My pedantic excerpt:
In March 1940, the head of the NKVD (later KGB) Lavrentiy Beria and three members of the Politburo signed a memorandum in which the Polish officers were condemned to execution. The operation, which was completed in eight weeks, began with the prisoners being transported to sites in and around Katyn, a forest near the Russian city of Smolensk. In all, around 22,000 soldiers – mostly officers who in civilian life had been lawyers, doctors, writers, artists, scientists, engineers and other professional people – were shot by a single bullet in the back of the head. Over a 28-day period a single individual, Vasily Blokhin (1895-1955), the chief executioner at Lubyanka prison in Moscow (where he killed the writer Isaac Babel and the avant-garde theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold), is said to have shot around 7,000 prisoners. He used German revolvers, which he brought with him in a suitcase, as he found the Soviet-made variety unreliable. For his services to the Soviet state Blokhin received the Order of the Red Banner.
This is Communism. This is the same Soviet Union Bernie Sanders took his honeymoon in.
Thinking about Communism, and its many iterations which do not yet use that label, I think of the biggest assholes I’ve met, people who fuck up then lie about it, who don’t plan worth a shit then blame somebody else every time something goes wrong. This is the heart, the core, the essence of the Socialist project: liars lying, and people suffering. The people lying do not suffer. Maduro in Venezuela does not suffer. And apparently he makes sure his army is well fed and well paid. The Roman Emperors did no less, and for the same reason.
But the whole things consists in a sociopathic, narcissistic Munchhausen Syndrome. It is a curse on humanity, a disease, a plague, a fatal and horrible mistake.
And it is swirling all around us at this very moment.