by Sean Hannity
To understand the true lunacy of these socialist frenzies, let’s look at an account of just one aspect of the Great Leap Forward provided by Li Zhisui, who traveled extensively with Mao during this period, serving as Mao’s personal doctor. In order to increase steel production, the Communist Party ordered that small furnaces be built in fields and courtyards throughout the country. What was used to fuel these contraptions, which spit out small, useless globs of steel? People’s steel household implements—pots and pans, knives, shovels, and doorknobs. What’s more, because there wasn’t enough coal to fuel the furnaces, families were forced to feed their wooden furniture—tables, chairs, and beds—into them. Meanwhile, because so many peasants were transferred to work with the furnaces, the harvest in many villages was left to rot in the fields, contributing to one of the worst famines in human history. Liu noted, “Mao said that China was not on the verge of communism, but in fact some absurd form of communism was already in place. Private property was being abolished, because private property was all being given away to feed the voracious steel furnaces.”33
In Cambodia, the communist Khmer Rouge regime led by Pol Pot seized power in 1975 and upped the ante on socialist utopianism, declaring they were resetting time to a mythical “year zero” in which Cambodian society and culture would begin completely anew. Suspicious of urban living, they emptied out their own cities, including the capital of Phnom Penh, and forced the residents into the countryside. The Cambodia Tribunal Monitor, which was established to document the later trials of Khmer Rouge leaders, provides a short summary of the regime’s bizarre totalitarian rule. In order to bring about a classless society, the Khmer Rouge
abolished money, free markets, normal schooling, private property, foreign clothing styles, religious practices, and traditional Khmer culture. Public schools, pagodas, mosques, churches, universities, shops and government buildings were shut or turned into prisons, stables, reeducation camps and granaries. There was no public or private transportation, no private property, and no non-revolutionary entertainment. Leisure activities were severely restricted. People throughout the country, including the leaders of the CPK, had to wear black costumes, which were their traditional revolutionary clothes.
The government deprived individuals of basic human rights, prohibiting them from congregating in public or leaving their cooperatives. If even three people were to gather to have a discussion, “they could be accused of being enemies and arrested or executed.”
The government also profoundly intruded on personal and familial relationships: “People were forbidden to show even the slightest affection, humor or pity. The Khmer Rouge asked all Cambodians to believe, obey and respect only Angkar Padevat [the Communist Party leadership], which was to be everyone’s ‘mother and father.’ ”34
The Khmer Rouge was responsible for an estimated 1.2 million–2.8 million deaths—or 13–30 percent of the country’s entire population at the time35—from execution, starvation, and other causes. In early 1979 they were overthrown in an invasion by Vietnam, a fellow socialist country. Some of the regime’s criminals fled into the jungles of Thailand. Although Pol Pot died in 1998 without facing justice, others were put on trial years later. It’s not often that an everyday victim of genocidal socialism gets to confront his tormentors in court, but during the trials some Cambodians got that chance.
One was Bou Meng, who was among just fifteen prisoners who survived Tuol Sleng prison, from where sadistic Khmer Rouge maniacs took at least twelve thousand prisoners to various locations for execution. In 1977, despite being a Khmer Rouge supporter, Bou Meng was arrested with his wife, Ma Yoeun, for no apparent reason. They were taken to Tuol Sleng, where Ma Yoeun, who had worked as a midwife, was quickly executed, a tragedy that still brings tears to Bou Meng’s eyes. He was tortured and forced to falsely confess to working for the CIA. His life was spared, though, because the prison chief, a notorious Khmer Rouge operative known as Duch, learned he was an artist and put him to work drawing portraits of Pol Pot and other international communist leaders.
