https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjT2FhubAf0
Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.
Ronald Reagan, March 30, 1961
Strong language advisory as to the above clip from the film The Death of Stalin (2017), the most anti-Communist film to be made in many years.
The film is a superb evocation of the power struggles that ensued in the wake of the death of Stalin in 1953. The blackest of black comedies, it is also hilarious, albeit with quite a bit of very rough language. The language, however, in this context works. The men of the Politburo were gangsters, murderers. We would no more expect them to use decent language than we would expect the demons to do so in Dante’s Inferno. However, if there are gradations in Hell, the worst was Stalin’s Himmler, Lavrentiy Beria. A Georgian like Stalin, and head of the NKVD for the latter part of Stalin’s rule, Beria had the blood of millions on his hands. However, his colleagues were little better than him. None of them had the courage not to go along with Stalin’s paranoia that executed millions and sent millions of others to living deaths, and often simply deaths, in the Gulag. All of them had to sign off on execution lists and imprisonment lists of people they knew to be completely innocent.
Beria is the villain of the film, as the film depicts, albeit in truncated fashion, his rise and fall post Stalin. The film’s comedic tone leaves it right at the very end when during his “trial”, shown in the above clip, Beria is denounced for his habit of taking advantage of his position to rape women at will, to have women prostitute themselves to him in usually futile efforts to save themselves or their men and children, and Beria’s involvement in pedophilia with the little girls of some of his victims. Only then do we see moral outrage from his colleagues, because here, for the first and only time in the film, they are talking about crimes they did not engage in themselves. Communism is a poisonous, and always murderous, political philosphy, and it says something very bad about our times that so many idiots, especially including our Pope, look upon it benignly.
Today I think of the silent victors over Communism in the last century, many of them filling mass graves. We stand on the shoulders of giants, most of them known but to God. By their lives and sacrifices they proved the essential truth of Man that a thirst for freedom is put in the soul of each of us by God. Governments can tyrannize over the sons of Adam and the daughters of Eve for a time, but they can never destroy that thirst.
Great post, Don. For obvious reasons, I fear we are much closer to the extinction of freedom now than we ever were during the Cold War years. And the extinction will come from within, albeit with plenty of outside help.
The ’90s mini series The Soviets was very sobering. Khrushchev’s, “We will bury you” was no idle threat. He along with other senior Soviets had hundreds of thousands killed. After a while they didn’t even have to name a minority or group. They only had to request to have a number murdered. “I want 350,000 exterminated.” Depraved evil men.
As a child I saw Kruschev from a distance. He was a very unimpressive, crude looking man. On many occasions my parents took us into DC when a world leader would be entertained at the White House or Blair House across the street. Large crowds would gather to see the Shah and Shabanu, King Ibn Saud and his entourage in 50 black Cadillac sedans, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Phillip, etc. Hadn’t thought about that in years.