For the nearly two-hundred-year history of socialism, its core problem has always been its dishonesty and broken promises.
Socialist parties and leaders don’t declare that if empowered, they’ll build an authoritarian police state, suppress dissent, rip away every vestige of freedom from society, run the economy into the ground, and transform their nation into an unlivable hellhole that specializes only in producing refugees. Yet time and again, that is exactly what has happened under the rule of socialist planners.
The ability of socialism to wreck an economy is actually pretty incredible—it’s an awesome force of nature, like a tornado or a tsunami. Socialism managed to turn Soviet Russia from the world’s largest grain exporter into a major importer, humiliatingly forced to turn to its chief geostrategic rival—the United States—to help feed its own people.1 In Venezuela, oil production has dropped 75 percent since the socialist revolution began there in 1999, despite the country having the world’s largest proved oil reserves.2 And just look at the former East Germany—thanks to socialism, the nation stopped producing anything extraordinary except steroid-infused athletes, a gigantic internal spying apparatus, and a massive wall designed to keep its captive subjects from fleeing their centrally planned dystopia. Socialism found a way to do what Germany’s enemies for nearly a century could not achieve—it made Germany poor.
Unsurprisingly, the Russian, Venezuelan, and German socialists did not forewarn people that that’s what they’d do. To the contrary, socialists everywhere promise to bring about a bright, shining future in which people’s needs and desires will all be fulfilled for the grand bargain price of zero dollars. There will be fantastic free health care for all, terrific free housing, wonderful free college education, and guaranteed jobs for everyone. They don’t promise to snuff out opposing viewpoints or strangle entrepreneurship or micromanage your life. No, it’s rainbows and unicorns and justice for everyone. All that’s asked of you, as a citizen, is to trust the government with most of your money and all your liberties.
Bafflingly, thirty years after the free world celebrated the collapse of communism behind the Iron Curtain, socialism has become trendy in America. For decades we were the world leader in the Cold War between communism and freedom, but as discussed earlier in this book, rising numbers of people, particularly young people, now want our nation to be more like the giant prison systems we helped to liberate.
Despite once again losing the Democratic presidential primaries, the popularity of the Bernie Sanders campaign is a flashing red warning sign. After spending decades in Congress as a freakish left-wing oddball, Bolshevik Bernie attracted crowds of ten thousand people or more to hear him preach class warfare and promise to abolish all student debt, make health care free, reengineer the U.S. economy through the Green New Deal, and adopt countless other impossible programs that would bankrupt the country many times over.
We have to take the Bernie phenomenon seriously. That’s where the Democratic Party’s energy is, that’s where its passion is, and that’s where its youth are. Although Bernie is not the Democratic presidential nominee, it’s clear his socialist ideas are having a huge effect on Democrats nationwide.
So it’s worthwhile here to review the history of socialism—what it is, where it came from, and how it’s worked out when it’s been tried. Since it’s not a new phenomenon, we have a lot of evidence to work with in many different countries and contexts.
In short, socialism is a political system in which the government owns and runs the key elements of the economy. But there isn’t universal agreement on what defines socialism—socialists everywhere have always had a tendency toward schisms, infighting, and factionalism, as they battle one another over the minutiae of their destructive ideology and repudiate each other as heretics. As such, there have developed many kinds of socialism—utopian socialism, anarcho-syndicalism, Nazi-style national socialism, to name a few—but the dominant form is Marxism.
Karl Marx and his collaborator, Friedrich Engels, set out the basic principles of socialism in many different articles and books, their most influential work being The Communist Manifesto of 1848. According to them, all of history has been dominated by conflict between economic classes. The main conflict of their own time, they said, was the struggle between the proletariat, or factory workers, and their oppressors—the bourgeoisie, or the wealthier middle and upper classes. They predicted that the workers would inevitably seize power through a violent revolution and establish the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” in which the newly empowered workers would suppress their class enemies, seize control of the economy, and bring about socialism, in which the workers run the economy for their own benefit. Eventually, after some period of time, the other social classes would be wiped out, economies would begin functioning much more productively, and people would be working because they get satisfaction from it, not because they are compelled to do so. After this system reached its final stage—communism—everything would work so well, said Engels, that the government and the state itself would wither away, having become unnecessary for the functioning of society.
This scenario is ridiculous utopianism. Yet socialists would spend the next 170 years squabbling over the meaning and application of Marx’s statements as if they were the word of God come down from Mount Sinai. The godfather of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Lenin, drew from Marx that the whole economy should be organized along the lines of the post office3—which helps explain the Soviet Union’s seventy-year record of economic dysfunction.
Some of the core problems of Marxism were mocked by Marx’s rivals at the time. For example, the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin noted that it’s impossible to have a “dictatorship” of an entire social class. He predicted Marx’s “dictatorship of the proletariat” would really be a dictatorship of a small group of Marxists who refuse to surrender power, leading to an authoritarian one-party state4—which is exactly what has happened just about everywhere Marxists have gained power.
