When Compassion Kills

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 18 December 2019.]

‘Tis the season of peace, joy, and giving, of both the complimentary and compassionate kind.  Every year during these weeks we are deluged with pleas to open our wallets for uncountable good causes.  ‘Twas ever thus.  But compassionate giving on an international scale has often been the precursor, if not the actual cause, of the subsequent death for tens of millions.  And as a nation that continues to give and has given lavishly in the past, this should give us Americans some pause as we reflect on the history of such gifts.

Recently published is one such history of a program of compassionate giving that turned out to give rise to the subsequent deaths of 20 to 30 million Soviet farmers in the 1930s.  The book is The Russian Job – the forgotten story of how America saved the Soviet Union from Ruin (2019) by award-winning historian Douglas Smith. (reviewed here)  In it Smith describes in devastating detail of how during 1921-23 the American Relief Administration under Herbert Hoover, working over a vast land area, saved 10 million Russians from certain starvation.

Few people know that after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, the communists and monarchists fought a five-year wide-ranging civil war that finally ended in 1923 with the consolidation of the Soviet Union under Lenin.  During that time the communists were sacrificing their independent-minded recalcitrant farmers in favor of city dwelling industrial workers needed to produce war materiel, and keep functioning the urban centers they controlled.  Word got out that some 30 million people would soon die were they not provided food relief.  As a result, Bolsheviks begrudgingly solicited, and then allowed, Hoover’s ARA to enter the war-torn land.  And working with “never more” than 200 American volunteers, they distributed American food to masses of Russians across the countryside.

The relief effort demonstrably saved the nascent USSR from popular revolt and counter-revolution by the czarists and republicans.  But for reasons not clear today, what no one then was able to forecast is the genocide that was to follow in six short years as Stalin, who succeeded Lenin, cracked a few eggs, attempting to bring about his promised socialist omelet.  Estimates vary, but Stalin subsequently killed about 30 million of his own citizens through executions, Siberian deportations, and starvation, beginning in 1929 with 10 million kulaks, Ukrainian farmers who resisted collectivization, who were then starved to death in the four years that followed.

And that tsunami of death, which began in the USSR, continued with the spread of international communism during the post-WW2 Cold War.  Then countries like Maoist China, Vietnam, Cambodia, and more in Africa, Middle East, and Hispanic America, tried socialism, with many quickly progressing to communism, that then killed their own citizens totaling in the tens of millions.   To many of these politically deteriorating countries, America and the West continued giving humanitarian aid, that primarily served to prop up their ruthless dictatorial governments, which then consolidated their lands into stable, murderous tyrannies that lasted decades.

It’s worth pointing out here the greatest killer the world has ever seen – Mao Zedong.  This monster, by the accounting of Chinese themselves, killed more than a 100 million of his people in carrying out his Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.  Compared to Mao and Joe Stalin, all the rest of the dictators were definitely second-class killers, a fact which the leftwing press has successfully suppressed.  To test this, just ask any young modern to name the greatest killer of his own people.

So, what is the main takeaway here about compassionate giving?  Should we continue repeating the mistake of Hoover’s ARA?  If not, in what light should we consider giving humanitarian aid to countries like the cynically named People’s Republic of Korea or even Venezuela?  Should we send aid to the poor and starving in the Sudan? To Ethiopia?  Should we not first consider what kind of regimes such aid will stabilize and enable to go on killing their own people while making their lives a pure misery?  Something to ponder when someone shows you a video of the starving and destitute in some already established s-hole country.

My name is Rebane, wishing all KVMR listeners a Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and a healthy and prosperous new year.  I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the addended transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

[Addendum]  R.J. Rummel published his landmark Death by Government in 1994.  It has been reprinted and revised since then.  You can now download the book for free here, and examine some updated numbers here.  Important to note that the cited updates still don’t include the latest numbers from Mao’s mega-murderous Cultural Revolution.

A takeaway from all this is again that the most complete forms of collectivism that are practiced under the largest governments are the greatest killers of their own citizens - many orders of magnitude more lethal than any conceivable form of private sector crime, ‘gun violence’, accidents, etc. (We note that many instances of nationalism that give rise to collectivist tyrannies also result in mass murders of their citizenry.)  When murder is institutionalized by governments that have deprived their citizens of any material means of resistance (e.g. the ongoing attempt by America's Left to abrogate our Second Amendment), the result is an inevitable bloodbath from direct executions, lethal imprisonments, and coordinated programs of genocide, to mass deaths from nationwide starvation and disease through malfeasance in operating the country’s economy.

Comments

[Scott O]

Such a pessimist! Doncha' know NEXT time they'll do it right?

[Bill Tozer]

“When murder is institutionalized by governments that have deprived their citizens of any material means of resistance (e.g. the ongoing attempt by America's Left to abrogate our Second Amendment), the result is an inevitable bloodbath from direct executions, lethal imprisonments, and coordinated programs of genocide, to mass deaths from nationwide starvation and disease through malfeasance in operating the country’s economy.” Dr. Rebane
————————-
Might be off-topic....

