A Century of Blood

But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

George Orwell, 1984

In the Julian Calendar which the Russians used in 1917 the Russian Revolution, more accurately the Russian Coup, by the Bolsheviks occurred on October 25, hence the October Revolution.  (On the Gregorian Calendar the date was November 7, 1917.)  Dave Griffey at Daffey Thoughts reminds us that Communism is still a favored murderous mass movement among all to many intellectuals of the West.

Dr. Samuel Gregg examines the 100th Anniversary of Russia’s October Revolution.  This should be bigger than it is, though the Left has always been shy about focusing too much on the horrors of Communism. 

Growing up, all the hip shows and movies cast a sympathetic glance over at the legacy of Communism and its prevailing states, whether it be MASH or Reds, you couldn’t help but get the feeling that underlying the approach was a secret ‘they’re better than us’ message in it all.

In college, it was the same.  Communism, though not without its flaws, was never as bad as – can I say it – the Capitalism of America’s industrial war machines.  More than one professor took great delight in pointing out that the Communists were often just trying to help, unlike our own government that never seemed to have a pure motive in its history.

The same for Catholics, at least those more hostile to America and the Western tradition.  More than once I’ve been informed that if you take the Trail of Tears, twist and turn the numbers just right, it’s clear the US is the most murderous nation state in history, far worse than any Communist state of the 20th century.  And that doesn’t count the millions of slaves that were murdered, the billions of Native Americans killed, and the tens of millions killed by our military during our endless imperial grabs for power.

Nonetheless, outside of that weird universe of Marxist driven leftist ideology, in what we call the real world, Communism remains perhaps the most evil, murderous, and destructive ideology in the history of the human race.  That so many on the Left either try to downplay, or outright deny, this makes you wonder just how passionate the Left is about opposing things like mass slaughter, tyranny, destruction and endless terror. 

Nonetheless, this is the big 100th anniversary.  We’ll see how much it’s covered.  Kudos to The Catholic World Report for stepping out early and getting a jump on the future reflections. 

Go here to comment.  Ironically, considering how infested with Marxism the Catholic left is, the main attraction of this superstition for intellectuals is largely the atheism that is at the core of Marxism.  There is no God, merely an inevitable historical path laid out by Marx. Traditional morality was done away with:  cooperating with the inevitable historical process, the ultimate triumph of Marxism, was moral, and anything that opposed it was immoral.  Thus morality becomes a mere matter of political labels.  How convenient that this allowed movements dedicated to Marxism to commit any crime, no matter how vile, in the scramble for supreme power.  That Marxism has never been anything but a transparent fraud, with no more intellectual validity than a tale from The Arabian Nights, is a damning indictment of the human capacity to embrace any fable if it gives an excuse to engage in wretched conduct with an ostensibly clean conscience. One hundred million corpses later it is depressing to see how popular this murderous nonsense is in the West.