When one socialist country after another turned out to be a horrific police state instead of the promised utopian paradise, socialists began arguing that the problem wasn’t socialism itself but that no one was implementing it correctly. But the seeds of authoritarianism and violence are right there in socialist philosophy. Socialists these days cite “social justice” as their goal, but socialism is not focused on achieving justice of any kind. Instead, its main impulses are rage, envy, scapegoating, a thirst for vengeance, and a desire to violently overturn the entire existing order. The Communist Manifesto demonized the so-called bourgeoisie, characterizing them as merciless and fiendish exploiters of the workers, whom they supposedly kept as “slaves.”5 The workers “have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property,” said Marx and Engels.6 Communists, they declared, “support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things,” and “[t]hey openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.”7
So socialist revolutions were envisioned from the beginning as bloody insurrections that don’t just change governments but violently overturn all of society by abolishing private property—essentially, the workers seize control of the government, and then the government steals the property of their enemies and eliminates them as a social class. A class of people is scapegoated for causing everyone else’s misery, and open season is declared on them. People are promised that not only will their lives get better, but they’ll achieve utopia if they annihilate their class enemies. Once you understand this, you understand why socialism so often degenerates into mass murder.
The utopian end goal also helps explain the inherent violence of socialism. If you’re promised not just better living conditions, or higher wages, or more equality but instead a whole new stage of development for mankind in which all exploitation and inequality are permanently ended, then you can justify using extreme means to achieve that miraculous end. Anyone who stands in the socialists’ way can easily be demonized as an exploiter and a reactionary who is thwarting utopia.
Take, for example, an order issued by Lenin concerning “kulaks,” which is a term of abuse the Russian communists used for wealthier peasants. Lenin wrote this order to his fighters in 1918 during the civil war that followed the communists’ seizure of power in Russia the previous year: “1) Hang (and I mean hang so that the people can see) not less than 100 known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers. 2) Publish their names. 3) Take all their grain away from them. 4) Identify hostages as we described in our telegram yesterday. Do this so that for hundreds of miles around people can see, tremble, know, and cry: they are killing and will go on killing the bloodsucking kulaks. Cable that you have received this and carried out (your instructions). Yours, Lenin. P.S. Find tougher people.”8
Note that Lenin is not ordering his men to hang a hundred random people—he’s ordering them to hang at least a hundred. There’s a minimum but no maximum. But if you really believe in socialism, why not kill all these peasants and seize their grain and take hostages? Regardless of who they are or what good things they’ve done in life, they’re class enemies. By definition, they’re reactionaries who are hindering mankind’s progress.
Of course, Bakunin’s observation also came true—that once a regime enters a “dictatorship” phase, it doesn’t give it up voluntarily. And if revolutionaries are following Marx’s blueprint, then dictatorship is their immediate goal. There’s no need for democratic elections, or freedom of the press, or freedom of speech, or freedom of religion when a nation is being ruled by a cabal who, in their own minds, have unlocked the secret to history, society, economics, and politics. Dissenting views become unacceptable temptations to go down the wrong path. The dictators know all the answers, so all that’s left is to implement them, not to debate them.
Socialism got its first chance to prove itself in practice, on a mass scale, with the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power in Russia in 1917 and their transformation of Russia into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). As is the case with many socialist power grabs that the left hails as popular revolutions, the October Revolution really wasn’t a revolution at all—it was a coup secretly planned and executed by paramilitary forces of the Communist Party. In the standard way that coups unfold, armed Bolsheviks seized communications hubs, the post office, and other key points in the capital, imprisoned the ruling authorities, and declared themselves the new authorities. They cynically claimed they were acting to guarantee that democratic elections could be held to a new body called the constituent assembly. But when those elections didn’t turn out well for the Bolsheviks, they shut down the assembly after its first meeting.9
The Bolshevik coup sparked a years-long civil war that the communists eventually won. As they set about implementing socialism, they made clear that they took seriously Marx’s demand for a dictatorship. In a series of moves that would be repeated in socialist countries worldwide, they first suppressed the nonsocialist parties, then they eliminated the other socialist parties, and finally they banned dissent—or “factions,” as they called it—within the Bolshevik Party itself.10 The USSR quickly became a totalitarian, one-party state in which the views of the party leadership were the only acceptable views. All other political parties were wiped out, the free press was crushed, and even trade unions—which represented the workers who supposedly now ran the country—were abolished or made subservient to the Communist Party. Religious expression and churches were also attacked with furious energy, inspired by Marx’s denunciation of faith as “the opiate of the masses.” There was simply no space for any other viewpoints or initiatives in society than those of the all-powerful party, and in particular, the small group surrounding Lenin who led the party.