“As the cart took Robespierre and his closest supporters to the guillotine on July 28, a spectator noted: “It was a holiday, all the elegant people were at their windows to see them pass. They applauded and clapped their hands all along the rue Saint Honoré.”

Robespierre had tried to commit suicide earlier but had only managed to shoot off part of his jaw. The executioner cruelly ripped the bandage off, leaving Robespierre screaming in pain as the blade descended. In retrospect, it seems somewhat ungrateful of the executioner, whom Robespierre had kept in such regular work for so long.

Popkin is initially far too generous to Robespierre, suggesting that he “was the last figure who could truly claim to have embodied the vision of liberty and equality,” as though there was any true liberty in France under his rule. On the very next page, he partially corrects himself, however, adding that “although the Terror restricted liberty, it continued to promote the other great revolutionary ideal of equality. Even in hindsight, it is difficult to say that the basic achievements of the Revolution could have been preserved in 1793 and 1794 without something resembling a revolutionary dictatorship.”

That was certainly the message that Vladimir Lenin and Stalin took from the French Revolution, and plenty more bloodthirsty killers besides. Most readers will hopefully conclude that there are other, less violent ways to secure reforms.”

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/heads-will-roll

[Steven Frisch]

Bah Humbug!

Of course it is important for us to remember during this Christmas season that the greatest cause of dependence and poverty is Christian charity :) Screw all your good causes and give your money to the Heritage Foundation!

Poverty is wealth.
War is peace.
Punishment is charity.

[Steven Frisch]

...and then there is that child of Bethlehem, born homeless, who later in life wandered the country homeless depending upon the charity of others to spread his gospel...what a deadbeat, I mean seriously, can't that guy get a job and stop leaching off of others, sleeping in their barns and sheds, eating their chick peas and bread? Cut your hair too...you look like a sissy.

[Castaneda]

,,,my impression after reading this holiday message is that George would prefer that ‘’’humanitarian aid’’’ in these areas be the form of M-16s and cluster bombs...

[fish]

Posted by: Steven Frisch | 19 December 2019 at 05:31 AM

Screw all your good causes and give your money to the Heritage Foundation!

If you really want to make your charity dollars go their furthest this year you might want to consider a little outfit in Truckee that's doin the lords work…..and hey, the lay minister who fronts the place….his 401k isn't going to fund itself.

[Jeff Pelline]

Steve Frisch,
I love your humor here man! Never change. Merry Christmas! Happy Hanukkah! Happy Kwanzaa! Etc. Etc.

[fish]

Posted by: "Curly" Pelline | 19 December 2019 at 07:19 AM

I love your humor here man!

Me too man! Nyuck, nyuck, nyuck!

https://tenor.com/view/the-three-stooges-curly-top-spinning-around-gif-13610697

[rl crabb]

More compassionate conservatism on display... https://www.businessinsider.com/chuck-bonniwell-show-canceled-over-school-shooting-impeachment-comments-2019-12

[fish]

Posted by: rl crabb | 19 December 2019 at 08:22 AM

……Epstein didn't kill himself.

(sotto voce)

[Castaneda]

,,,yes RL,,,at least this Christian station tossed out the Conservo hater...

[Scott O]

It was a joke, Crabb. Ill-thought and tasteless, but a joke none the less. You're really grasping at moral straws to use that to impugn conservative thought.
The other mindless comments by the lefties here show how shallow their thinking is. George brings up facts that the left can't handle so they turn to completely false charges against him.
And of course we need to bring in Jesus to the conversation. Funny how the left gets religion when they think it suits them.
Any of you lefties care to actually address the issue?

[Steven Frisch]

Scott, it's kind of amazing that you don't see the logical fallacy in George's connection of the American Relief Agency and it's success and the failure of a popular counter-revolution against Leninism occurring.

First, there could have been any number of reasons such a counter-revolution did not occur in 1921, the best perhaps being that the counter-revolution had already been occurring since 1918 and was played out. The Red's won and the White's lost.

Second, it is never logical to propose an alternative history, such as, "if the US had not fed the starving refugees they would have started a revolution and the result would have been preferable." It presumes an event would have occurred and there is no way to know that, and it presumes the outcome that would have occurred and been preferable, which we have no way of knowing.

In other words, George's comment is really just an excuse for yet another anti-communist propaganda hit against what he perceives to be progressive fellow travelers hiding in the hills of the Yuba headlands.

George goes on to posit, "Should we not first consider what kind of regimes such aid will stabilize and enable to go on killing their own people while making their lives a pure misery? Something to ponder when someone shows you a video of the starving and destitute in some already established s-hole country."

That George is using an act of Christian charity in 1921 (which if you knew the history of Herbert Hoover the director of the ARA you would recognize was a prime motivating factor) during the season that celebrates Christian charity and our collective responsibility to care for the least privileged amongst us, was simply a delicious irony too rich to pass up.

Now you know I am not a Christian, but as a person of the west I am profoundly influenced by Christian philosophy; George however is a Christian, which mean love for others and obedience to God's word, and George's stated position is inconsistent with that.

So, once again, Bah Humbug.

