"Writing in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, A. Barton Hinkle remembers "A century of ghastly communist sadism," which started when a relatively small number of Bolshevik anarchists led by Vladimir Lenin managed to overthrow the Russian government of Alexander Kerensky in November 1917.
As Hinkle writes, "while the Soviet Union is no more and communism has been discredited in most eyes for many years, it is hard even now to grasp the sheer scale of agony imposed by the brutal ideology of collectivism."The Black Book of Communism, which came out in 1997, estimated that some 95 million people were either killed or made to starve to death in the communist attempt to create an egalitarian paradise on earth. Current research puts the number of victims of communism anywhere between 43 million and 162 million.
As such, the original 100 million figure remains a remarkably accurate midway point.
It is, also, a figure so large that people may have difficulty comprehending it without additional context.
Leaving the (rightly) well-known example of the Holocaust aside, let us look at some other bywords for human cruelty....
- Or take another byword for savagery—the Inquisition. According to Professor Agostino Borromeo, a historian of Catholicism at the Sapienza University in Rome who authored a 783-page study of the Inquisition that was based on the Church's own records, "there were some 125,000 trials of suspected heretics in Spain... [between 1478 and 1834, but only] about 1 percent of the defendants (i.e., 1,250) were executed."...
- Queen Mary, the eldest daughter of Henry VIII, who has come to be known as Bloody Mary for her attempt to restore Catholicism to England between 1553 and 1558, sent 280 dissenters to the stake..
- Lastly, consider apartheid, which the United Nations declared a "crime against humanity" in 1966. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was tasked by Nelson Mandela's government to provide a definitive account of apartheid abuses between 1960 and 1994, found (Volume 5, p. 232) that the "IFP (Inkatha Freedom Party—a black nationalist movement) remains the major perpetrator of killings on a national scale, being allegedly responsible for over 4,500 killings compared to 2,700 attributed to the SAP (white-dominated South African Police) and 1,300 to the ANC (African National Congress—another black nationalist movement)."
...Put in proper perspective, in other words, communism really does take the cake when it comes to the scale and intensity of human rights abuses."
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