RUTHFULLY YOURS

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Not everyone reads the WSJ but any American who wants to understand what happened at the Parkland School Massacre should read the interview conducted by Tunku Varadarajan with Andrew Pollack, father of Meadow, murdered by Nikolas Cruz ( A Parkland Father’s Quest for Accountability 1/12/19). If you can’t get that, read the book that Pollack co-wrote – “Why Meadow Died: The People and Policies That Created the Parkland Shooter and Endangered America’s Students” coming out in February. For those who believe that the primary problem here was and is gun control, this is particularly mandatory.

The title of this piece refers not to any pledge but to an acronym for a program created in 2011 by Robert Runcie, superintendent of the Broward County Public Schools: Preventing Recidivism through Opportunities, Mentoring, Interventions, Support and Education. This was developed to combat the assumed racism of teachers because of the disparity between white and minority students when it came to reported out of control behavior at school. Under this new program, students committing criminal acts would be evaluated and dealt with by school personnel, not by law enforcement.

One of the worst examples of the law of unintended consequences is that no student offender ever developed a criminal record so that background checks for buying weapons would be non-existent. Instead of apprehension and punishment, students were sent to “healing circles” and other politically correct remedial activities. To give you a measure of Mr. Cruz’s behavior in school, here is a summary: vandalizing a bathroom that required $1,000 of repair; racial fist fights; carving swastikas on his desk; bringing dead animals to school and waving them at other students; threats to kill teachers, students and to shoot up the school; bringing knives and a backpack of bullets to school, writing KILL in his notebooks. None of this was reported to police. Along with the school chancellor, the sheriff was intent on reducing juvenile arrests so that despite being called to the Cruz home an incredible 45 times, the police never arrested the out of control perpetrator who was able to maintain a clean record.

https://www.newcriterion.com/blogs/dispatch/socialism-as-a-hate-crime-9746?utm_source=The+New+Criterion+Subscribers&utm_campaign=432f5ac8d7-Most-Read_dispatch_2019_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_f42f7adca5-432f5ac8d7-104843169
On the human cost of a persistent and pernicious political doctrine.
A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.–Joseph Stalin

It is a great irony that at a time when Facebook and Twitter are closing accounts of conservatives for allegedly promoting “hate,” and conservative speakers are banned from college campuses for (as it is charged) “peddling hate,” opinion polls suggest that socialism is more popular than ever among college students and in progressive precincts of the Democratic Party. Bernie Sanders, a self-proclaimed socialist, is the most popular figure among progressive Democrats, while Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has emerged from the Bronx as the newest socialist celebrity and is traveling the country singing the virtues of socialism, as if no one has heard those songs before.

Which raises the question: given our loose standards on the subject, why isn’t socialism a “hate crime”?

After all, the evidence for its malignant effects is obvious to anyone with sufficient curiosity to look at the historical record. The socialist movement has been responsible for the murder, imprisonment, and torture of many millions, and perhaps hundreds of millions, of innocent people during its heyday in the twentieth century. That history of murder and tyranny continues on a smaller scale today in the handful of countries living under the misfortune of socialism—for example, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, and (more recently) Venezuela.

How do socialists escape the indictment that, in view of the historical record, they are purveyors of tyranny and mass murder? Many deny that Stalin, Mao, and the others were true socialists and, indeed, that socialism has never really been tried—a manifest absurdity. Senator Sanders and others claim that they are for something called “democratic socialism,” a popular and peaceful version of the doctrine, but that’s what Lenin, Mao, and Castro said until they seized power and immediately began to sing a different tune. Democracy and diversity are what they say when out of power; tyranny and authoritarianism are what they practice once in power. That is the tried-and-true technique of all socialist movements.

Democracy and diversity are what socialists say when out of power; tyranny and authoritarianism are what they practice once in power.

The late R. J. Rummel, a noted scholar of political violence and totalitarian movements, coined the term “democide” to describe large-scale government killings for political purposes—in other words, politically motivated murder. While communists and socialists have not had a monopoly on democide, these movements (Rummel says) have been responsible for far more political killings in the modern era than any other political movement or form of government.

He concludes that

“[i]n sum the communists probably have murdered something like 110 million, or near two-thirds of all those killed by all governments, quasi-governments, and guerrillas from 1900 to 1987. Of course the total itself is shocking. It is several times the thirty-eight million battle-dead that have been killed in all this century’s international and domestic wars. Yet the probable number of murders by the Soviet Union alone—one communist country—well surpasses this cost of war.”

Rummel suspects that the estimate of one hundred ten million killed may be too low, and in fact that the death toll from socialist democide in the twentieth century may be as high as 260 million.