Megamurder

Upon visiting the Victims of Communism Museum:

As you enter the building, a placard declares the startling human cost of world communism: Over 100 million people have been killed since Lenin took power. Josef Stalin supposedly said that whereas one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. He would certainly know. The mind cannot comprehend such mass misery; it glazes over. The VOC Museum’s curators overcome this problem by highlighting individual human tragedies. ....

The museum’s first gallery focuses on the Bolshevik takeover of Russia. Lenin was the first to pioneer the model of one-party totalitarian dictatorship. ....

The museum’s second gallery centers on the victims of Stalin’s rule and informs visitors about the gulags, forced labor camps, purges, and show trials that characterized his dictatorship. We see and hear gripping evidence of the deportations, the mass executions, the ethnic cleansings, and the deliberately engineered famines that killed millions, most notably in Ukraine. ....

The museum’s third gallery describes the postwar expansion of the Leninist model into Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, Southeast Asia, and parts of Africa. ....

During the 1990s, it was commonplace to write triumphalist obituaries of communism. Now we know better. For while the USSR was deservedly placed on the ash heap of history, the Marxist-Leninist template never entirely disappeared. Instead, it discovered new ways to tyrannize and survive. ....

Visiting the Victims of Communism Museum is a remarkable experience; not only does the museum educate visitors on twentieth-century communist tyranny, but it reminds us that Marxist-Leninist dictatorships continue to survive, impacting the lives of over 1.5 billion people. In the case of Xi Jinping’s China, that threat is greater than ever. For American conservatives, the only sane answer in the coming years must be: resist. .... (more)

If I were to visit Washington, D.C. again this place would be on my agenda.

Some years ago I posted this:

Colin Dueck, "The Cost of Communism," First Things, July 4, 2023,  R.J. Rummel, Death by Government