“Communism set out to make everyone equal. It did—equal in hunger, equal in fear, and far too often, equal in the grave. Communism didn’t just fail—it buried over 100 million people beneath its promises. Roughly 45 million under Mao in China, around 20 million under Stalin in the Soviet Union, and millions more in North Korea and Cuba—proof that when power is absolute, the cost is always human.” -- YNOT!
Here’s the blunt version of the argument: when a communist regime takes full control of property, food, labor, speech, and political power, the same pattern shows up over and over. Death comes through purges, executions, camps, and state terror. Famine comes through collectivization, rationing, and command-economy stupidity. War comes through revolutionary expansion, militarism, and regimes that need enemies. Pestilence follows in the form of sickness, decay, shortages, blackouts, prison disease, and systems so censored they punish bad news instead of fixing bad policy. Not every disaster in these countries came from ideology alone, but the one-party structure kept turning mistakes into national catastrophes.
The USSR:
The Soviet Union turned political theory into organized scarcity and organized fear. Stalin’s collectivization helped produce the Soviet famine of 1931–34, and Britannica describes the Holodomor in Ukraine as a man-made catastrophe that killed millions. Then came the Great Purge, where millions of alleged “enemies of the people” were sent to prison camps, while the Gulag system at its height held millions. And when the system looked outward, it did not bring peace; the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan dragged on for a decade and helped bleed the empire dry. That is three horsemen already—death, famine, and war—with pestilence riding in the camps and the starvation zones.
China:
Mao promised a workers’ paradise and delivered the Great Leap Forward, which Britannica says led to one of the worst famines in history, with recent estimates around 45 million deaths. As if that were not enough misery for one revolution, the Cultural Revolution followed with mass persecution, imprisonment, torture, and killings; Britannica notes estimates of the dead range from 500,000 to 2,000,000, with millions more brutalized. China also sent forces into the Korean War, and modern China, though vastly richer than Mao’s China, is still ruled by a party-state that tightly controls speech, religion, media, and civil society. Same tune, newer speakers.
Cuba:
Cuba sold the romance of revolution and wound up with ration books, blackouts, repression, and chronic shortage. Britannica says the island became plagued by shortages of food, fuel, and necessities, and during the post-Soviet “special period” it endured food rationing, energy conservation, and reduced public services. Freedom House says Cuba remains a one-party communist state that outlaws political pluralism and suppresses dissent. Human Rights Watch and Reuters describe a dire economic crisis with blackouts and shortages of food, fuel, medicine, and water, while Reuters also reports visible decline in the health system. And Cuba did not keep its revolution at home either; Britannica notes Cuban troops fought in Angola and assisted Ethiopia in 1978. So yes, even on a sunny island, the horsemen found parking.
North Korea:
North Korea is communism stripped to its bare bones: one party, one family, one truth, and a population expected to survive on obedience. Britannica describes it as a command economy with recurrent food crises and chronic shortages, while the late-1990s famine became one of the modern world’s ugliest starvation disasters. The U.N. Commission of Inquiry found systematic, widespread, and grave human rights violations that may amount to crimes against humanity. Freedom House and Human Rights Watch describe arbitrary detention, forced labor, torture, starvation, severe surveillance, and political prison camps. And the regime launched the Korean War by invading the South in 1950. If somebody wanted to build a museum exhibit called “How to summon all four horsemen with one ideology,” Pyongyang would save them a lot of design work.
So what’s the real lesson?
It is not that every person who talks about equality is secretly building a gulag. It is that communist systems, in practice, keep concentrating too much power in too few hands, and once that happens the state stops being a referee and becomes the whole ballgame. Then bad ideas cannot be corrected, bad leaders cannot be removed, and bad numbers cannot be spoken aloud. That is when death stops being an accident, famine stops being a crop problem, pestilence stops being a health problem, and war stops being a last resort. They all become management style.
And that, plain as a hammer, is why the Four Horsemen keep speaking with a party accent.
#Communism #USSR #China #Cuba #NorthKorea #History #Totalitarianism #Famine #PoliticalRepression
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