In the 1980s, after the Khmer Rouge were overthrown and the prison was converted into a museum, Bou Meng returned there to search for the photo his captors took of Ma Yoeun when she was processed into the prison. In 2015 he told a BBC reporter that he could still see her standing in front of him, and that he wanted to be able to pray over her grave. His tormentor, Duch, was put on trial in 2009 by a special court established to try Khmer Rouge officials. Bou was given the opportunity to ask Duch one question during the trial, so he asked where his wife was killed. Duch was unable to answer the question.36
A more recent socialist experiment occurred in Venezuela under Hugo Chavez, a former military officer who’d been imprisoned for staging a failed coup in 1992. Elected president in 1998, Chavez presided over the “Bolivarian Revolution,” a socialist movement inspired by nineteenth-century Venezuelan revolutionary Simon Bolivar. As president, Chavez centralized power, cracking down on oppositional media outlets and packing the Venezuelan Supreme Court. He realigned his nation’s foreign policy and cultivated Castro’s Cuba as a close ally while denouncing then-president George W. Bush as “the devil” at the United Nations.37
Chavez introduced many programs to fight poverty and assist the poor, including low-income housing projects, literacy programs, free health care, and food subsidies. While those programs were touted by his leftist international supporters, they proved to be utterly unsustainable when his overall socialist economic program wrecked the economy. Forced land transfers, land expropriations, and increasing state control in agriculture led to a 75 percent drop in food production over the following two decades as the Venezuelan population increased 33 percent. A vast program of nationalizing industry spread corruption and dramatically suppressed operations in electricity, water, banks, supermarkets, construction, and other industries.38
A core problem was that Chavez never diversified the Venezuelan economy from its dependence on oil. With the price of oil skyrocketing from $20 a barrel when he became president to $110 when he died in office in 2013,39 Chavez’s social programs survived during his tenure, even though they were piling up an enormous debt load. But Chavez planted the seeds of catastrophe when he included the oil industry in his massive program of seizing and nationalizing businesses. He seized private oil fields and gave them to the national oil company, PDVSA. After the company’s employees joined an anti-Chavez general strike in 2002, he fired nineteen thousand oil workers. Their replacements were Chavez loyalists who lacked the knowledge and experience to competently run the company. Many foreign experts were later chased out of Venezuela when Chavez seized control of oil projects run by ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips, and confiscated their assets.40 The result was a long, steep decline in Venezuela’s oil output that outlasted Chavez’s reign, with output falling from 3.5 million barrels per day in 1998, when Chavez was elected, to just 760,000 in February 2020.41
Chavez responded to the economic deterioration by socializing the economy even more, implementing price controls and exchange controls that only made the problems worse, creating more shortages and an extensive black market in foreign currencies.42
Chavez’s successor, Nicolàs Maduro, continued the economic policies of the Bolivarian Revolution, resulting in a shattering economic collapse. Due to food shortages, the average Venezuelan lost twenty-four pounds in 2017, while 90 percent of the population lived in poverty—compared to 33 percent in 2015, the last time the Venezuelan government published poverty statistics.43 The health care system has been decimated by a lack of medicine and equipment and the emigration of doctors. Women about to give birth must endure what they call “the roulette”: traveling to multiple hospitals to find one that will accept them. According to the New York Times, “They sometimes hitchhike, or walk for miles, or take buses over roads whose ruts and bumps seem designed just to torture them. In rare cases, they are rejected over and over until finally giving birth in the street, on a hospital’s steps—or
in its lobby.”44 The economic meltdown has created a huge outflow of refugees, with around 5 million people45—more than 15 percent of the population—having fled their socialist paradise.