To smother any expressions or actions that might conflict with the party, the rulers created what would become a hallmark of socialist governments: a gigantic secret police force with nearly unlimited power. People lived in fear of a dead-of-night visit that could result in the victim’s disappearance into a forced labor camp. These camps for those deemed enemies of the party began under Lenin and were expanded under his successor, Joseph Stalin, into the sprawling, nightmarish gulag system that imprisoned an estimated 18 million people.11 According to the Russian historian Dmitri Volkogonov, at the time of Stalin’s death in 1953, “there were eleven million people employed in one way or another on the task of watching the rest of the population. There had never been anything like it in history….”12
As I mentioned, a key element in constructing the socialist paradise was to ruthlessly suppress the Bolsheviks’ class enemies. They abolished private property, confiscated citizens’ wealth, and nationalized most of the economy. Volkogonov explained how the so-called bourgeois were systematically humiliated, abused, starved, and murdered:
In December 1919 there was a fuel crisis in the country. Lenin appointed A. Eiduk to deal with the problem, and all manner of “bourgeois” were mobilized to gather and load wood onto trains: clerks, intellectuals, tsarist officers—any “ex-person” whom the new order had impoverished and as a rule denied a ration card. It was a common sight to see frail people, wrapped in what remained of a once-fine coat, clumsily loading frozen logs under the watchful eye of some “authorized” comrade. Later harried by a rule of 20 April 1921 under which their apartments could be packed out with poor and homeless people, or taken over altogether, these desolate individuals sought any excuse to avoid the drudgery of manual labour. Religious holidays were one such excuse. On 25 December 1919 Lenin told Eiduk: “it is stupid to tolerate ‘Nikola’ (i.e., St Nicholas’ Day); all Chekists [secret policemen] have to be on alert to shoot anyone who doesn’t turn up to work because of ‘Nikola.’ ”13
Leon Trotsky, Lenin’s right-hand man, made clear how pitiless the Bolsheviks’ class warfare would be: “There is nothing immoral in the proletariat finishing off the dying class. This is its right. You are indignant… at the petty terror which we direct against our class opponents. But be put on notice that in one month at most this terror will assume more frightful forms, on the model of the great revolutionaries of France. Our enemies will face not prison but the guillotine.”14
The communists didn’t show the peasants any mercy, either. In a bloody operation under Stalin, agriculture was collectivized, meaning government agents seized control of the peasants’ land, equipment, and animals, and forced peasants to surrender however much of their harvest the party deemed necessary. An estimated 7 million people died in the resulting famine, mostly in Ukraine15—a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions. This is the calamity that New York Times correspondent and Soviet sympathizer Walter Duranty, reporting from the USSR, famously denied was occurring. In 1990, the New York Times called Duranty’s reports on the USSR “some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper”16—which is really saying something.
As have socialist regimes everywhere, the USSR subscribed to the cult of planning. The free market—allowing people to freely trade their goods and services with each other and to set prices for them—was viewed as a tool of the rich for exploiting the workers. Trotsky was explicit about the need to totally replace free commerce with government-controlled planning: “The socialist organization of the economy begins with the liquidation of the market, and that means the liquidation of its regulator—namely, the ‘free’ play of the laws of supply and demand. The inevitable result—namely, the subordination of production to the needs of society—must be achieved by the unity of the economic plan, which, in principle, covers all the branches of productivity.”17
But what’s left when you abolish the free market? In Marxist theory, under a socialist regime, the workers as a class are running the economy for their own benefit. But in practice, party bureaucrats are in charge. They decide where factories will be built, what goods they’ll produce, and what price they’ll charge. The problem is, it’s impossible to efficiently plan a mass industrial economy. There are just too many variables for even the wisest among us—much less some corrupt, power-hungry party hacks—to be able to allocate the correct resources to the right places and to set the proper prices in a modern economy.
In the USSR, the centralized planning mania took the form of five-year plans, which in the late 1920s and the ’30s guided the country through a crash industrialization program that fundamentally transformed life in the Soviet empire. Starved and suppressed in the countryside by collectivization, peasants poured into the cities to work in factories. Meanwhile, now that the government directly controlled newly collectivized farms, it could seize the remaining peasants’ production and use it to feed the workers to support the industrialization program.
In the end, although the USSR did industrialize quickly, it was achieved at the cost of millions of lives. What’s more, socialist planning resulted in severe economic problems that plagued the entire economy until its collapse in 1991. There were constant shortages of everyday consumer goods, leading to a pervasive black market. Manufactured goods were poorly made, and agriculture was inefficient, as farmers had little motivation to work hard to grow crops to be confiscated by the government at whatever price the party dictated. To paper over the problems, the government manufactured fake economic statistics that were not taken seriously anywhere in the world.
Meanwhile, because the state-guaranteed wages weren’t enough to live on, the entire economy worked on bribes. The writer David Remnick, who worked in the USSR in the late 1980s and early ’90s as a reporter for the Washington Post, told how his son’s Russian nanny showed up to work one day “exhausted and depressed,” and then explained what she just had to go through to bury her mother, even though the funeral and burial were supposed to be provided free of charge by the government:
First, Mother’s body had to be taken to the morgue. We were told that the morgues were all filled up, and they wouldn’t take her. But when we paid two hundred rubles to the attendants, they took her. Then there was the fifty rubles for her shroud. Then the funeral agent said he had no coffins my mother’s size and that we could only buy something eight feet long. My mother was five feet tall. For eighty rubles he came up with the right size. Then the gravediggers said they could not dig the grave until two p.m., even though the funeral was set for ten a.m. So that took two bottles of vodka each and twenty-five rubles each. The driver of the funeral bus said he had another funeral that day and couldn’t take care of us. But for thirty rubles and a bottle of vodka we could solve the problem. We did. And so on with the gravesite and the flowers and all the rest.18
