Red Century, Red Blood

Take my arm, take my leg
Oh, baby don't you take my head
--The Rolling Stones

The 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution finds several mainstream media outlets including NYT waxing poetically about the 'Red Century.' Its association with the color red is more than a little ironic. No ideology has exacted a bloodier toll on human existence than communism.

As noted here, the killing capacity of the Marxist-Leninist movement, which commonly promoted itself as a champion of 'the people,' tests the bounds of human comprehension. The number of deaths associated with various threads of this ideology might surpass 100 million.

Recount after recount of life behind the iron curtain reinforces the extent of human cruelty in everyday terms.

None of this should be surprising. Even cursory examination of Marx and Engels and other early works that laid the conceptual foundation for communism suggests that an extreme amount of force is necessary to reshape the lives of individuals--who are naturally endowed with freedom--into the unnaturally collectivist communist ideal.

A Harvard undergrad, whose parents fled the chaos the communism wrought on Eastern Europe, captured the essence:

"Communism cannot be separated from oppression; in fact, it depends on it."

Here's hoping that the world's sentence to a century of communism is not extended.