No doubt the stated intentions are oh-so-pure and oh-so-good, like “liberte, egalite, fraternite.” It’s the sort of compassion Flannery O’Connor wrote of when she noted that “tenderness leads to the gas chamber.” That’s because, at the end of the day, socialism is a manipulative machine of human cruelty powered only by a blind greed for power. It forces people to finely mince their words, or remain silent.
—Stella Morabito, “Socialism’s Bloody History Shows Millennials Should Think Twice Before Supporting It“
“About 200,000 clergy, many crucified, scalped and otherwise tortured, were killed during the approximately 60 years of communist rule in the former Soviet Union, a Russian commission reported this week. In addition, another 500,000 religious figures were persecuted and 40,000 churches destroyed in the period from 1922 to 1980, the report said. Half the country’s mosques and more than half the synagogues were also destroyed” Clergymen were crucified on churches’ holy gates, shot, scalped [and] strangled,” said Alexander Yakovlev, head of the Commission for the Rehabilitation of the Victims of Political Repression. The commission prepared the report for Russian President Boris Yeltsin. “I was especially shocked by accounts of priests turned into columns of ice in winter,” Yakovlev said. “It was total cruelty.” (paulbogdanor.com)
“Persecution and martyrdom of Christians under 20th century totalitarianism–mainly of Russian Orthodox Christians under Bolshevism–is by far the greatest crime in all of recorded history….Attempts at “killing the soul” started only months after the Revolution of 1917.” Persecution and martyrdom was, “several times greater than the Holocaust in terms of innocent lives brutally destroyed. It has killed more Christians in a few decades than all other causes put together in all ages, with Islam a distant second as the cause of their death and suffering. And yet it still remains a largely unknown, often minimized, or scandalously glossed over crime.” (New Martyrs of the East and Coming Trials in the West, Srdja Trifkovic, OrthodoxyToday.com)