Remnick explained that this sort of dishonesty and corruption was everywhere. “[I]n the Soviet Union, no economic transaction was untainted. It was as if the entire Soviet Union were ruled by a gigantic mob family; virtually all economic relations were, in some form, mafia relations…. No one could avoid at least a certain degree of complicity. That was one of the most degrading facts of Soviet life: it was impossible to be honest.”19
The system was so corrupt and hopeless that both the USSR and its Eastern European socialist satellites had to ban their citizens from emigrating. If they allowed it, there wouldn’t have been anyone left to populate their paradise. The USSR tightly restricted its own citizens’ travel to nonsocialist countries—if someone could secure the party’s permission to travel abroad, he typically had to leave immediate family members behind in order to increase the odds he would return home.20 Neither the Soviet Union nor any other communist government wanted a repeat of the embarrassment communist Hungary had suffered in 1956, when forty-eight of its Olympians—nearly half its team—defected during the Olympics in Melbourne, Australia.21
Viktor Belenko, a Soviet fighter pilot who escaped to Japan in a MiG-25 jet in 1976 and defected to America, compared leaving the USSR to leaving prison. “After my arrival [in America], the hardest thing for me to understand was freedom of choice,” he said. “When you are in a closed society and the government is making [the] decision where you live, what you do for a living, and even where you die, it is very hard to understand freedom of choice. Those people who spend many years in U.S. in jail have a hard time after their release. But when I discovered the freedom of choice in the U.S. it became the best part of my life today.”22
Socialism spread worldwide throughout the twentieth century based on the Soviet model. The USSR actively encouraged socialist revolutions—both because socialist governments tended to become client states of the USSR and because Marxist theory imagines socialism as a worldwide phenomenon, reflected in Marx’s catchphrase “Workers of the world, unite!” The USSR directly funded socialist uprisings, created an international organization—the Comintern, later reestablished as the Cominform—to advance socialist causes, and unleashed a worldwide propaganda campaign touting the joys of socialism and criticizing the free world in general and America in particular. Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev discussed many of these efforts, and the resulting tensions between the United States and USSR, in his memoirs. It is the ultimate irony that, because Khrushchev was overthrown in a coup and largely erased from official Soviet history, he had to smuggle his memoirs to America in order to get them published.23
The USSR had its first big success spreading socialism in Eastern Europe, mainly thanks to the Soviet Red Army marching through the region on its way to Germany in World War II. In Hungary, Yugoslavia, East Germany, Romania, Poland, Albania, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria, communists seized power and went to work constructing their own socialist paradise. The communists nationalized industries, eviscerated freedom of speech, suppressed churches, set up vast secret police forces, and created one-party authoritarian states featuring ridiculous cults of personality around the leaders.
Eastern Europe became a giant jail imprisoning its own citizens. Occasional rebellions against these oppressive conditions were suppressed with ruthless force, sometimes directly by occupying Soviet troops. A 1953 revolt in Eastern Germany, eventually involving nearly a million people,24 was particularly embarrassing because it ended with Soviet troops violently suppressing industrial workers in whose name the Soviet regime supposedly acted. A major anticommunist revolution in Hungary three years later was also violently put down by Soviet troops. In 1968, the USSR decided it could not tolerate the Prague Spring—internal reforms in Czechoslovakia designed to allow more freedom within the communist system—and so army units from the USSR and other Eastern Bloc regimes invaded Czechoslovakia and put an end to it. Claiming they were trying to avoid yet another Soviet intervention, Poland’s communist regime declared martial law in 1981 and suppressed workers’ protests led by a workers’ union called Solidarity.
These rebellions are easy to understand—socialism throughout the Eastern Bloc had created sickening conditions similar to those in the USSR. James Bovard wrote about his experience traveling through Romania as a reporter in 1987. In “The Daily Hell of Life in the Soviet Bloc” he described Romania—which had, prior to World War One, been a top grain exporter—deep in the throes of a food crisis:
Children could not get milk without a doctor’s prescription. It was forbidden for foreigners to send food to Romanians. The government responded to food shortages with a publicity campaign on the danger of overeating…. Food shortages became so bad that the lion in the Bucharest Zoo was converted into an involuntary vegetarian and lost his teeth as a result.
The communists destroyed hundreds of square miles of prime farmland to erect factories and open pit mines. Hundreds of villages were razed and the residents corralled into cities and conscripted to work in factories.
Government investment had shifted almost entirely to heavy industry. Romania nevertheless produced poor quality products and industry was “extremely inefficient, consuming up to five times as much energy per unit of output as western factories. The government compensated by cutting off electricity to people’s homes for up to six hours during the winter, and permitting only one 25-watt light bulb per room.”
Bovard wrote that the Romanian healthcare system nosedived. The government consistently cut off hospitals’ electricity, causing a staggering number of preventable deaths, and infant mortality was “so high the government refused to register children as being born until they survived their first month.”25
Closer to home, Cuba was put on the road to socialism in 1959, when Fidel Castro’s guerrillas seized power. Much like the Bolsheviks did, Castro took charge promising to hold free elections but quickly broke his promise. He destroyed the free press, cracked down on workers’ unions, subjugated churches, and created a massive secret police force. During the 1960s alone, the regime killed between 7,000 and 10,000 people and imprisoned around 30,000 for political crimes.26 As cited in The Black Book of Communism, forced labor camps were established by the Military Unit of Production Assistance (MUPA) to handle the huge load of political prisoners.
