The 20th century was the bloodiest in history.
250 million people died in wars, mass slaughter, and political murders.
The ideology known as communism bears the greatest responsibility for this terrible savagery.
This is an ideology that promises so-called equality and justice,
but which brings with it only bloodshed, death, and fear.
In this film, we shall be examining the bloody century of communism
and seeing the terrible misery this ideology inflicted on humanity.
It will be impossible for the world to avoid similar tragedies in the future
unless it learns from the past.
Thank you.
The books of Marx and Darwin appeared together in communist posters of the time.
The Franco-Prussian War of 1871 allowed for the first experiment in the revolution Marx had dreamed of.
France was defeated and the imperial administration overthrown, leaving a power vacuum.
The Marxists seized their opportunity.
Together with other small socialist groups, they provoked an uprising in the capital, Paris,
and established a commune, an administration based on communist principles.
Under the new regime, Paris turned into a city of terror.
Churches and government buildings were torn apart.
Men of religion were shot by the communards.
The commune was finally suppressed by government troops that entered Paris after lengthy fighting.
The first experiment in communism had left 18,000 dead behind it.
Yet how was it that Karl Marx's theories were able to spread so quickly?
The answer to that question was provided by the famous German scientist Rudolf Virko.
At a congress of naturalists, Virko took the floor to warn those biologists who supported Darwinism.
Be careful of this theory, for this theory is very nearly related to the theory that caused so much dread in our neighboring country.
Virko was right.
Darwin's theory of evolution was of great importance in the spread of Marxism among Western intellectuals.
The theory portrayed human beings as a species of animal, claimed that they would develop by means of conflict,
and most important of all, denied the idea of creation.
These three great errors formed the basis of Marxism.
The first of the communist revolutions built on that foundation was to take place in Russia.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Russia was ruled by the Tsarist regime.
However, revolutionary communist ideas were beginning to spread among an increasing number of workers.
Part of the military apparatus had also come under the ideology's influence.
The leader of the communist movement in Russia was Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
The communist movement led by Lenin was known as the Bolsheviks.
These believed that bloody revolution would be necessary for them to seize power.
Despite the fact that they had been illegally organized for years, they had been unable to achieve their aim.
The opportunity they were looking for came in 1914 with the outbreak of the First World War.
That war was the bloodiest conflict that mankind had ever known.
One of the countries involved in that war, which cost the lives of 10 million people, was Russia.
The Russians suffered defeat after defeat in the first three years of fighting and lost 2 million dead.
The suffering inflicted by the war dragged Russia towards revolution.
In February 1917, army units in the capital, Petrograd, rebelled and took over the city.
Tsar Nicholas II, who was at the front encouraging his troops, set out for the city.
His train was stopped by revolutionary troops, however, and the Tsar was arrested.
All symbols of the Tsarist regime were destroyed by revolutionary soldiers.
Supporters of the revolution rejoiced in the streets.
Most people hoped that the end of the Tsarist regime would bring happier times for Russia.
But they were wrong.
The Bolshevik contribution to the February 1917 revolution was actually quite minimal.
They were poorly represented in the post-revolutionary parliament that was set up.
The government passed into the hands of the pro-Western Kerensky, a Democrat.
Lenin, then in exile, ordered his men to give the new government absolutely no support.
He continued to organize the Bolsheviks for his own revolution.
And in October 1917, he struck.
Lenin's armed militants attacked the Winter Palace, the center of government.
They killed those guards who resisted and carried out one of the easiest coups in history.
Soviet propaganda films made years after the event would portray the coup as a huge popular uprising started by Lenin's fiery speeches.
The fact was, though, that the number of people who attacked the palace was less than 100, and only five people died.
Lenin started with a silent coup.
Yet things were not to remain so.
The Bolsheviks attacked those army units still loyal to the Tsar.
A terrible civil war began that would last for three long years.
The Bolsheviks established a Red Army to prosecute that war.
Lenin's right-hand man, Leon Trotsky, was placed at its head.
Red Army units and the secret police agencies set up by Lenin, known as the Cheka, had no compunction about using the most ruthless methods to deal with monarchists and other anti-communist groups.
