Communism and Violence

On the face of it, Communism is a peaceful doctrine. All it says is that people should share resources. Joint ownership of resources, that sounds like a good idea. The problem, of course, is that it doesn't work. Communism may seem like just another way to apportion resources, but its history demonstrates that it is really an inhumanly violent doctrine. (That is because there are no safeguards; the people in power are not responsible to those they rule over.) It inevitably devolves into a violence-when-desired doctrine.

This is evidenced by the excessive violence in all communist regimes so far. Soviet Russia had its share of extreme rulers. Millions were killed, and terror was the performance-motivating factor for most of the U.S.S.R.'s history. China followed much the same route under Mao Ze-Dong during the euphemistically named cultural revolution in the 1960s. In today's media-driven world, China's communist party recognizes that it is folly to be so blatant and have resorted to total indoctrination of the Chinese population to achieve the same aims. Any dissidents (the Falun Gong, for example) are dealt with savagely.

The latest in the line of Marx's descendants to embrace violence and repression wholeheartedly are the Indian communists, the CPI(M). Following in the footsteps of their Soviet and Chinese gods, they have rigged every election in West Bengal (as reported by every English language daily published out of Calcutta after every election) since they came to power in the 1970s. The CPI(M) operates like the Chinese Communist Party, pilfering public funds to pay a huge array of "cadres" operating at a street-by-street level. The recent violence in Nandigram is the latest example of the disregard for ethics of even a basic pretense at humanity demonstrated by the CPI(M), which sent its cadres in to rape and torture villagers who did nothing worse than resist the confiscation of their own land for the CPI(M)'s commercial designs. In typical Communist fashion, saving loss of face became more important than the land and the law and the people.