The organization, which endured from 1964 to 1967, established concentration camps that incarcerated “socially deviant people” who were considered a danger to society. The group included religious prisoners, pimps, and homosexuals, many of whom were forced to build the camps and “were subjected to military discipline, which quickly degenerated into poor treatment, undernourishment, and isolation. Many detainees mutilated themselves to escape this hell; others emerged psychologically destroyed by their experiences.”27
One of Castro’s most fanatical accomplices was Che Guevara. Nigel Jones of Britain’s Telegraph summed up his bloody career: “Guevara was jailer and executioner-in-chief of Castro’s dictatorship. As boss of the notorious La Cabaña prison in Havana, he supervised the detention, interrogation, summary trials and execution of hundreds of ‘class enemies.’ ” Ernest Hemingway, who was then living in Cuba, invited an acquaintance to see the execution of prisoners by Che’s tribunals. “They watched as the men were trucked in, unloaded, shot, and taken away.”28
When it came to executions, Che wasn’t worried about little details like evidence. “To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary,” Che declared. “These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate.”29 After Castro was forced to abandon efforts to install Soviet nuclear weapons in Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Che revealed what the regime would have done if the efforts had succeeded: “If the missiles had remained, we would have used them against the very heart of America including New York. We must never establish peaceful coexistence. In this struggle to the death between two systems we must gain the ultimate victory. We must walk the path of liberation even if it costs millions of atomic victims.”30
And yet Che became an international youth icon, with Che T-shirts becoming popular on college campuses throughout the Western world. Unsurprisingly, Hollywood is a big fan of Che’s, though actors don’t seem very knowledgeable about him. Benicio Del Toro, who played this psychopath in the hagiography Che, excitedly told a reporter what first captured his attention on this subject: “I hear of this guy and he’s got a cool name. Che Guevara!” The reporter noted, “Del Toro as good as swoons when he says it. And the appeal does seem as simple as that—groovy name, groovy man, groovy politics.” Del Toro also denounced the execution of Che by soldiers in Bolivia, where Che was raising an army to fight for another socialist revolution. “He was killed like a war criminal, man, and he was not a war criminal. He should have been given a fair trial,”31 Del Toro said, either not knowing or not caring that Che himself didn’t believe that fair trials were groovy at all.
If socialism’s body count in Cuba was bad, it was just a drop in the ocean compared to China. After Mao Zedong led the communists to power in 1949, the Chinese effort to implement socialism was so catastrophic that it nearly defies belief. Even aside from the typical socialist horrors—the mass murder of political opponents, suppression of all freedoms, unrestrained class warfare—just one element of Mao’s program, “the Great Leap Forward,” was one of the greatest tragedies in world history.
The Great Leap Forward was Mao’s attempt to rapidly industrialize China and to collectivize agriculture to make that possible. Based on information from Chinese Communist Party archives, historian Frank Dikköter compiled a devastating account of the Chinese people being systematically robbed of their “work, homes, land, belongings, and livelihoods,” as the government forced peasants onto giant communal farms, seized control of the food supply, and used it as a weapon to impose its will in the ensuing famine. During the campaign, reports Dikköter, “between two and three million victims were tortured to death or summarily killed, often for the slightest infraction. When a boy stole a handful of grain in a Hunan village, local boss Xiong Dechang forced his father to bury him alive. The father died of grief a few days later.” According to Dikköter’s study, the Great Leap Forward resulted in at least 45 million deaths. This makes Mao, in Dikköter’s view, “one of the greatest mass murderers in history.”32
To understand the true lunacy of these socialist frenzies, let’s look at an account of just one aspect of the Great Leap Forward provided by Li Zhisui, who traveled extensively with Mao during this period, serving as Mao’s personal doctor. In order to increase steel production, the Communist Party ordered that small furnaces be built in fields and courtyards throughout the country. What was used to fuel these contraptions, which spit out small, useless globs of steel? People’s steel household implements—pots and pans, knives, shovels, and doorknobs. What’s more, because there wasn’t enough coal to fuel the furnaces, families were forced to feed their wooden furniture—tables, chairs, and beds—into them. Meanwhile, because so many peasants were transferred to work with the furnaces, the harvest in many villages was left to rot in the fields, contributing to one of the worst famines in human history. Liu noted, “Mao said that China was not on the verge of communism, but in fact some absurd form of communism was already in place. Private property was being abolished, because private property was all being given away to feed the voracious steel furnaces.”33
In Cambodia, the communist Khmer Rouge regime led by Pol Pot seized power in 1975 and upped the ante on socialist utopianism, declaring they were resetting time to a mythical “year zero” in which Cambodian society and culture would begin completely anew. Suspicious of urban living, they emptied out their own cities, including the capital of Phnom Penh, and forced the residents into the countryside. The Cambodia Tribunal Monitor, which was established to document the later trials of Khmer Rouge leaders, provides a short summary of the regime’s bizarre totalitarian rule. In order to bring about a classless society, the Khmer Rouge
abolished money, free markets, normal schooling, private property, foreign clothing styles, religious practices, and traditional Khmer culture. Public schools, pagodas, mosques, churches, universities, shops and government buildings were shut or turned into prisons, stables, reeducation camps and granaries. There was no public or private transportation, no private property, and no non-revolutionary entertainment. Leisure activities were severely restricted. People throughout the country, including the leaders of the CPK, had to wear black costumes, which were their traditional revolutionary clothes.
The government deprived individuals of basic human rights, prohibiting them from congregating in public or leaving their cooperatives. If even three people were to gather to have a discussion, “they could be accused of being enemies and arrested or executed.”