Hyperinflation of the Venezuelan currency, the bolivar, reached epic proportions. Because the Venezuelan government stopped publishing the inflation rate, Bloomberg news service created its own estimate based on the price of a cup of coffee at one bakery. In January 2018, its gauge measured an annualized inflation rate of 448,025 percent.46 In August 2018, a Bloomberg journalist reported paying 20 million bolivars for lunch at Burger King.47 The previous month she wrote, “With inflation soaring above 60,000 percent, a top-shelf liter of Scotch can set you back 1 billion bolivars—a sum that a minimum-wage worker would have to toil 16 years to earn.”48 The currency has become so worthless that state officials are increasingly demanding that citizens pay them their bribes in dollars.49
Bloomberg filed a series of reports from correspondents in the capital city of Caracas that offers a glimpse into the bizarre, hellish landscape of Venezuela’s collapse. The dispatches included the following observations:
Due to constant water shortages, “Dishes are brushed off and reused, and clothing is not something regularly laundered…. You ask friends whether it’s okay to flush. You often do not. We’re sweaty and, yes, smelly….”50
In a report titled “Everyone I Know Is Depressed and Medicated,” a reporter described the explosion of the use of anti-anxiety and depression medications, adding, “Our country has been so short on meds that some people buy drugs made for pets.”51
Because Venezuela no longer produces auto spare parts, importers have shut down, public transport has “fallen into ruin,” and any public transport that does work is crime ridden, people are forced to hitchhike to work.52
A correspondent described obstacles to dating in Caracas, including hyperinflation, the closing of bars and restaurants, condom shortages, rampant crime, rolling blackouts, tear-gas smoke, and the constant emigration of possible partners.53
Starving child beggars have appeared “seemingly everywhere” in Caracas. A reporter described Andrea, a nine-year-old juggling limes on a street corner: “She kept her collections in a pink-plastic purse: 24 bolivars, less than a penny, and a packet of strawberry-flavored wafers. By 11 a.m., that was all she’d had to eat.”54
Mind you, these are the miserable conditions in the country with the largest proved oil reserves in the entire world. It’s hard to think of any system of government other than socialism that could accomplish that feat. As I said, the destructive power of socialism is like a force of nature.
FEEL THE BERN OF SOCIALISM
As you see, socialists have a long record of promising utopia for the poor and then delivering economic destruction, famine, oppression, forced labor camps, and mass killings. Their horrific record speaks for itself. Yet, as I noted earlier, the popularity of socialism is having a resurgence in America, particularly among young people. Democrats in the current Congress have a high-profile “squad” of socialists whose proposals are quickly entering the mainstream of the Democratic Party, and avowed socialist Bernie Sanders became so popular among the Democratic grassroots that for a time he was the front-runner for the 2020 Democratic nomination for president.
Socialists have an endless supply of excuses for all the misery that governments have inflicted in their name. As I mentioned earlier, a primary one is to argue that the architects of all the socialist nightmares we’ve discussed just weren’t doing socialism right. In other words, there’s nothing wrong with central planning per se, it’s just that people keep getting the plan wrong. And if some socialist regime becomes a big enough embarrassment, socialists will simply deny that it was socialist at all. However, leftists inevitably praise these regimes as they’re implementing socialism and disown them only years later, once the disastrous consequences have become undeniable.
In an essay titled “But That Wasn’t Real Socialism,” Kristian Niemietz, head of political economy at the United Kingdom’s Institute of Economic Affairs, provides numerous examples of left-wing Western intellectuals and politicians praising Maoist China, the USSR, Eastern European communism, and other socialist disasters in their early years, only to repudiate them later. One example is renowned left-wing academic Noam Chomsky. On a trip to Venezuela in 2009 he gushed about the Bolivarian Revolution: “[W]hat’s so exciting about at last visiting Venezuela is that I can see how a better world is being created…. The transformations that Venezuela is making toward the creation of another socio-economic model could have a global impact.” But eight years later, Chomsky was singing a different tune: “I never described Chavez’s state capitalist government as ‘socialist’ or even hinted at such an absurdity,” he claimed. “It was quite remote from socialism. Private capitalism remained…. Capitalists were free to undermine the economy in all sorts of ways, like massive export of capital.”55
