George Rebane
[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 18 December 2019.]
‘Tis the season of peace, joy, and giving, of both the complimentary and compassionate kind. Every year during these weeks we are deluged with pleas to open our wallets for uncountable good causes. ‘Twas ever thus. But compassionate giving on an international scale has often been the precursor, if not the actual cause, of the subsequent death for tens of millions. And as a nation that continues to give and has given lavishly in the past, this should give us Americans some pause as we reflect on the history of such gifts.
Recently published is one such history of a program of compassionate giving that turned out to give rise to the subsequent deaths of 20 to 30 million Soviet farmers in the 1930s. The book is The Russian Job – the forgotten story of how America saved the Soviet Union from Ruin (2019) by award-winning historian Douglas Smith. (reviewed here) In it Smith describes in devastating detail of how during 1921-23 the American Relief Administration under Herbert Hoover, working over a vast land area, saved 10 million Russians from certain starvation.
Few people know that after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, the communists and monarchists fought a five-year wide-ranging civil war that finally ended in 1923 with the consolidation of the Soviet Union under Lenin. During that time the communists were sacrificing their independent-minded recalcitrant farmers in favor of city dwelling industrial workers needed to produce war materiel, and keep functioning the urban centers they controlled. Word got out that some 30 million people would soon die were they not provided food relief. As a result, Bolsheviks begrudgingly solicited, and then allowed, Hoover’s ARA to enter the war-torn land. And working with “never more” than 200 American volunteers, they distributed American food to masses of Russians across the countryside.
The relief effort demonstrably saved the nascent USSR from popular revolt and counter-revolution by the czarists and republicans. But for reasons not clear today, what no one then was able to forecast is the genocide that was to follow in six short years as Stalin, who succeeded Lenin, cracked a few eggs, attempting to bring about his promised socialist omelet. Estimates vary, but Stalin subsequently killed about 30 million of his own citizens through executions, Siberian deportations, and starvation, beginning in 1929 with 10 million kulaks, Ukrainian farmers who resisted collectivization, who were then starved to death in the four years that followed.
And that tsunami of death, which began in the USSR, continued with the spread of international communism during the post-WW2 Cold War. Then countries like Maoist China, Vietnam, Cambodia, and more in Africa, Middle East, and Hispanic America, tried socialism, with many quickly progressing to communism, that then killed their own citizens totaling in the tens of millions. To many of these politically deteriorating countries, America and the West continued giving humanitarian aid, that primarily served to prop up their ruthless dictatorial governments, which then consolidated their lands into stable, murderous tyrannies that lasted decades.
It’s worth pointing out here the greatest killer the world has ever seen – Mao Zedong. This monster, by the accounting of Chinese themselves, killed more than a 100 million of his people in carrying out his Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Compared to Mao and Joe Stalin, all the rest of the dictators were definitely second-class killers, a fact which the leftwing press has successfully suppressed. To test this, just ask any young modern to name the greatest killer of his own people.
So, what is the main takeaway here about compassionate giving? Should we continue repeating the mistake of Hoover’s ARA? If not, in what light should we consider giving humanitarian aid to countries like the cynically named People’s Republic of Korea or even Venezuela? Should we send aid to the poor and starving in the Sudan? To Ethiopia? Should we not first consider what kind of regimes such aid will stabilize and enable to go on killing their own people while making their lives a pure misery? Something to ponder when someone shows you a video of the starving and destitute in some already established s-hole country.
My name is Rebane, wishing all KVMR listeners a Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and a healthy and prosperous new year. I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the addended transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively. However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR. Thank you for listening.
[Addendum] R.J. Rummel published his landmark Death by Government in 1994. It has been reprinted and revised since then. You can now download the book for free here, and examine some updated numbers here. Important to note that the cited updates still don’t include the latest numbers from Mao’s mega-murderous Cultural Revolution.
A takeaway from all this is again that the most complete forms of collectivism that are practiced under the largest governments are the greatest killers of their own citizens – many orders of magnitude more lethal than any conceivable form of private sector crime, ‘gun violence’, accidents, etc. (We note that many instances of nationalism that give rise to collectivist tyrannies also result in mass murders of their citizenry.) When murder is institutionalized by governments that have deprived their citizens of any material means of resistance (e.g. the ongoing attempt by America's Left to abrogate our Second Amendment), the result is an inevitable bloodbath from direct executions, lethal imprisonments, and coordinated programs of genocide, to mass deaths from nationwide starvation and disease through malfeasance in operating the country’s economy.
rebanesruminations.com 
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