Comparing Mountains Of Corpses And Handfuls Of Grain

While I was contemplating a response to a whiny bit of hate mail citing only one instance of Communist genocide, the planned starvation of Ukranians the Holodomor, a word so little known that I have to tell people what it means, looking at the various estimates of how many millions of people died, from a "low" of 3.3 million to a high of more than 10 million, also, as a result of that going to look at the estimated body count for the Marxist regimes of the 20th and 21st centuries, it occurred to me that there is something seriously demented about quibbling about the size of genocides measuring in the millions and tens and even scores of millions.   As if a genocide of "only" 3.3 million is a small thing as compared to one numbering twice that or if an estimate for the total number of dead under Marxism or Nazism or fascism or white supremacy that differs by this or that multiple of 10 or even 20 million, somehow, reduces the moral wrong of the "smaller" number if that is accurate.

Clearly the use of mountains of murdered people as a measure of the nature and, I will puke if I say it, "moral status" of the gangster regimes which murdered them surpasses the casual imagination of so many.  Like the Western supporters of Hitler during his genocidal reign, the supporters of Stalin (who made out somewhat better in their PR in history) and Mao and others, were not impressed by any of those numbers.  They don't seem to move them or even seem important for them to consider.  There are those who considered it a deserved fate for those they accused of backwardness or laziness, proving there's really no difference between those pseudo-lefty gangsters and their elite fans and the most appalling of aristocrats of 19th century Britain or 18th century, pre-revolutionary France.

---------------

Perhaps there is a different way to approach the moral status of them in something else that so many Marxists and their associated atheist lefties and Nazis, many fascists and white supremacists  have in common, their common hatred of the Mosaic tradition, The Law, the Prophets and, yes, The Gospels.

Under the city-boy dreamed up collectivization of the Soviet Union (as under the equally agriculture ignorant Mao 20 years later) there is a perfect example of the distinction between that materialist-scientific, rationistic regime and the despised Law of Moses, The Law of Three Spiklets (Закон о трёх колосках) under which anyone who so much as gleaned a handful of grain from an already harvested field would be held to be an enemy of the people, under which many, many scores of thousands of those starving in Ukraine and elsewhere were summarily shot or otherwise killed.

You can contrast that to The Law of Moses which required that farmers NOT harvest their fields efficiently to allow the widow and orphan and, YES THE ALIEN, to glean so that they would be able to eat.

When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. 10 Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the foreigner. I am the Lord your God.  

Leviticus 19: 9-10

And that was in what is widely despised as the harshest of the books of the Bible but in economics and equality and justice set a standard that nothing in secular radicalism can begin to match.

During the planned famine under that idol of so many heroes of the Western left, more than 2500 people were convicted of cannibalism, eating the bodies of the dead, it was so widespread that even the Soviet regime printed posters condeming the practice that the Soviet regime made inevitable through their policies, including, like the science-based, Enlightenment era Brits during the Irish potato famine, exported grain for profit as millions starved to death.  Both the Brits of that time and the Communist regimes and the Nazis all believed they were the sons of science and enlightenment.   The reason that all of them hated and still hate the moral requirements of the Mosaic Law and its gentile form in The Gospel.

Compared to Communism The Law of Moses, even its decidedly harshest features, is mild by comparison (there is no capital punishment for property crimes in the Mosaic Law) and there is no one apart from some really demented and isolated fanatics who propose putting those harshest measures into effect, now.  But you can't say that among polite company, not even in the context I've put it into here in polite company among the college credentialed class, certainly not on the free-speechy left.  I'll bet you that in most faculty parties, in most gatherings of lefties, it would be more acceptable to rehabilitate Stalin or Mao than Moses.