Bernie Sanders did a similar about-face on Venezuela. In 2006, he participated in a Hugo Chavez stunt in which Bernie bought discounted Venezuelan heating oil for distribution to Vermonters through government assistance programs.56 But in 2015, when Hillary Clinton supporters began attacking him over that deal, he denounced Chavez as a “dead communist dictator.”57 That makes it really hard to explain why, during the Venezuelan general strike of 2002–2003, Bernie signed a letter along with eighteen Democratic members of Congress expressing support for the dictator and opposing efforts to remove him from office.58
Today’s crop of socialists in Washington claims they don’t support communist or authoritarian socialism, insisting they have something more peaceful in mind. Bernie insists Denmark is his inspiration—which upset the Danish prime minister, who noted that Denmark actually isn’t socialist at all.59
Despite these claims, Bernie can’t seem to stop himself from blurting out praise for communist regimes. This is no one-time slip-up, it’s a decades-long habit. In 1988 he honeymooned in the USSR and returned to America declaring, “There are some things that [the USSR does] better than we do and which were, in fact, quite impressive,” going on to rave about the wonders of the Moscow subway system.60
True to form, after the USSR collapsed, Bernie’s messaging was noticeably different. At a 2020 CNN town hall, an audience member told Bernie that his father’s family had fled the USSR and asked, “How do you rectify your notion of democratic socialism with the failures of socialism in nearly every country that has tried it?” Bernie answered, “Is it your assumption that I supported or believe in authoritarian communism that existed in the Soviet Union? I don’t and never have. And I opposed it…. What do I mean when I talk about democratic socialism? It certainly is not the authoritarian communism that existed in the Soviet Union and in other communist countries.”61
If that’s the case, it’s strange that Bernie continually praised the actions of the communist regimes he supposedly opposes. In 1985 he traveled to Nicaragua for celebrations commemorating the sixth anniversary of the communist Sandinista regime. According to the New York Times, “At the anniversary celebration, a wire report described a chant rising up: ‘Here, there, everywhere, the Yankee will die.’ If Mr. Sanders harbored unease about the Sandinistas, he did not dwell on it.” After returning to Vermont, Bernie wrote a letter to Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega inviting him to Burlington and bemoaning the U.S. media’s supposed bias against his regime. But today, with Ortega again ruling Nicaragua as Amnesty International and other human rights groups denounce him for committing crimes against humanity, Bernie voices concern about Ortega’s “anti-democratic policies.”62
Similarly, after returning from a trip to Cuba in 1989, Bernie babbled, “I did not see a hungry child. I did not see any homeless people.” He admitted Cuba was “not a perfect society,” but insisted that the communist nation “not only has free health care but very high-quality health care…. The revolution there is far deeper and more profound than I understood it to be. It really is a revolution in te
rms of values.”63 When asked by 60 Minutes during the 2020 presidential campaign about his praise of the Castro regime, he again changed his tune, claiming, “We’re very opposed to the authoritarian nature of Cuba.” But Bernie just couldn’t help himself, following that statement by lauding Castro’s “massive literacy program.”64 So Castro may have thrown dissidents into prison camps and murdered them, but at least some of those who didn’t resist learned how to read—and mostly government-sanctioned “news” and books.
Despite his halfhearted attempts to distance himself from hard-core communism, Bernie has a long history of supporting radical Marxist organizations. In the 1980 and 1984 U.S. presidential elections, Bernie campaigned for the Socialist Workers’ Party, a fringe communist group. As the Washington Examiner reported,
In 1980, Sanders “proudly endorsed and supported” Andrew Pulley, the party’s presidential candidate, who once said that American soldiers should “take up their guns and shoot their officers.” Sanders was one of three electors for Pulley on the Vermont ballot, stating in a press release: “I fully support the SWP’s continued defense of the Cuban revolution.”
Four years later, he backed and campaigned for the SWP presidential nominee Mel Mason, a former Black Panther, saying it was important for there to be “fundamental alternatives to capitalist ideology.” During the campaign, Mason praised the Russian and Chinese revolutions and said: “The greatest example of a socialist government is Cuba, and Nicaragua is right behind, but it’s still developing.”65
And if Bernie now projects himself as merely supporting peaceful assistance for the poor, some of his followers haven’t got the message. In video stings, Project Veritas captured multiple Bernie campaign workers and volunteers declaring support for “extreme action,” warning of mass violence if Bernie doesn’t win the Democratic nomination, discussing the need to keep quiet about Marxist-Leninists and anarchists participating in the campaign, and advocating sending their class enemies to Soviet-style forced labor camps.66