The kids today
Only ten thousand or so were slaughtered in the initial stage of the Red Terror, which accompanied Lenin’s German-assisted coup d’état in Russia, a hundred years ago. This first slaughter was selective, and personal; the Bolsheviks had made lists. We commemorate not a “revolution” but a successful putsch, in which one faction (the most fanatic, violent, and evil faction) appropriated a Russian Revolution that had already been started by others. Their targets were mostly Tsarist officials, already displaced with Tsar Nicholas and family.
But through the civil war that followed, as the Bolsheviks consolidated their power, many more than a million were butchered. Lenin himself — a parody Satan incarnate — lived through to its end. By the last of his strokes and his death in early 1924, he had seen off all rivals within and without benighted Russia’s socialist movements; his own understudy Stalin had now seen off him.
In the coming decades, some twenty millions were starved and slaughtered to achieve full “socialism in one country.” Mao’s Chinese Communists would kill several times more. Add many millions in the smaller countries of Communist triumph and occupation, through a century which exceeded all others combined in the production of e.g. Christian martyrs. Then add the millions more from alternative Atheist creeds, such as National Socialism.
According to a recent survey of “millennials” (or as I prefer, “the kids today”), about half would like to live under “socialism,” instead of whatever they have now. They are the latest generation educated, or more precisely idiotized, by our state school systems. Among my baby-boom contemporaries coming of age in the ’sixties, the proportion was about one-quarter. We need not wait more generations to forget completely the most obvious lessons of recent history. One has only to ride the trolley through Greater Parkdale to watch the little thumbs texting.
Chiefly, they want to be taken care of. They want to make the mess that others clean up. They want a paradise in which they will not be held accountable for their actions, one that will ultimately compass the execution of those to whom they have taken a dislike. By comparison to them, one might account the earlier, minority, socialist generations heroic in a way: they were willing to do their own killings. The kids today come late to this game.
By the humble method of hospital abortions, and in North America alone, we have already killed ten times as many as the Nazi death camps, though only half as many as the Communists. I know this is to reduce modern history to mere body counts; but anything more subtle would be lost on our millennials. Indeed, even the subtlety that abortion means killing a human being is lost on most of them, so effectively have they been infused with the euphemisms of progressive thinking.
There is no debate; there can be no argument with people of any age who are incapable of grasping that murder is always wrong; that killing human beings (including ourselves, when we’re feeling down) must not be reduced to a political option, or consumer choice. How to discuss history with these people?
My parents’ generation failed their children; we failed ours; our children are failing theirs — so far as they even get born. Only in this sense is progress real: a kind of progress towards the Hell-gates. Imagine where we’d be if God were not constantly intervening, in His unimaginably reactionary way.