Tsar Nicholas II, his wife, and five children were executed by order of Lenin.
Those cities which refused to support the Bolshevik regime were ruined.
In telegrams to his militants, Lenin ordered that all those who opposed the communist regime should be shot.
The Bolsheviks arrested tens of thousands of people for the crime of opposing the regime.
Most of these were tortured and executed en masse.
The famous Russian writer Maxim Gorky described examples of Bolshevik savagery.
In Tambov province, communists were nailed with railway spikes by their left hand and left foot to trees a meter above the soil.
And they watched the torments of these deliberately, oddly crucified people.
They would open a prisoner's belly, take out the small intestine, and nailing it to a tree or telegraph pole, they drove the man around the tree with blows, watching the intestine unwinding through the wound.
Stripping a captured officer naked, they tore strips of skin from his shoulders in the form of shoulder straps.
A terrible fear fell over Russia, but the communist savagery had only just begun.
The war has only just begun.
When the Bolsheviks came to power, most of the population of Russia lived in the villages, enjoying a pretty miserable standard of living.
Most peasants were only just able to feed their families with what they produced.
The freezing Russian winters made productive agriculture an impossibility.
A decision taken by Lenin in 1918 inflicted an even worse disaster on millions of peasants, who were already living in poverty.
Private property was forbidden, and the peasants' goods were to be confiscated by the state.
Lenin carried out that policy by means of another right-hand man, Felix Zarzynski, the head of the Cheka, well known for his ruthlessness.
Cheka officers descended on villages all over Russia, and began rounding up peasants, crops and livestock at gunpoint.
A quota to be handed over by every peasant and given to the Bolsheviks was drawn up.
In order to meet that quota, most of them had to give up all that they possessed.
Peasants who protested were silenced by the most savage means.
On 14 February 1922, one inspector who visited the Omsk region wrote,
Abuses of position by the requisitioning detachments, frankly speaking, have now reached unbelievable levels.
Systematically, the peasants who are arrested are all locked up in big, unheated barns.
They are then whipped and threatened with execution.
Those who have not filled the whole of their quota are bound and forced to run naked all along the main street of the village,
and then locked up in another unheated hangar.
Lenin was enraged when he realized that the quota set for the villages would not be met.
In 1920, he inflicted a fearful punishment on some regions that had resisted the requisitions.
Not only would these peasants' crops be seized, but also all the seeds they possessed.
Confiscating the seeds meant that the peasants would be unable to produce a new crop.
In other words, they would have nothing to eat.
Then the famine began.
Twenty-nine million people within the borders of Russia battled with starvation.
In 1921 and 1922, five million starved agonizingly to death.
Lenin watched what was happening with enormous pleasure.
In his view, the famine was most useful.
He calculated that it would help to destroy people's belief in God and religion,
and make them bow their heads to Communism.
In the black book of Communism that sent shockwaves around the world,
that devilish idea of Lenin's is discussed thus.
As one of his friends later recalled, Vladimir Ilyik Ulyanov had the courage to come out and say openly that famine would have numerous positive results.
Famine, he explained, would bring about the next stage more rapidly and usher in Socialism,
the stage that necessarily followed Capitalism.
Famine would also destroy faith, not only in the Tsar, but in God too.
This is what Lenin wrote to the members of the Politburo on March 19, 1922.
The present moment favors us.
With the help of all those starving people who are starting to eat each other, who are dying by the millions,
and whose bodies litter the roadside all over the country,
it is now and only now that we can and therefore must confiscate all church property with all the ruthless energy we can muster.
Our only hope is the despair engendered in the masses by the famine, which will cause them to look at us in a favorable light or, at the very least, with indifference.
These communications in the Soviet archives have revealed that Lenin deliberately brought about that dreadful famine which cost five million lives.
That is the same conclusion arrived at by the historian Richard Pipes, who spent years researching the archives in his book, The Unknown Lenin.
In his view, for humankind at large, Lenin had nothing but scorn.
Individual human beings held for Lenin almost no interest.
And he treated the working class much as a metal worker treated iron ore.
The reason why Lenin and the other Bolsheviks were so utterly ruthless was the dialectical materialist philosophy they so believed in.
