Google “Oct. 25 communist anniversary celebration,” and there are some results.
The first is about a meeting in Minneapolis, described in a blog, in which the Freedom Road Socialist Organization is marking the 100th anniversary of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia.
Second is a communist publication reporting “communists in the Antifa crowd” are preparing to mark the day, and third is how North Korea dictator Kim Jong Un plans to remember it.
The fourth result, however, is a Japan Times article headlined “No pomp as Russia revolution centenary nears.”
“A hundred years later, Russia still has trouble dealing with its revolutionary past,” the report said.
While during the Soviet era, there were grand events marking the day, “today the program is far more subdued.”
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In fact, a traveler planning a trip to Russia asked on TripAdvisor what events would be going on to mark the anniversary of the October Revolution, and the top response was “authorities decided to abstain from massive celebrations due to the divisive nature of the event and unclear official viewpoint.”
Responded one person from Moscow, “You won’t believe it, but quite a few people here would like to know that too!”
The website of the Communist Party USA didn’t appear to have a single paragraph about any celebration of the anniversary.
Instead, its profiled issues were “Long Live May Day,” “The African American Liberation Struggle” “and “Remembering James W. Ford.”
It was on Oct. 25, 1917, that the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, took over the Russian government and began to inflict communism on the world.
Inflict, because the political system has been tried over and over on different continents in different nations by many different leaders, and the only uniform result has been tyranny, poverty and death.
Experts estimate that as many as 140 million people have died as a direct result of the communist system and its leadership.
Professor Paul Kengor, a Ph.D. whose works include “The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism” and “11 Principles of a Reagan Conservative,” and who has written for publications such as USA Today and the New York Times, told WND, “We should have learned that communism is the deadliest ideology in human history.”
He elaborated: “No ideology has killed as many people. The total deaths in communism governments in the 20th century was between 100 million and 140 million.”
Kengor said many of the lower estimates likely don’t account for those killed by Mao in China and by the Kim clan in North Korea.
“I think we can safely say the death toll from communism probably is double the combined death toll of World War I and World War II,’ he said.
President Reagan, he noted, once referred to communism as a “disease,” but Kengor said he’s been unable to identify any disease with such a record of killing.
The professor said it’s more a form of “insanity,” “when you consider the political pathology.”
The problem, he said, is “education, education, education.”
Today’s society is simply not taught the historic impact of communism.
The left, instead, praises the concepts and practices, even if it doesn’t call it communism anymore.
Today, the ideology is masked in language such as “economic equality” and “workers’ rights,” he said.
William Murray, author of “The Utopian Road to Hell,” noted communism “is not the only utopian villain of the 20th century.”
“The madness that drives individuals and sometimes entire societies to seek utopian solutions inevitably ends in failure, usually at great human cost. … The national socialism of Adolf Hitler was also based on a system of central planning.”
Murray notes in his book that the “centrally planned attempts at Utopian government during the 20th century resulted in hundreds of millions of deaths and the imprisonment and torture of millions more.”
“Most of the deaths were not caused in war, but by the governments themselves as their failed economic model forced entire societies into near or actual slavery,” he said.
“More people died at the hands of their own communist governments in the 20th century than died in all the wars in all the history of mankind,” said Murray,
Joseph Farah, WND founder and CEO, said that in his youth he was a “small-c communist.”
“It’s amazing how little attention the 100th anniversary of Red October and the birth of the Soviet Union is getting this year,” he said. “Some 60 million or more were murdered by this regime. Even the left doesn’t celebrate this nightmarish historical reality, nor talk about it.”
Farah said the lack of attention suggest to him “we haven’t really learned the critical hard lessons of communism.”
“What an opportunity we have to make people understand there was another holocaust – one even bigger and longer than the Nazi Holocaust. Our motto should be the same: Never again,” said Farah, author of “The Restitution of All Things.”
The Bolshevik.info site says the “tremendous impact of the Russian October Revolution was due to one irrefutable fact: the working class, for the first time in history, had captured state power and used it to overthrow the existing order and transform society and existing social relations.”
The site blames the later “rise of Stalinism” for the “eventual collapse.”
“Re-reading the writings of Lenin, Trotsky, and John Reed on the Russian Revolution one finds ideas that seem very modern when we consider the tasks workers and youth face today,” the organization said. “We are confident that this generation will see its own October, learn the lessons of the past, and move to fulfill the destiny that the Russian workers …Â left unfinished.”
