GLENN: Growing deep within the roots of socialism is a brutal and dismissive view of human life.
VOICE: Jonah Goldberg, author of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, explains.
VOICE: The essence of Marx is simply that the universe is run by these cold, material, impersonal forces, and that over time, we are going to see us move from the feudal through the capitalist to the socialist to the communist stage. Along the way, a lot of people are going to get killed. And Marx is completely fine with this.
GLENN: Today, most have forgotten the scale of the Soviet atrocities, particularly what may have been their most horrific. It began long before Hitler's horror was revealed. Popular uprising had become a problem in the Ukraine. Their spirit of individualism threatened the grand design of Moscow. Stalin decided to take steps and correct the problem.
Stalin forced peasants to give up their farms under the banner of collectivization. Stalin took everything: their independence, their livelihoods, and even their food. Plunging the Ukraine into famine.
And while the people were starving, it wasn't because the food wasn't growing. Grain production was skyrocketing. Instead of giving the grain to starving people, the Soviets exported it to fund their centrally planned centralization. How the Soviets dealt with the hunger was inhuman.
The forced famine that resulted was so horrific. The situation so desperate, that there were even widespread reports of cannibalism.
VOICE: Rutgers University professor Terrace Hunchek (phonetic) recalls.
VOICE: I was once with a group of people going to one part of Ukraine, and I said, "Is there some older lady that could tell me something about what happened?"
GLENN: What the woman told him, next, he would never forget.
VOICE: And she said, oh, my God. I really don't like to talk about that. She says, you see, there is this house on the top of the hill there. A mother ate her daughter. She was already insane because people reach the level of insanity. And then she committed suicide.
GLENN: How did the Soviets deal with this? They printed posters that said, to eat your own children is a barbarian act. This period is known as the Holodomor, roughly translated as murder by hunger.
GLENN: These intentional policies resulted in murder as efficient as has ever been seen in human history. Most know that the horrors of the Holocaust resulted in the deaths of approximately 6 million Jews. But what many don't know is that the government designed starvation in the Ukraine caused the deaths of between seven and 10 million, in just one year.
None of this is meant to diminish the horrors of the Holocaust, the pure evil that inspired it is above question and must be remembered vividly and at all costs. Though, in addition, the other victims of vicious governments who have treated human life as nothing, but a speed bump to their grand design, must also be remembered.
VOICE: One of the most disgusting things about the way we talk about communism is you have people talk about it as if it was this well-intentioned social experiment. But even at the level of first principles, of the sort of planning sessions, it was planned and premeditated mass murder on a massive scale.
GLENN: The New York Times now acknowledges their role in the propping up of Stalin's regime by their reporter Walter Duranty. He called the forced famine in the Ukraine mostly bunk and viciously justified the millions dead by saying, you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs.
VOICE: He reported, no, there is no famine in Ukraine. But there is widespread mortality due to diseases of malnutrition.
GLENN: Yet, still, the Times wrote in a book review that despite the fact that Friedrich Engels, one of the founders of communism, was an advocate of ethnic cleansing, he would have been a fine man to drink with. And it is surely true that Engels' larger critique of capitalism resonates down the ages.
Each year, Ukrainians gather to remember the Holodomor by lighting 25,000 candles. Why 25,000? Because during this intentional famine, they lost 25,000 people every single day. Allowing this to happen one more time would be unforgivable.
VOICE: The totalitarian system established by Stalin was responsible for murdering millions of innocent people in the most horrendous way. And nobody was interested in knowing about it.
The question is, what kind of people are we?
GLENN: In the next episode, we'll learn about another genocidal dictator who the left avoids bringing negative attention to. In fact, it's one of their heroes: Che Guevara.
