The Deadly Consequences of a Progressive Disease

Exactly how many poor people have progressives starved since 1917? It’s a good question.

Russia was the breadbasket of Europe until progressives seized power that year and instituted policies to “share the wealth.” For the next 70 years -- until socialism collapsed -- Russia was a net importer of food, always on the brink of famine.

In the 1930s, Josef Stalin instigated a campaign to collectivize farming in the Ukraine -- a campaign that created a man-made famine within a year, killing between 6 million and 11 million Ukrainians.

Stalin’s crime was protected by the progressives at the New York Times, including Walter Duranty -- now accepted as a Stalin apologist -- and on the Pulitzer Prize Committee, which rewarded Duranty’s work.

The left’s inability to understand the basic economic fact that people need an incentive to produce has caused the unnecessary deaths of tens of millions of people in the last 75 years. But thanks to a politically corrupted media and educational system, their pigheaded pursuit of socialist fantasies goes on.

A few years ago, when Robert Mugabe, the leftist dictator of Zimbabwe, began his race war against white farmers to the cheers of progressives, I corresponded with a journalist friend of mine who writes for all those leftist news outlets that pretend to care about black people but really care only about their left-wing agendas. I suggested that he might get his friends to protest Mugabe’s bloody racism before poor black people began starving in Zimbabwe as a result of these criminal policies.

Naturally, my friend defended the murders and thefts of land from the white farmers as “social justice” and turned a blind eye to the racism because it was directed only against whites, whose parents had been “imperialists.”

The United States and Britain, which led the world in ending slavery and even attempted (futilely) to end it in Africa, were put in the dock by progressives at the 2001 U.N. Conference Against Racism and held up for “reparations.” Muslim Sudan, which maintains slavery today, and the League of Arab States, whose ancestors enslaved more black Africans than all the Europeans and Americans put together, were not. Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, whose Arab citizens have more rights than Arabs in all the Arab states, was accused of racism, while the Arab states that forbid Jews to set foot on their territory were not.

Now the progressive chickens are coming home to roost in Zimbabwe. On Christmas Eve, the Wall Street Journal ran a front-page news story on conditions in Mugabe’s Marxist police state. The title of the story said it all: “Once a Breadbasket, Now Zimbabwe Can’t Feed Itself.” The production of corn -- the diet staple -- has declined by two-thirds in the last three years, and 6 million Zimbabweans are on the verge of starvation.

Former Rep. Tony Hall of Ohio, now the United States’ ambassador to the U.N. food and agriculture agencies, nearly got it right when he said, “Zimbabwe stands alone as an example of how a country can be ruined by one person.” Actually, Zimbabwe is one of many such countries, and it was not ruined by one person but by one person supported by a global movement of arch reactionaries who call themselves progressives and who have millions of people in the last century in the name of “social justice” and learned nothing in the process.

David Horowitz, the author of the “Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey” (Spence Publications, 2003), is the editor of Frontpagemag.com.