The government also profoundly intruded on personal and familial relationships: “People were forbidden to show even the slightest affection, humor or pity. The Khmer Rouge asked all Cambodians to believe, obey and respect only Angkar Padevat [the Communist Party leadership], which was to be everyone’s ‘mother and father.’ ”34
The Khmer Rouge was responsible for an estimated 1.2 million–2.8 million deaths—or 13–30 percent of the country’s entire population at the time35—from execution, starvation, and other causes. In early 1979 they were overthrown in an invasion by Vietnam, a fellow socialist country. Some of the regime’s criminals fled into the jungles of Thailand. Although Pol Pot died in 1998 without facing justice, others were put on trial years later. It’s not often that an everyday victim of genocidal socialism gets to confront his tormentors in court, but during the trials some Cambodians got that chance.
One was Bou Meng, who was among just fifteen prisoners who survived Tuol Sleng prison, from where sadistic Khmer Rouge maniacs took at least twelve thousand prisoners to various locations for execution. In 1977, despite being a Khmer Rouge supporter, Bou Meng was arrested with his wife, Ma Yoeun, for no apparent reason. They were taken to Tuol Sleng, where Ma Yoeun, who had worked as a midwife, was quickly executed, a tragedy that still brings tears to Bou Meng’s eyes. He was tortured and forced to falsely confess to working for the CIA. His life was spared, though, because the prison chief, a notorious Khmer Rouge operative known as Duch, learned he was an artist and put him to work drawing portraits of Pol Pot and other international communist leaders.
In the 1980s, after the Khmer Rouge were overthrown and the prison was converted into a museum, Bou Meng returned there to search for the photo his captors took of Ma Yoeun when she was processed into the prison. In 2015 he told a BBC reporter that he could still see her standing in front of him, and that he wanted to be able to pray over her grave. His tormentor, Duch, was put on trial in 2009 by a special court established to try Khmer Rouge officials. Bou was given the opportunity to ask Duch one question during the trial, so he asked where his wife was killed. Duch was unable to answer the question.36
A more recent socialist experiment occurred in Venezuela under Hugo Chavez, a former military officer who’d been imprisoned for staging a failed coup in 1992. Elected president in 1998, Chavez presided over the “Bolivarian Revolution,” a socialist movement inspired by nineteenth-century Venezuelan revolutionary Simon Bolivar. As president, Chavez centralized power, cracking down on oppositional media outlets and packing the Venezuelan Supreme Court. He realigned his nation’s foreign policy and cultivated Castro’s Cuba as a close ally while denouncing then-president George W. Bush as “the devil” at the United Nations.37
Chavez introduced many programs to fight poverty and assist the poor, including low-income housing projects, literacy programs, free health care, and food subsidies. While those programs were touted by his leftist international supporters, they proved to be utterly unsustainable when his overall socialist economic program wrecked the economy. Forced land transfers, land expropriations, and increasing state control in agriculture led to a 75 percent drop in food production over the following two decades as the Venezuelan population increased 33 percent. A vast program of nationalizing industry spread corruption and dramatically suppressed operations in electricity, water, banks, supermarkets, construction, and other industries.38
A core problem was that Chavez never diversified the Venezuelan economy from its dependence on oil. With the price of oil skyrocketing from $20 a barrel when he became president to $110 when he died in office in 2013,39 Chavez’s social programs survived during his tenure, even though they were piling up an enormous debt load. But Chavez planted the seeds of catastrophe when he included the oil industry in his massive program of seizing and nationalizing businesses. He seized private oil fields and gave them to the national oil company, PDVSA. After the company’s employees joined an anti-Chavez general strike in 2002, he fired nineteen thousand oil workers. Their replacements were Chavez loyalists who lacked the knowledge and experience to competently run the company. Many foreign experts were later chased out of Venezuela when Chavez seized control of oil projects run by ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips, and confiscated their assets.40 The result was a long, steep decline in Venezuela’s oil output that outlasted Chavez’s reign, with output falling from 3.5 million barrels per day in 1998, when Chavez was elected, to just 760,000 in February 2020.41
Chavez responded to the economic deterioration by socializing the economy even more, implementing price controls and exchange controls that only made the problems worse, creating more shortages and an extensive black market in foreign currencies.42
Chavez’s successor, Nicolàs Maduro, continued the economic policies of the Bolivarian Revolution, resulting in a shattering economic collapse. Due to food shortages, the average Venezuelan lost twenty-four pounds in 2017, while 90 percent of the population lived in poverty—compared to 33 percent in 2015, the last time the Venezuelan government published poverty statistics.43 The health care system has been decimated by a lack of medicine and equipment and the emigration of doctors. Women about to give birth must endure what they call “the roulette”: traveling to multiple hospitals to find one that will accept them. According to the New York Times, “They sometimes hitchhike, or walk for miles, or take buses over roads whose ruts and bumps seem designed just to torture them. In rare cases, they are rejected over and over until finally giving birth in the street, on a hospital’s steps—or in its lobby.”44 The economic meltdown has created a huge outflow of refugees, with around 5 million people45—more than 15 percent of the population—having fled their socialist paradise.
Hyperinflation of the Venezuelan currency, the bolivar, reached epic proportions. Because the Venezuelan government stopped publishing the inflation rate, Bloomberg news service created its own estimate based on the price of a cup of coffee at one bakery. In January 2018, its gauge measured an annualized inflation rate of 448,025 percent.46 In August 2018, a Bloomberg journalist reported paying 20 million bolivars for lunch at Burger King.47 The previous month she wrote, “With inflation soaring above 60,000 percent, a top-shelf liter of Scotch can set you back 1 billion bolivars—a sum that a minimum-wage worker would have to toil 16 years to earn.”48 The currency has become so worthless that state officials are increasingly demanding that citizens pay them their bribes in dollars.49
Bloomberg filed a series of reports from correspondents in the capital city of Caracas that offers a glimpse into the bizarre, hellish landscape of Venezuela’s collapse. The dispatches included the following observations:
Mind you, these are the miserable conditions in the country with the largest proved oil reserves in the entire world. It’s hard to think of any system of government other than socialism that could accomplish that feat. As I said, the destructive power of socialism is like a force of nature.
