Is America Doomed to Repeat the Failures of Socialism? 

So-called democratic socialists such as Mamdani ally Darializa Avila Chevalier have called for the “total eradication of Western civilization.”  This should not surprise us. For decades, America’s education system—from K-12 through universities—has drifted from teaching about the American Dream to an outright assault on America’s free market, democratic system and Judeo-Christian heritage.   

History provides many examples of the failures of state-controlled economies. 

Few Americans realize, for example, that the late Roman Empire experimented with socialist-style policies—with disastrous results. In the early 300s A.D., Emperor Diocletian imposed government control over the means of production along with wage and price controls. When people fled these restrictions, the state responded by tying workers to the land—laying the foundations for medieval serfdom, a form of slavery. 

Time and again, totalitarian command economies result in famine, misery, and slavery.   

Progressive Americans would be shocked to learn that George Fitzhugh, the South’s leading intellectual defender of slavery in the 1850s, praised the slave plantation as the “beautiful ideal” of a socialist society. Slaves worked, he argued, but were provided for and spared the difficult choices liberty requires. 

The 20th century saw the first large-scale attempts to implement socialism at the state level, starting in revolutionary Russia. Today’s socialists try to distance themselves by calling these cases “communism,” but Lenin himself made no such distinction. He named his new state the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and his global revolutionary movement the Communist International. 

However they brand themselves—Marxist, communist, socialist—these regimes proved among the most monstrous in history, and shared certain traits. 

Horrific famines were one. Five million Soviets were forcibly starved to death between 1930 and 1935. China’s Great Leap Forward caused an inconceivable 20 to 45 million deaths from 1959 to 1961. Vietnam and Cambodia experienced deadly famines from forced collectivization, resulting in the loss of one-quarter of Cambodia’s population!  Ethiopia’s 1980s collectivization experiment also triggered famine. North Korea endured its own catastrophic famine in the 1990s, with an indeterminate death toll. In some cases, the horror included cannibalism—even parents selling their children for food. 

Periods of “terror,” with indiscriminate purges and executions, were another common feature. The Soviet Union experienced two: the initial Red Terror (formalized by an official government “Decree on the Red Terror”) shortly after the Bolsheviks seized power, and the Great Terror of the late 1930s. China’s Cultural Revolution, beginning in the mid-1960s, was a decade of chaos in which no one was safe. North Vietnam’s paranoid purges in the mid-1950s were brutal, while the entire Khmer Rouge era in Cambodia qualifies as one long terror. Finally, shortly after taking power, Cuba saw indiscriminate political executions overseen by the sadistic Che Guevara—whose image still adorns many T-shirts. 

All these regimes—including the USSR, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Cuba—became totalitarian states where people lived in constant fear of secret police and of informers among friends and even family members. 

Socialists and communists always promise workers’ rights but delivered the opposite. In 1919, the Soviets made work compulsory and absenteeism a crime punishable by prison.  One never saw homeless or the unemployed in communist countries because they were rounded up, imprisoned, or killed. 

These regimes always institute a cult of personality around the likes of heroic Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Che, or the deified Kim family.  The Greate Leader and the Party can not be wrong, and any sacrifice is worthy if made in their name. 

Improved living standards? Soviet economists admitted that meat rations in 1989 were lower than under the Tsar before World War I. Whether in the Soviet Union or today’s China, access to technological innovation has often been through surveillance, industrial espionage, and theft from the West, not home-grown innovation. 

Here is the ethos of socialism as declared in the first issue of The Red Sword, the newspaper of the Kyiv Cheka in 1918: “To us, everything is permitted … Let blood flow like water! Let blood stain forever the black pirate’s flag flown by the bourgeoisie and let our flag be blood-red forever!” For those who have experienced the menace of an ANTIFA event, the burning of American cities in the summer of 2020, or some “Free Palestine” rallies, such calls to violence do not seem improbable. 

We cannot blame younger voters for their ignorance of the lies and crimes of socialism in all its forms. The failure to educate them is ours, and now we must act. 

We can do so: we must directly confront the anti-American and anti-historical allegations made by democratic socialists such as Dareliza Avila Chevalier (NYC), Melat Kiros (CO), and Chris Robb (PA).  We must also dramatically reform our formal and informal education systems, from our homes to elementary school through university, to give an accurate accounting of the evils of all forms of communism as well as the achievements and ideals of the American system.