A businesslike piece by Ilya Somin about the scale of Communist crimes – and why we must not forget them.

It’s the sheer scale of the cruelty which we normally fail to grasp. Cuba? Great health care!

Unless you’re murdered by the state:

Since coming to power in 1959, Castro’s government has executed some 1.5% of Cuba’s population for “political” dissent, while incarcerating another 5.6% in concentration camps. These figures would be even higher if not for the proximity of the United States, which enabled a large part of Cuba’s population to flee… 

Despite these atrocities, Cuba and North Korea receive only a tiny fraction of the attention that human rights groups and the international community pay to much lesser offenses committed by democratic governments or non-leftist dictatorships.

Imagine if, after the fall of Hitler, an unreconstructed Nazi-like regime had remained in place in some small European country, and continued to run concentration camps, a Gestapo-like secret police, and so on. Would not that regime be an international pariah constantly targeted by human rights groups and subjected to severe sanctions by all self-respecting democratic states? 

Well, at least Tito’s Yugoslavia was not so bad.

Almost every fully socialist government (by which, again, I mean a government that manage to take control over the vast bulk of the economy) that held on to power for more than a few years ended up murdering a substantial fraction of its population (usually at least 1–2%).

Even the relatively moderate government of Yugoslavia – generally considered the least oppressive communist regime — killed some 1 million of its people, according to calculations by political scientist Rudolph Rummel.

I am off to Berlin tomorrow to give a talk about the end of Communism in Europe and the Berlin Wall. That Wall merely made explicit to even the dimmest person in the East and West alike – that people in the post-WW2 Communist states were in fact trapped in a giant prison camp.

Of course walls are also handy for keeping people out. Which is why things in the USA will get interesting in the South if the new healthcare ‘reforms’ compel Americans in jobs to subsidise the medical treatment of anyone who shows up at a hospital?