To each according to his need

“From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.”

- Karl Marx

“The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.”

- George Orwell

400 grams of bread a day. Which is approximately one thousand calories a day. That was my Deda’s (grandpa, in Russian) daily allotment of calories.

Health.Gov lists the necessary daily caloric intake of physically active fifteen-year-old males as 2600–3000 calories.

Deda was fifteen years old. It was Barnaul, Siberia 1941.

Food.

He could not think of anything but food for four years straight. He would think of food for every single waking hour. He would dream of food throughout the night. Deda told me he used to wonder if it would ever be possible to not think about food, for even a moment.

Many, many years later, he was still haunted by choices he made as a teenager. Choices he had to make in order to keep his family alive.

The soviets had evacuated his city of Kharkiv. He was three years short of being old enough to be sent to the front, most likely to die. Possibly die without a weapon; just because you went to the front did not mean they would give you a gun. Or quite possibly die at the hands of the NKVD, the secret police. The soviets “boosted” morale by shooting their own.

“There are no Soviet prisoners of war, only traitors.”

- Stalin on Order 270

In communism; The people are the enemy.

And yet, this is nothing.

One of the most awful features of communism is the wholesale corruption of the human soul. Anything and everything that is beautiful about humanity gets twisted, corrupted, made spiteful and hateful.

Communism turns neighbors against each other, family members against each other. Communism makes a mockery of honor, of love of country, of love of your fellow man.

This brings me to the story of the Holodomor.

Ukraine;

Described as the breadbasket of Europe. A land taken straight out of a Hansel and Gretel story. Forests and fields, people rooted in some ancient reality. This mysterious land of old has been blessed. Covered with a thick blanket of “black earth,” Ukraine has always been one of the most fertile regions in the world.

And yet between 1932–1933, between 3,500,000 to 12,000,000 people died there from famine. Mostly the peasants feeding the rest of the country.

The famine was named Holodomor — The Famine-Genocide. Scholars being scholars are yet debating reasons, and motives, but some facts are undisputed;

The Holodomor was preceded by “Dekulakization” which is Commie-speak for murdering all of the “Kulaks”.

Central to the communist narrative is the villain. Always, there must be a villain.

The Kulaks were the designated villain in that round of Communism vs Humanity.

Communists always neatly divide the population into the oppressed and the oppressors.

And oppressors, the enemies of the state (or the people) are everywhere. Everyone is always in fear of being labeled enemies of state and of being suddenly dispatched of.

No one is ever quite sure what it is exactly that one does that makes him such an enemy. Today you’re a hero, tomorrow you’re “disappeared.”

Kulak means “fist” in Russian. Kulak was the derogatory nickname with which the Communists labeled any farmer that they deemed too successful. Two cows and a horse, probably his own house, and a few hectares of land he cultivated. Possibly he occasionally not only worked his ground with his own bare hands, but even paid a farmhand to help him out in the busy season. All of this was altogether way too successful for the communists..

Some context perhaps would be due. To what, you might ask, did this villainous Kulak owe his so-called “riches”?

Roughly 55+ years earlier, Emperor (Tsar) Alexander II of Russia abolished serfdom throughout the Russian Empire. Read: abolished slavery. Serfs pre-emancipation were tied to their land, they belonged to it. They were bought and sold with the land, just like the mice and owls.

In 1861 Serfs gained the full rights of free citizens, including rights to marry without having to gain consent, to own property and to own a business.

45 years later, the liberated serfs still had a pretty rough time of it. Though free by law, they were mostly still enslaved in fact, buried and tied down with crushing mountains of debt. Unable to leave the collective small collectivized agricultural community to which they belonged, the Obshchina, which was authoritatively controlled by one family elder.

In 1906, Interior Minister Stolypin, introduced the unconditional right of individual land ownership and launched a series of reforms designed to help transition the traditional authoritarian collective form of farming into a market-based agricultural system that included major improvements to the personal rights of individuals on a broad level.

The general idea was that if you own your own land, you would be incentivized to do your best to make it productive. You would have your own skin in the game so to speak, would become the master of your own destiny and as a result would become a more reasonable, stable citizen.

And so after 55+ years of freedom by law, and a few years of freedom in fact, some farmers managed through hard work and dedication to make something of themselves.

Enter the Communists.

The communists wanted the farmers’ grain.

This was all fine, the only hitch was that the communists didn’t feel like actually paying for the peasants’ grain. They simply took it, using guns as ehm, a ‘negotiating tool’. Somewhat unsurprisingly, many of the farmers felt, after having experienced a few years of freedom (which included private property ownership), that there was something deeply wrong about someone else taking the fruits of their labor, without paying for it.

