The right to speak freely, protest, own guns, and elect the leaders that we the people prefer are relatively new ideas to humanity. Yet many Americans are acting as though these rights can't be taken away, which I find disturbing considering how many Americans are descended from Europe, which was ground zero for 20th-century despotism and the butchery of fascism.
Reminders of totalitarian slaughter are everywhere. Millions of Holocaust survivors live among us, some of whom still bear the concentration camp numbers that Nazis tattooed on their arms.
Europe and Asia are brimming with the largely unmarked mass graves of millions of people who died fighting for the right to exist. Millions of others had little chance to resist; they were arrested, crammed onto cattle cars, and exterminated in camps built for genocide or sent to gulags where they likely froze to death or died of typhoid. Millions of others were starved to death.
Though the Nazis seem to get most of the attention and blame for the slaughter of the 20th century, communism has killed far more.
The Tsarist regime of Russia carried out 6,321 political executions between 1825-1917. The Bolsheviks murdered more than 15,000 in the autumn of 1918. Stalin alone is believed to have killed up to 60 million people from 1922 -1953
Some believe communists killed roughly 94 million people in the 20th century.
Despite the hundreds of European and Asian mass graves — and those aforementioned tattoos — it seems that people have already forgotten how tyranny typically begins.
Mao, Stalin, and Hitler, the most prolific killers in the history of 20th-century despotism, utilized many of the same tactics to get their genocide in motion, and I am seeing those schemes being used in America today.
No comments:
Post a Comment