As you see, socialists have a long record of promising utopia for the poor and then delivering economic destruction, famine, oppression, forced labor camps, and mass killings. Their horrific record speaks for itself. Yet, as I noted earlier, the popularity of socialism is having a resurgence in America, particularly among young people. Democrats in the current Congress have a high-profile “squad” of socialists whose proposals are quickly entering the mainstream of the Democratic Party, and avowed socialist Bernie Sanders became so popular among the Democratic grassroots that for a time he was the front-runner for the 2020 Democratic nomination for president.
Socialists have an endless supply of excuses for all the misery that governments have inflicted in their name. As I mentioned earlier, a primary one is to argue that the architects of all the socialist nightmares we’ve discussed just weren’t doing socialism right. In other words, there’s nothing wrong with central planning per se, it’s just that people keep getting the plan wrong. And if some socialist regime becomes a big enough embarrassment, socialists will simply deny that it was socialist at all. However, leftists inevitably praise these regimes as they’re implementing socialism and disown them only years later, once the disastrous consequences have become undeniable.
In an essay titled “But That Wasn’t Real Socialism,” Kristian Niemietz, head of political economy at the United Kingdom’s Institute of Economic Affairs, provides numerous examples of left-wing Western intellectuals and politicians praising Maoist China, the USSR, Eastern European communism, and other socialist disasters in their early years, only to repudiate them later. One example is renowned left-wing academic Noam Chomsky. On a trip to Venezuela in 2009 he gushed about the Bolivarian Revolution: “[W]hat’s so exciting about at last visiting Venezuela is that I can see how a better world is being created…. The transformations that Venezuela is making toward the creation of another socio-economic model could have a global impact.” But eight years later, Chomsky was singing a different tune: “I never described Chavez’s state capitalist government as ‘socialist’ or even hinted at such an absurdity,” he claimed. “It was quite remote from socialism. Private capitalism remained…. Capitalists were free to undermine the economy in all sorts of ways, like massive export of capital.”55
Bernie Sanders did a similar about-face on Venezuela. In 2006, he participated in a Hugo Chavez stunt in which Bernie bought discounted Venezuelan heating oil for distribution to Vermonters through government assistance programs.56 But in 2015, when Hillary Clinton supporters began attacking him over that deal, he denounced Chavez as a “dead communist dictator.”57 That makes it really hard to explain why, during the Venezuelan general strike of 2002–2003, Bernie signed a letter along with eighteen Democratic members of Congress expressing support for the dictator and opposing efforts to remove him from office.58
Today’s crop of socialists in Washington claims they don’t support communist or authoritarian socialism, insisting they have something more peaceful in mind. Bernie insists Denmark is his inspiration—which upset the Danish prime minister, who noted that Denmark actually isn’t socialist at all.59
Despite these claims, Bernie can’t seem to stop himself from blurting out praise for communist regimes. This is no one-time slip-up, it’s a decades-long habit. In 1988 he honeymooned in the USSR and returned to America declaring, “There are some things that [the USSR does] better than we do and which were, in fact, quite impressive,” going on to rave about the wonders of the Moscow subway system.60
True to form, after the USSR collapsed, Bernie’s messaging was noticeably different. At a 2020 CNN town hall, an audience member told Bernie that his father’s family had fled the USSR and asked, “How do you rectify your notion of democratic socialism with the failures of socialism in nearly every country that has tried it?” Bernie answered, “Is it your assumption that I supported or believe in authoritarian communism that existed in the Soviet Union? I don’t and never have. And I opposed it…. What do I mean when I talk about democratic socialism? It certainly is not the authoritarian communism that existed in the Soviet Union and in other communist countries.”61
If that’s the case, it’s strange that Bernie continually praised the actions of the communist regimes he supposedly opposes. In 1985 he traveled to Nicaragua for celebrations commemorating the sixth anniversary of the communist Sandinista regime. According to the New York Times, “At the anniversary celebration, a wire report described a chant rising up: ‘Here, there, everywhere, the Yankee will die.’ If Mr. Sanders harbored unease about the Sandinistas, he did not dwell on it.” After returning to Vermont, Bernie wrote a letter to Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega inviting him to Burlington and bemoaning the U.S. media’s supposed bias against his regime. But today, with Ortega again ruling Nicaragua as Amnesty International and other human rights groups denounce him for committing crimes against humanity, Bernie voices concern about Ortega’s “anti-democratic policies.”62
Similarly, after returning from a trip to Cuba in 1989, Bernie babbled, “I did not see a hungry child. I did not see any homeless people.” He admitted Cuba was “not a perfect society,” but insisted that the communist nation “not only has free health care but very high-quality health care…. The revolution there is far deeper and more profound than I understood it to be. It really is a revolution in terms of values.”63 When asked by 60 Minutes during the 2020 presidential campaign about his praise of the Castro regime, he again changed his tune, claiming, “We’re very opposed to the authoritarian nature of Cuba.” But Bernie just couldn’t help himself, following that statement by lauding Castro’s “massive literacy program.”64 So Castro may have thrown dissidents into prison camps and murdered them, but at least some of those who didn’t resist learned how to read—and mostly government-sanctioned “news” and books.