And since the communists insisted on “requisitioning” all of the peasants’ produce, the peasants in turn felt a declining desire to actually produce it.

Rather than backing down, the communists did what they always do. They identified an enemy, an oppressor a Villain with a capital “V”; “The Kulak”. In the Communist’s narrative, the Kulak was the well-off and greedy peasant, who’s taking advantage of the poor peasants, the “Bednyaks”. Being poor, (mostly) made them acceptable to Communism, though they did not actually fare very well as we shall soon see.

The minority of genuinely well-off peasants, the ones with 50–80 acres, were long since “freed” of the burden of their lands. But the communist narrative must have it’s class struggle. So now, any peasant who owned a few cows or a few acres more than his neighbors, engaged in any form of trade or simply dared to try and resist grain seizures, was deemed a Kulak.

Stalin had a simple solution to this “resistance”;

“We have passed from the policy of restricting the exploiting proclivities of the kulaks to the policy of liquidating the Kulaks as a class”

- Joseph Stalin

Mass deportations to concentration camps, called Gulags in Russian, (where they would be used as slave labor and die in untold numbers) and widespread murder of the Kulaks ensued, more often than not committed by the Kulaks’ own neighbors.

My great grandfather David, died in a Gulag, for a so called ‘financial crime against the state’ meaning the photography shop he worked for dared to offer their services to private customers. My mother, who Grandpa David never got to meet was named in his memory.

What a better explanation might one ask for, to his own failure to make something with his life than, “It’s your neighbors fault; he stole it from you.”

Now, not only do you get to go over to his house, rape his daughter, murder him and take everything he has, but you get to feel good about yourself doing so, since you are performing your revolutionary duty. You are obtaining grain for the socialist fatherland. You are eliminating an enemy of the state. You are a ‘Communist hero’.

Divide and conquer. That is what communism does; radicalizes one group of people to a murderous extreme on the one hand, and dehumanizes another group of people on the other. As an individual you are absolutely worthless in the Communist belief system.

You exist only as a member of your class, and rest assured that Communism will let you know which of class is the righteous one, and which one must be “liquidated”.

Thus, Communism gains absolute control. By turning people against one another.

The war on the Kulaks had two goals: grain for the country, and control, asserting Communism’s absolute domination upon the countryside and the peasant.

Essentially what the communists did was target and eliminate all of the most effective farmers, penalizing them for being good at what they did, quite often with the ultimate penalty. They removed all the incentives to produce effectively, by stealing the peasants’ private property, and the fruits of their own labor, and then, just in case all this was not enough, took away every last grain from the peasants for “redistribution”, a distribution that did not include the food producing peasants themselves.

A mother going to an empty field after harvest, to look for leftover seeds on the ground was supposed to hand over those seeds to the party, bringing them home to her starving children was a crime, punishable by death or banishment to the Gulag.

What happened next should not come as a surprise.

A famine so bad that it was named the “Famine-Genocide” — Holodomor.

Between 1932–1933 between 3,500,000 million to 12,000,000 million people died in Ukraine.

That’s every last person in a city somewhere between the size of LA on the low end to every last person in NYC and Houston combined.

The widely varying estimates are not a bug, but rather a feature of communism, that always denies, denies, and denies the truth. Then lies about it. Communism hides the truth far away from the light of the sun. Since an ideology so malicious, so outright hateful towards humanity can only survive in darkness.

A young Ukrainian girl named Anna somehow made it out of that hell (The army and secret police closely guarded the countryside to prevent the starving peasants from running away) to close family friends of ours, who embraced her into their family.

It got so bad, she told them, that if you saw smoke rising over someone’s chimney, you knew they were cooking children.

There was nothing else left to eat.

Some families traded their children, so that they would be spared the fate of eating their own.

Sometimes I lie awake at night. Thinking of my own three beautiful children. And try to imagine the unimaginable. How can it get so bad that you would murder your own flesh and blood for meat?

Is it a descent into a mindless state, driven by an unimaginable hunger, that strips you of all that makes you human? Makes you forget that what you are looking at is your own beloved child, and not a pile of meat?

Or perhaps it is an unimaginably ruthless, hopeless, impossible choice; Sacrifice one so that the others might have a chance. And whom would one choose? How could one choose?

That is what communism does to people, it drives them against each other. It corrupts everything that is good about humanity, and turns people against their own neighbors, against their friends, against their own flesh and blood.

Always, Communism plays the same game, only the actors change, kulak against bednyak, black against white, man against woman, parent against child.