This philosophy regarded human beings as a kind of animal and maintained that violence and conflict were necessary for the development of mankind.
Not only did Lenin regard human beings as a species of animal, he also employed animal methods to train them.
In October 1919, he paid a personal visit to the Russian scientists Ivan Pavlov, famous for his conditioned reflex experiments on animal.
Lenin wanted to impose these conditioned reflex methods on the whole of Russian society.
Pavlov was astounded.
I want the masses of Russia to follow a communistic pattern of thinking and reacting, Lenin explained.
Pavlov was astounded.
It seemed that Lenin wanted him to do for humans what he had already done for dogs.
Do you mean that you would like to standardize the population of Russia?
Make them all behave in the same way, he asked?
Exactly, replied Lenin.
Man can be corrected.
Man can be made what we want him to be.
The so-called scientific basis for that philosophy that regarded human beings as a species of animal was Darwin's theory of evolution.
The theory of evolution was the most important ideological inspiration behind the communist movement in Russia.
Darwin's origin of species was translated into Russian at the end of the 19th century and was responsible for thousands of young Russians turning to atheism and communism.
Russian communism was so tied to Darwinism that Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov, widely regarded as the founder of the movement, clearly stated that he regarded Marxism as Darwinism in its application to social science.
Plekhanov's student Lenin indeed applied Darwinism to society and mercilessly slaughtered whole societies he regarded as herds of animals.
The truth is that human beings are not a species of animal, but are honorable beings created by humans.
created by God in possession of a soul.
The reason for their existence on earth is not, as communists and Darwinists would assert, conflict, war and bloodshed, but for them to display a morality that is pleasing to God.
Only when man has understood this concept, in other words, only when he lives by true religion, will he find peace and happiness.
The end of Lenin, who denied that fact, is a terrible warning.
From 1922 on, an increasingly serious sickness slowly began to paralyze him.
He spent most of 1923 in a wheelchair, suffering from terrible headaches.
In March 1923, he had a stroke and was thenceforth unable to speak normally.
In the final months of his life, those who saw Lenin were terrified.
His face had taken on a peculiar expression and he was half mad.
The final photograph taken of him shortly before his death was utterly ghastly.
God speaks of the fate of such cruel people in the Koran.
Then the final fate of those who did evil will be the worst because they denied God's signs and mocked at them.
Lenin died on January 21st, 1924.
The Bolsheviks organized a huge funeral ceremony for Lenin.
The leaders of the Communist Party decided to have his body, which had a tremendous importance for them, in bond.
Among those bearing Lenin's coffin was the next dictator of Soviet Russia, Joseph Stalin.
Stalin would rule Soviet Russia for nearly 30 years and establish a regime of such bloodshed and terror that would even surpass that of Lenin.
All the historical facts we have so far considered have an important moral for mankind.
False ideas can lead to disasters for people and societies.
Communism is one such false idea and it inflicted dreadful suffering on the world during the 20th century.
One of the fundamental errors of communism is that it believes conflict to be an unchanging law of nature.
The so-called scientific justification for this view is found in the theory of evolution,
which says that the differences between people necessarily lead to war, fighting and conflict.
According to this view, called dialectics, every class, every nation and every society is obliged to fight every other one and this is a law of nature.
That view stamped its mark all over the 20th century and is the common inspiration behind both the communist savagery we have seen in this film
and also behind that of fascism which appears to be the complete opposite of communism.
It is only possible for mankind to escape this cycle of violence by coming to know the purpose behind its existence.
Human beings are not a species of animal that emerge by chance and live only to fight as Darwinists, communists and fascists believe.
Human beings are noble beings created by God and possessing his soul.
And the purpose of man is to learn and to live by that pleasing morality that God has taught him.
In the next section, we shall continue to examine the disasters that communist ideology, which rejects that truth, has inflicted on humanity.
The bloody history of communism, part two.
Stalin's regime of fear, death camps and secret murders.
The Soviet Russian genocide of Muslims.
Stalin's scientists killed for refusing to accept the theory of evolution.
Do not miss the bloody history of communism, part two.
It's a brilliant and personal embrace, Stunden Muse and Augustus.
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