Despite his halfhearted attempts to distance himself from hard-core communism, Bernie has a long history of supporting radical Marxist organizations. In the 1980 and 1984 U.S. presidential elections, Bernie campaigned for the Socialist Workers’ Party, a fringe communist group. As the Washington Examiner reported,
In 1980, Sanders “proudly endorsed and supported” Andrew Pulley, the party’s presidential candidate, who once said that American soldiers should “take up their guns and shoot their officers.” Sanders was one of three electors for Pulley on the Vermont ballot, stating in a press release: “I fully support the SWP’s continued defense of the Cuban revolution.”
Four years later, he backed and campaigned for the SWP presidential nominee Mel Mason, a former Black Panther, saying it was important for there to be “fundamental alternatives to capitalist ideology.” During the campaign, Mason praised the Russian and Chinese revolutions and said: “The greatest example of a socialist government is Cuba, and Nicaragua is right behind, but it’s still developing.”65
And if Bernie now projects himself as merely supporting peaceful assistance for the poor, some of his followers haven’t got the message. In video stings, Project Veritas captured multiple Bernie campaign workers and volunteers declaring support for “extreme action,” warning of mass violence if Bernie doesn’t win the Democratic nomination, discussing the need to keep quiet about Marxist-Leninists and anarchists participating in the campaign, and advocating sending their class enemies to Soviet-style forced labor camps.66
Bernie’s ideological instincts are obvious. His proposal to abolish private health insurance through his Medicaid for All scheme is similar to his policy proposals from years ago, when he was less guarded about his program than he is today. In the 1970s, he called for “placing doctors on salaries” and implementing a 100 percent tax rate for income over a million dollars a year. He also advocated for the government to seize control of the energy industry, electricity and telephone utilities, banks, “corporations” in general, and drug companies.67 In other words, he called for state control over the main levers of the economy.
That is what socialists want, because that’s what socialism means. According to socialism, free individuals can’t be trusted to run industries; only the government can be trusted. Why government bureaucrats are smarter or less selfish or less corrupt than businesspeople remains to be seen. But if a socialist gains power, this state of affairs has the benefit of concentrating far more power in his or her own hands.
People can reasonably ask what would be needed to discredit socialism if the centuries-long record of disaster after disaster isn’t enough. The answer, clearly, is that for true believers, nothing can discredit the ideology. No number of famines, mass murders, or economic collapses will ever be enough to make them question their socialist faith. To the contrary, everything is proof of the need for socialism. When the U.S. economy is doing poorly, they claim capitalism is broken and socialism will do better. When the economy is doing well, they say we need socialism to eliminate inequality between the rich and poor. For most reasonable people, the spread of the coronavirus showed the need to be more wary of communist China, but for Bernie and his supporters, it simply proved the need for more socialism.68
Although socialists often spend entire lifetimes arguing over the trivial details of their philosophy, it’s possible that no one has understood socialism better than Margaret Thatcher. She was elected prime minister of Britain in 1979 as a backlash against socialists, who had conducted a decades-long experiment on the British economy. The wide-scale nationalization of industry and other collectivist policies had produced the typical results—economic stagnation, labor unrest, and social strife. But Thatcher understood that the problem with socialism is not just that it fails to meet its goal. The problem is the goal itself. Leveling society to make everyone equal is not only impossible, it’s inherently destructive, it breeds corruption, and it’s totally incompatible with freedom and limited government. In 1976 Thatcher declared,
One of our principal and continuing priorities when we are returned to office will be to restore the freedoms which the socialists have usurped. Let them learn that it is not a function of the State to possess as much as possible. It is not a function of the State to grab as much as it can get away with. It is not a function of the State to act as ring-master, to crack the whip, dictate the load which all of us must carry or say how high we may climb. It is not a function of the State to ensure that no-one climbs higher than anyone else. All that is the philosophy of socialism. We reject it utterly for, however well-intended, it leads in one direction only: to the erosion and finally the destruction of the democratic way of life.69
So long as socialists continue to fight for their destructive policies, the rest of us will have to remind people, especially young people, about socialism’s miserable real-life record. We have to recognize socialism’s sinister appeal—its promise of utopian equality, and its relentless scapegoating and encouragement of class warfare. We have to emphasize not only socialism’s failures throughout the world, but the dilution of freedom that socialism requires.
With her stunning victory over socialism in Britain, Thatcher provides an example of how to argue our case—relentlessly, factually, fearlessly, and passionately. Never allow socialists to claim moral superiority—they have none. Never apologize for free markets and freedom, which produced the greatest system of wealth creation in human history. Instead let’s put them on the defensive and make them justify their adherence to a failed, freakish ideology and their mystical faith in government planning that has resulted in anguish and squalor throughout the world.
Considering the American left’s long fascination with socialist regimes and its romance with the USSR, it was a stunning turnaround when they suddenly decided in 2016 and 2017 that Russia was our chief enemy worldwide—a country so powerful and evil that it could supposedly corrupt a U.S. presidential election just by putting up some broken-English Facebook and Twitter posts. But if that’s the argument they thought would get rid of President Trump, then that’s the argument they had to make, and we turn to that topic in the next chapter.