[George Rebane]

StevenF 841am - Your hubris in the continuous display of your marginal reading skills and lamentable logic is remarkable. Apparently you missed that the presenter of the counter-factual thesis held by many for the last century is the celebrated historian Douglas Smith. But as always, you of the lightly read Left ascribe to me the genesis of all the ideas of which you are ignorant and first read in these pages. And your contention that “it is never logical to propose an alternative history” is beyond ignorant on both counts of logic and utility. Generating and processing with counter-factuals is one of humanity’s highest cognitive talents and most powerful learning paradigms. These have now formally entered the field of AI with Judea Pearl’s causal calculus, which makes them computable in applications of machine learning and inference. I think you continue to flail above your pay grade.

[Castaneda]

,,,I guess George is saying if you find a wounded animal in the forest and nurse it back to health,,,it will get rabies...that will spread throughout the world...

,,,best to just put it out of its misery...

It's the humane thing to do...

[George Rebane]

Castaneda 938am - Thank you for that marvelous observation which joins with that of your intellectual colleague whom I addressed in my 902am. I forgot to also thank him for his 841am. These corroborating visitations from our progressive readers continue to be most welcome in these pages. They save me and our other readers from having to surmise the direction and depth of such thoughts before countering them.

[Ted Hempel]

Castenada ,,,"my impression after reading this holiday message is that George would prefer that ‘’’humanitarian aid’’’ in these areas be the form of M-16s and cluster bombs..."

No, not an impression. Stone cold fact. George spent most of his years perfecting weapons of war. He made a killing in the killing game.

[George Rebane]

TedH 1115am – Your “stone cold fact” is not even a stone-cold turd. I am very proud of the work I and my colleagues did for the Pentagon developing systems to secure our collective butts. But none of us got rich doing government R&D contracts; we just made good salaries inventing new stuff and selling our brains. Financial success came when I left defense work and took those skills into the private sector as a manufacturer of educational electronics, and developer of new interactive information systems, based first on laser discs and then distribution through the internet, concentrating mainly in the field of ecommerce where I headed the group that introduced the field of web analytics. Most recently I have been involved in the development of new quantitative methods in financial engineering. At every stage I have helped create hundreds of new career-fulfilling jobs, primarily for young families, and always contending with the stifling overreach of government bureaucracies filled mostly with people unclear about almost everything. Do you also work for the government?

[Gregory]

Gilbert Gottfried lost his only regular gig telling the following post-tsunami joke, similar to the one Crabbie was celebrating... paraphrased:
"In Japan, if you lost your girlfriend, just wait... another will float by soon"

It was accepted as well as the pining for a school shooting quip to interrupt wall to wall coverage of the interminable Impeachiement hearings was... and it was a bit funnier in Gottfried's voice. So much for riches to voice the Aflac duck.

[on his firing from the voice of the Aflac duck] "It gives me a sentimental feeling about the old lynch mobs. At least they were social."

[Gregory]

"...and then there is that child of Bethlehem, born homeless, ..."

This little story told by Frisch was seen as funny by Pelline, Keachie and even RL Bozo.

Only the little brat wasn't homeless. His parents had traveled out of town as commanded by their guvmint to pay taxes due and the manger was the closest thing to an Airbnb they could find.

[Gregory]

...or was it they had to travel to their birthplace for a census... I'm so confused.

[Steven Frisch]

According to the Gospels Jesus entire time of his ministry are described as him being homeless, wandering to deliver his ministry, and relying on charity to survive.

Matthew 8:20 Jesus replied, “Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”

Matthew 25:35 "For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me."

Luke 6 20-21: "And he lifted up his eyes on his disciples, and said: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. “Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you shall be satisfied. “Blessed are you who weep now, for you shall laugh."

Luke 14 13-14: "But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. For you will be repaid at the resurrection of the just.”

Matthew 25 35-49 "Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you?"

Just a little reminder for you Greg and George on Christmas.

[George Rebane]

Don't you love the way leftwing secular humanists (here Friar Frisch) resort to religions of opportunity to bolster their arguments, when otherwise they would take you to court for similar citations in the public square?

[Gregory]

"and then there is that child of Bethlehem, born homeless"

He wasn't "born homeless", was he, Steven? And none of the biblical citations clearly state he didn't keep a home as an adult.

I think the difference between an activist a-theist like Steve and a pacifist a-gnostic like me is that I'm not hostile to the god-fearing.

[Steven Frisch]

My case is that feeding the hungry is a virtue, not a mistake.

That is a Christian value too...and I didn't need Christianity to have that value, I have it as a secular humanist, but I am not hostile to Christianity.

I just think George needs to read Matthew, Mark Luke and John again.

[Gregory]

"My case is that feeding the hungry is a virtue, not a mistake."

Golly, Steve, then why the line of BS about the virtues of Homeless Jesus? Why the need for Jesus being homeless from birth? The Gospel according to St.Frisch?

Of course you're hostile to Christianity. You're hostile to Christians who stand their ground and you misquote stories from the Bible to make your mistaken points.

[George Rebane]

Where oh where do they come up with that mindset that they substitute for logic? And such self-assured logic that brooks no contention.

[Bill Tozer]

Sent from God

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=3577848122226135&set=gm.830772477377864&type=3&theater