It so happens to be that I am Jewish. The Nazis murdered around 6,000,000 Jews in the Holocaust, and their own fair share of Slavs, Gypsies, homosexuals, mentally ill, dissidents, etc. Estimated at a total non combatant body count of under 21,000,000 people.

Worldwide, Communists have murdered upwards of 100,000,000 people and counting.

Even Today, in 2020; The Chinese are committing genocide against the Uyghurs; concentration camps, forced labor, forced abortions, medical experimentation, organ harvesting.

In Russia, where Putin is doing all that he can to revive the glory days of the Soviet Union, being a Jehovah’s witness is a crime. Today, thousands are being jailed or are escaping the country with the clothes on their backs, seeking asylum.

Need I remind you that North Korea, practically a byword for evil-country, is Communist?

And ever more, this pernicious, vile, humanity-destroying ideology is reaching out to sink its teeth into the west.

You will never hear in polite circles anyone who will proudly proclaim himself to be a Nazi.

But, for some reason, which I cannot fathom, more and more, you will hear people shamelessly describing themselves as Communists or Marxists.

Communism’s (true) credo is: “We cherish the party, the individual is worthless. We shall grind the individual into oblivion on our way to the promised land.”

The Wests main credo is: “We Cherish the individual.”

Choose which of those you would wish to live by.

Communism promotes the beguiling ideal of equality, of equity. Everyone shall get the same, or rather “according to his need”. If anyone produces too much, if anyone is deemed to have taken more than their equal share in the eyes of the party (which rest assured, fails to hold itself to the same impossible standard it holds others too) than they are first demonized, then eliminated.

But the trouble is that people are not equal. People are different, they are each and every single one unique. Some are creative, and some organized, some are compassionate and some are technically gifted, some excel with things, some excel with numbers and some excel with people, and some of us are handicapped or disabled in one form or another, destined to teach the rest of us compassion, and perhaps humility.

So Communism has to crush these disagreeable people, who for some reason persist in their diversity, in order to make them fit the mold of their sickening ideology.

People are not a grass lawn for “wise” party members to mow down into equality, into conformity. People are diverse, they are different from one another; they grow and develop and engage with life in an infinitely diverse array of ways.

The more freedom we provide to people to cultivate their own unique gifts, to be and do all that they can, the more variance in results you will have across society. And that’s ok. Because we all win.

I may not have as much money as Jeff Bezos, but I don’t need or want that much. What I do need is the ability to instantly order one of my children a new shirt or school supplies through my phone without having to pack all three kids and go search for a store that’s open. Amazon gives me what I need.

I am no musician, but that’s ok as well, because though I do not know how to program, I have Spotify on my smartphone, with which I can hear all the music ever written. I do not know how to hunt or how to farm, and yet my fridge is stocked. And when it runs low I drive the car which I cannot build nor fix to the supermarket which I do not wish to own or run myself and I refill my supplies with a bounty unimaginable even in his wildest dreams to my 15 year old grandfather, back in 1941 when he was slowly wasting away from hunger.

The only thing I’m really any good at is being an electrician, a trade I have been working at for 10 years now. I offer that to others, everything else is offered to me in return.

Worldwide, absolute poverty is being eliminated at a rate unprecedented in human history. This is thanks to an abundance created by the capitalist western civilization.

We in the West are surrounded with an abundant plenty, given to us on a silver platter by a complex, largely egalitarian society where the uniqueness of everyone else, serves us all. It is not perfect, but then again, we humans are not perfect. I for one am all too aware of my own defects. But that’s ok, we’re trying, and we’re doing a damn fine job.

I watch in shock how people flippantly dismiss all that has been painstakingly built over thousands of years, demanding we burn it all to the ground. And rebuild it all over again according to their vision. According to a communist Ideal. Which they of course know how to apply properly.

Please don’t.

We’ve been there.

The strongest argument for communism is that it sounds good.

The strongest argument against Communism is that whenever implemented it is hell.

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Thank you to K for your invaluable assistance. You are a true friend.

Thank you to Thomas Sowell, for speaking words of wisdom in a language that even an Electrician might understand.

Thank you to Annie, for giving me the strength and courage, to descend into the deepest, darkest, corners lurking within the human spirit, by being such a bright reminder of all that is beautiful & good in the human spirit.

Thank you to my Mother for keeping alive the family memory, painful though it might be, so that we will not forget, and keep evil at bay.

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Dedicated to my Dedushka, may he rest in peace side by side with his beloved, my Babushka; for teaching me to see with wonder and love the divine within Children, for inspiring me to write, and for despite having grown up in Hell, lovingly raising me in heaven.