a more fair and equal society,” she adds.
Since Americans grow up with such views forced on them from K-12 schools and into college, it’s no surprise that 25 percent of college-age Americans have a favorable view of communism.
But how has it worked out historically for nations that have “given communism a try,” as Pendleton urges her followers to do?
Consider my parents, who left Communist Romania in the early 1980s, also leaving behind a trail of horrifying pain and hunger.
Romania under communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was a “gray and grim place,” as recounted by an American diplomat stationed there in the 70s. Ceausescu’s economic policies—such as severe austerity measures and exporting food to other nations as his own people starved—led to widespread hunger.
Cyclopean food centers at the capital, much praised by the state, became known as “hunger circuses” due to the empty shelves. My parents and grandparents would recount stories of waiting in line for hours just to get a loaf of bread and some chicken talons with not enough meat on them to feed a chihuahua.
The hunger, bad enough on its own, was not the only problem Romanians had to deal with. Ceausescu’s policies also caused routine energy shortages and blackouts. The resulting energy rationing was so severe that the communist dictatorship ordered most street lights to be shut off and forbade Romanians from driving their own cars.
The cherry on top of the starvation and freezing was the censorship. To paraphrase an old Soviet joke, Romania had freedom of speech—People were free to say what they wanted, and the communist authorities were free to arrest them.
The censorship was only one facet of the brutality of the communist regime, which imprisoned and tortured Christians, killed thousands of its own people, used slave labor, and operated the Securitate—a ruthless and infamous communist secret police.
But was Romania only a fluke? Did communism work elsewhere?
The communist dictator Vladimir Lenin started the Russian Civil War, which killed more than 10 million Russians and led to the establishment of one of the most brutal tyrannies in history. Lenin’s successor, Joseph Stalin, killed millions more of his own citizens in horrific ways. He tortured innocent people, imprisoned millions, and threw Soviet citizens into gulags where they had to face temperatures of negative 40 degree Fahrenheit and the prospect of daily starvation.
As one inmate described, “Death from a bullet would have been bliss compared with what many millions had to endure while dying of hunger. The kind of death to which they were condemned has nothing to equal it in treachery and sadism.”
How about Cambodia, which came under the rule of the Communist dictator Pol Pot? During his benevolent rule, the Khmer Rouge—the communist party of which he was leader—murdered roughly a full third of the country’s population.
They forced prisoners to eat their own excrement, flayed people alive, and conducted experiments on fully-conscious humans. Some prisoners killed themselves in stomach-churning ways to avoid torture. Communist thugs would take the children and babies of prisoners and smash their heads on trees—to make sure they would not come back to avenge their mothers and fathers.
But remember—communism brings “flourishing,” as Pendleton tells us.
Further examples abound, like China, which killed 45 million Chinese under Mao Zedong and is currently keeping roughly one million Uyghurs in “re-education camps”; Cuba, a once prosperous country that was immiserated in poverty by Fidel Castro and his followers; and Venezuela, where communist brutality has forced people to hunt zoo animals or starve.
Of course, these examples are usually explained away as “not real socialism.” But what does it say about a system when it not only fails, but fails horrendously, every single time it is tried? Saying “this time it will work” is like playing Russian Roulette with a fully loaded revolver.
Communism always fails because it is based on an evil idea: That a government has the right to rob its own people of their hard-earned property, that it can institute a “dictatorship of the proletariat” to safeguard its ill-gotten gains, and that it must use “revolutionary terror” to crush anyone who disagrees. Don’t believe me—go and read Karl Marx’s writings.
People like Pendleton are not just ignorant, they are promoting an evil ideology and they spit in the face of the victims of Marxist regimes like my parents. We owe it to all those—both alive and departed—who suffered under communist maniacs like Ceausescu and Stalin to combat such wicked lies.
