Today is not just May Day, but also Victims of Communism Day. As law professor Ilya Somin explains,
The authoritative Black Book of Communism estimates the total at 80 to 100 million dead, greater than that caused by all other twentieth century tyrannies combined. We appropriately have a Holocaust Memorial Day. It is equally appropriate to commemorate the victims of the twentieth century’s other great totalitarian tyranny. And May Day is the most fitting day to do so….
Our comparative neglect of communist crimes has serious costs. Victims of Communism Day can serve the dual purpose of appropriately commemorating the millions of victims, and diminishing the likelihood that such atrocities will recur. Just as Holocaust Memorial Day and other similar events promote awareness of the dangers of racism, anti-Semitism, and radical nationalism, so Victims of Communism Day can increase awareness of the dangers of left-wing forms of totalitarianism, and government domination of the economy and civil society.
While communism is most closely associated with Russia, where the first communist regime was established, it had comparably horrendous effects in other nations around the world. The highest death toll for a communist regime was not in Russia, but in China. Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward was likely the biggest episode of mass murder in the entire history of the world…While the influence of communist ideology has declined since its mid-twentieth century peak, it is far from dead. Largely unreformed communist regimes remain in power in Cuba and North Korea. In Venezuela, the Marxist government’s socialist policies have resulted in political repression, the starvation of children, and a massive refugee crisis—the biggest in the history of the Western hemisphere.
In Russia, the authoritarian regime of former KGB Colonel Vladimir Putin has embarked on a wholesale whitewashing of communism’s historical record….China’s horrific repression of the Uighur minority is reminiscent of similar policies under Mao and Stalin, though it has not—so far—reached the level of actual mass murder. But imprisoning over 1 million people in horrific concentration camps is more than bad enough. In a 2012 post, I explained why May 1 is a better date for Victims of Communism Day than the available alternatives, such as November 7 (the anniversary of the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia) and August 23 (the anniversary of the Nazi-Soviet Pact).
In Washington, DC, left-wing protesters defaced the memorial to victims of communism, in 2020. As Intellectual Takeout notes:
Marion Smith, the executive director of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation tweeted images of the vandalism Tuesday. Photos show “BLM” and what looks to be part of another word spray painted on the statue.
In interesting, if perhaps coincidental timing, this vandalism of a tribute to the dead occurs the same week as the anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) brutal suppression of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, resulting in an estimated death toll of thousands of protesters as the full weight of China’s military descended upon its citizenry.
The Victims of Communism memorial statue is a duplicate of the “Goddess of Democracy” statue which was a 10-meter tall construct assembled during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in China. Work began on May 27 in the Central Academy of Fine Arts, before students there surreptitiously moved the statue in pieces, avoiding state security, and assembled it in Tiananmen Square on May 30.
This was an ironic thing for protesters who say Black Lives Matter to do. Communism’s founder, Karl Marx, exhibited deep-seated racism toward people of color. As the Journal of Political Ideologies notes, there were “racist components in the thought of Karl Marx and of [his disciple] Friedrich Engels. Their numerous horrendous comments on Slavs, ‘Negroes’, Bedouins, Jews, Chinese and many others are well known.” Communists murdered hundreds of thousands of people in African countries like Ethiopia. Up to 750,000 people died in Ethiopia’s Red Terror, and an even larger number of Ethiopians died in famines that resulted from destructive communist agricultural polices.
