Communist Crimes

Many people have heard the word "Communist" before, but don't really know the crimes that have plagued every single Communist-run country. On paper Communism sounds great: a classless society where everyone is equal. In reality, Communism has never worked because it goes against human nature and the end result has always been Communists creating a dictatorship and imprisoning and killing anyone who isn't a Communist (and even some "good" Communists that have fallen out of favor with the Communists currently in power.) I know there are many people around the world who want the return of the "good ole days" when they had free healthcare, had to have a job (or be imprisoned) and where things seemed better on surface. The reality was: long lines for everything, rationing, special stores and housing for powerful Communists, restricted travel inside your own country, restricted travel outside your country, strict censorship, a distortion of the facts and history, the imprisonment, deportation and/or killing of anyone  - Communist or non-Communist - simply because the authorities could and a society where no one could trust strangers, friends or even family as they could be reporting on you to the secret police. I have been to several former Communist countries and know many people that lived under different degrees of Communist dictatorships, but have found the same overall "theme" throughout: the Communist countries were not "classless workers paradises where everyone was equal", but were corrupt, segregated societies where torture, murder and fear were used to gain and keep control. Even the few Communist countries today (China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam and Laos) have had to dramatically change their traditional stance on Communism in order to survive. North Korea has to accept foreign aid from non-Communist countries to feed its own people the same way the Soviet Union did from the US. China had to open-up to the outside world and now more Chinese tourists travel the world than ever before.

While Communism doesn't have the same terror-sounding effect it once did we can't forget that just 25 years ago there were many Communist countries killing their own people as well as other people around the world and the majority of the murderers have never been brought to justice or their victims remembered.

The following are estimates of the number of people killed by the Communists in that country and are taken from numerous sources (see below) along with the time period the Communists were/are in power from:

1.) China (1949-Present):  73,237,000 people killed

2.) Soviet Union (1922-1991):  58,627,000 people killed

3.) Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (1919-1922): 3,284,000 people killed

4.) North Korea (1948-Present): 3,163,000 people killed

5.) Cambodia (1975-1987): 2,627,000 people killed

6.) Afghanistan (1978-1992): 1,750,000 people killed

7.) North Vietnam (1945-1976), Vietnam (1976-Present): 1,670,000 people killed

       *This estimate doesn't include the 1,062,000 people killed by the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War and goes from 1945-1987. *

8.) Ethiopia (1974-1991): 1,343,610 people killed

9.) Yugoslavia (1945-1992): 1,072,000 people killed

10.) Chinese Soviet Republic (1931-1934): 700,000 people killed

11.) Mozambique  (1975-1990): 700,000 people killed

12.) Romania (1947-1989):  435,0000 people killed

13.) Bulgaria (1946-1990):  222,000 people killed

14.) Angola (1975-1992):  125,000 people killed

15.) Mongolia (1924-1992): 100,000 people killed

16.) Albania (1946-1991): 100,000 people killed

17.) Cuba (1961-Present): 73,000 people killed

     *This estimate covers the time period 1959-1987*

18.) East Germany (1949-1990): 70,000 people killed

19.) Czechoslovakia (1948-1990): 65,000 people killed

     * This estimate covers the time period 1948-1968*

20.) Laos (1975-Present): 56,000 people killed

   * This estimate covers the time period 1975-1987*

21.) Hungary (1949-1989): 27,000 people killed

22.) Poland (1948-1989): 22,000 people killed

23.) Yemen (1969-1990): 1,000 people killed

These numbers are only an estimate of the number killed by the Communists and doesn't include those arrested, kept in corrective labor camps or mental institutions or deported. As stated above the vast majority of the Communist officials who planned, organized and carried-out these murders have never been brought to justice and many are still alive today receiving government pensions for their "good work in service of their country" the same way many Nazis were receiving government pensions from 1945-on. The scope of the crimes committed by the Communist dictatorships around the world far surpasses what the Nazis did (mostly because the Nazis were in power for 12 years while many Communist dictatorships were around for 60 + years.) In many parts of the world the same Communists who did these crimes are still in power (at the local and Federal levels) and that is just plain wrong.

References Used:

BBC News (2000, April 6). Flashback 1984: portrait of a famine. Retrieved May 7, 2006, from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/703958.stm
Chang, Jung, & Halliday, Jon (2005). Mao: the unknown story (1st American ed.). New York: Alfred A Knopf.
Courtois, S., Werth, N., Panne, J., Paczkowski, A., Bartosek, K., & Margolin, J. (1999). The black book of Communism: crimes, terror, repression. United States: Harvard University Press.
Rummel, R. J. (1994). Death by government. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
Rummel, R. J. (1996). Lethal politics: Soviet genocide and mass murder since 1917 (1st paperback ed.). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
Rummel, R. J. (2005, November 20). Reevaluating China’s democide to be 73,000,000. Retrieved April 5, 2006, from http://freedomspeace.blogspot.com/2005/11/reevaluating-chinas-democide-to-be.html
Rummel, R. J. (1997). Statistics of democide: genocide and mass murder since 1900. Charlottesville, Virginia: Transaction Publishers.
U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (2006). Failure to protect: a call for the UN Security Council to act in North Korea. United States: DLA Piper.
Young, Lance S. (1991). Mozambique’s sixteen-year bloody civil war. Retrieved November 1, 2006, from http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/1991/YLS.htm