Is Communism Moral? | 5 Minute Video — Transcript

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1. 0:02Motives are much less important than behavior.  We all know this: If someone has good intentions,
2. 0:08but treats people badly, those  good intentions mean nothing.
3. 0:13As it is with individuals, so it is  with governments. Capitalism might sound
4. 0:18less noble than communism—the individual  pursues success to the best of his abilities
5. 0:24(that’s capitalism) versus everyone shares  everything equally (that’s communism). But it is
6. 0:30capitalism that has produced freedom and it alone  has lifted millions from poverty while communism
7. 0:37has kept millions impoverished and  without exception crushed freedom.
8. 0:42Capitalism for all its imperfections enables a  decent society. Communism, whatever its stated
9. 0:50intentions, leads to evil. Yet, increasingly,  people either ignore or deny the evil of this
10. 0:57ideology, which, within a period of only 60 years,  created modern totalitarianism and deprived more
11. 1:06people of human rights, and tortured and killed  more people than any ideology in history.
12. 1:13How can we explain this? There are two ways.
13. 1:16One is ignorance: People just don't  know the truth about communism.
14. 1:21The second is willful blindness:  People know the truth,
15. 1:25but choose to ignore it because the truth about  communism's horrors is too painful to confront.
16. 1:32Given the sad state of our educational  system, we can assume most people
17. 1:36fall into the first category. They just  don't know. So let me offer some facts.
18. 1:43But before I do, I need to  address another question:
19. 1:46Why is it important that  everyone know what communism did?
20. 1:50Here are three reasons:
21. 1:51First, we have a moral obligation to the  victims of communism not to forget them.
22. 1:56Just as Americans have a moral obligation to  remember the victims of slavery, we have the same
23. 2:01obligation to the billion victims of communism,  especially the hundred million who were murdered.
24. 2:08Second, the best way to prevent an evil from  reoccurring is to confront it in all its horror.
25. 2:16The fact that many people today, especially  young people, mention communism as a viable
26. 2:21option for modern society, proves they  don’t know communism's moral record.
27. 2:27Therefore, they do not properly fear communism, which means this evil could happen again.
28. 2:33And why could it happen again? That brings us  to reason number three. The leaders of communist
29. 2:39regimes and the vast number of people who helped  those leaders torture, enslave, and murder were
30. 2:45nearly all normal people. Of course, some were  psychopaths; but most were not, which means
31. 2:53that any society—including free ones—can  devolve into communism or some analogous evil.
32. 3:02Now some facts: Based on the authoritative  Black Book of Communism, written by six
33. 3:08French scholars and published in the United  States by Harvard University Press, here are
34. 3:14the numbers of people murdered by communist  regimes—not soldiers; ordinary civilians.
35. 3:21Vietnam: 1 million. Eastern Europe: 1 million.  Ethiopia: 1.5 million. North Korea: 2 million.
36. 3:29Cambodia: 2 million. The Soviet  Union: 20 million. China: 65 million.
37. 3:35And the numbers are conservative.
38. 3:37And, of course, these numbers do not describe  the suffering endured by hundreds of millions
39. 3:42of people who were not murdered: the systematic  stripping people of their right to speak freely,
40. 3:47to worship freely, to start a business, or  even to travel without party permission;
41. 3:53no non-communist judiciary or media; the  poverty of nearly all communist countries;
42. 4:00the imprisonment of vast numbers of  people; and, of course, the trauma
43. 4:04suffered by the hundreds of millions of friends  and relatives of the murdered and imprisoned.
44. 4:10These numbers don't tell you about the frozen  millions in the vast Soviet Siberian prison
45. 4:15camp system known as the Gulag Archipelago,  or the Vietnamese communists' routine practice
46. 4:22of burying peasants alive to terrorize other  peasants into supporting the communists,
47. 4:28or Mao Zedong's regular use of hideous tortures  to punish opponents and intimidate peasants.
48. 4:34People associate evil with darkness. That’s not  accurate: It is easy to look into the dark; it is
49. 4:42very hard to stare into bright light. One should  therefore associate evil with extreme brightness,
50. 4:49given that people rarely look at  real evil. And those who do not
51. 4:53confront real evil often make up evils like  "systemic racism" in 21st-century America,
52. 5:00or "toxic masculinity," or "patriarchy"  that are much easier to confront.
53. 5:06The Book of Psalms states: "Those  of you who love God must hate evil."
54. 5:12If you don't believe in God,  here's another way of putting it:
55. 5:14"Those of you who love people must hate evil."
56. 5:18If you don't hate communism, you don't  care about, much less love, people.
57. 5:25I'm Dennis Prager.