Communism — A Centennial Celebration of Tyranny and Terror

In 1987, seven decades after Russia’s Communist Revolution and the generations of misery, mayhem and murder that it seeded worldwide, Ronald Reagan delivered a speech at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate where John F. Kennedy had delivered his condemnation of communism a quarter-century earlier.

Reagan, whose administration is credited by all fair-minded historians as engineering the 1991 fall of the Evil Empire, issued this challenge: “There stands before the entire world one great and inescapable conclusion: Freedom leads to prosperity. … General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

Those iconic words, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” did indeed set in motion the demolition of the much-hated Berlin Wall, just as it signaled the beginning of the end of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and freedom for its subordinate satellite states.

Russia’s “Red October” Revolution was inspired by the Communist Manifesto, published by Karl Marx in 1848. Marx wrote, “The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property. … Take away the heritage of a people and they are easily destroyed.”

That same year, historian Alexis de Tocqueville offered a different perspective: “Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.”

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