from Looking for Trouble- Adventures in a Broken World
by Ralph Peters

“Anyone who imagines a shred of humanity in Communism or militant Socialism need only study the Soviet treatment of the workers of the world. When the masses are raised above the individual, individuals suffer ‘en masse’. In a perverse way, the derelict behavior of the bureaucracy was more frightful than the intentional exterminations. When a tyrant kills, we have someone to hate. But what can we make of a system that murders millions through neglect and inattention? The planned murders were only a fraction of Soviet suffering. Poor planning killed as many, if not more, from the scheme to produce a wealth of cotton in the desert, to the Virgin Lands project that dumped city slickers in the Kazakh steppes bare-handed- then ordered them to produce absurd quotas for the state that exiled them. Millions died.”

“But what do those “millions” mean to us? Figures on a page. Accounts for their suffering don’t even spoil our appetite for lunch. The media lures us with tales of kidnapped girls, while genocide rates a few paragraphs on page nine.”

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