Top Ten Stupid Socialist Blunders

The following is a list of the ten worst blunders committed by socialist and collectivist states throughout history. These blunders range from crimes of pure negligence and stupidity to acts of violence and genocide. I have tried not to pick isolated incidents (of which there are many), but rather the items on this list are microcosms of the larger structural flaws in collectivist ideology. This list stands as a stark remainder of the failures caused by the implementation of socialism throughout history and why it should never be attempted again.

10. Chilean Inflation

Winning by a narrow margin in the 1970 election, Chilean president Salvador Allende became the first Marxist to be democratically elected as the leader of a Latin American country. During his first speech as head of state, Allende vowed to “destroy the economic basis for capitalism” and nationalize Chile’s copper mines—the main source of the country’s income. To the contempt of Chilean conservatives, businessmen, and the United States government, he attempted just that. Through excessive spending and buying out of shareholders, Allende was able to requisition most of the nation’s mines and factories. In 1972, however, the effort had become increasingly militarized, with armed party members seizing many of them by force.

These immoral and anti-capitalist tendencies of his eventually ran the Chilean economy into a fatal nosedive. By 1972, the government was 300 million dollars in debt, real wages had dropped nearly ten percent, and the inflation rate was 163%. The country was also relying more on agricultural imports to feed its people, increasing 84% since 1970.[1] Due to the gross mismanagement of the economy, American banks stopped giving the Chilean government loans, and as a result, Allende printed more money. When he was finally thrown out of power in a military coup in 1973, the inflation rate had reached a whopping 508%.[2] Salvador Allende’s successor, Augusto Pinochet initiated free market policies by privatizing the factories and paying the nation’s debt. The economy finally improved and the inflation rate stabilized.

Imbecilic monetary policy and economic mismanagement are trademarks of collectivist regimes. When a government engages in such irresponsible behaviour as seizing property and printing money, it is no wonder that other countries would be wary of doing business with them. Chile was certainly not the only socialist nation to have a runaway inflation rate, but it stands as a perfect example of how economic mismanagement can cripple the economy of such regimes.

9. Suppression of Free Speech in East Germany

The Stasi spied on you before Obama made it cool.

            From 1961 to 1990, Germany was split into two states by the Berlin Wall. The eastern half of Germany, known as the German Democratic Republic, was governed by the Stasi, a brutal secret police force.  The Stasi were meticulous at gathering information and keeping files on individuals they considered subversive, which in GDR, was just about everyone. Speaking out against the regime or discussing the Berlin Wall was strictly forbidden in GDR and censorship of information was strictly enforced by the state. If you were suspected of questioning the tenets of communism, then you would be imprisoned and tortured by the Stasi as a political prisoner. Other topics that were similarly forbidden to discuss in GDR included capitalism, fascism, pollution, the standard of living, education, homosexuality, pornography, alcoholism, and depression. Art that was not approved by the state was also banned.[3]

The split of Germany into two halves is significant because it acts as a natural experiment to show what happens when two previously identical nations adopt radically different policies. Under the capitalist-leaning west, the country prospered, whereas in the socialist East, a concrete wall was built to prevent people from fleeing. Proponents of collectivism never cease to argue how capitalism is tyrannical and oppressive, but if you compare the freedom of speech in GDR to the Federal Republic of Germany, it is the socialist state that is more oppressive. It is common among most socialist countries that freedom of speech is curtailed to some extent in order to maintain the illusion of homogenous public support.  One would be hard-pressed to argue how capitalism is more oppressive since freedom of speech and of the press is usually taken for granted in open societies. Unfortunately, we will never know the true cost that censorship had in GDR since great works of art that did not fit the vision of the state were hidden, destroyed, or were simply never created.

8. Personality Cult in Gaddafi’s Libya

In Socialist Libya, you can have a watch in any colour you want, as long as it's Gaddafi.

            In 1969, when he was only 27 years old, Muammar Gaddafi overthrew King Idris of Libya in a bloodless coup and began his 42 year-long rule of the country, which he later renamed The Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. His political ideas, outlined in The Green Book, can be loosely described as the marriage of socialism and Islam. In typical fashion of both ideologies, Gaddafi fostered a cult of personality that would make Stalin or Saddam Hussein seem like the pinnacle of modesty in comparison. Prior to his violent overthrow in 2011, it would have been impossible to walk down the streets of Tripoli without seeing images of the dictator plastered all over the city. Much of the wealth generated by the country by its oil reserves was siphoned off by Gaddafi to fund his extravagant projects and vacations abroad. He also used state funds to supply weapons to global terrorist organisations and his government was responsible for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988.

           The Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya was just one of many socialist regimes ruled by a dictator who used the state as his personal bank account. Gaddafi didn’t give a fuck about the Libyan people, he only cared about himself. His idiosyncrasies, such as his all-female-virgin bodyguards, his massive bulletproof tent, and his eccentric outfits testify to his narcissism and corruption. Libya would have likely been a better place today had its wealth not been embezzled by Muammar Gaddafi.

7. Venezuela Shortage of Consumer Goods

Fuck, they're all out of Gatorade.

            It is characteristic of socialist regimes that their economic policies are self-destructive and betray a lack of understanding with basic laws of supply and demand. Due to its recently discovered oil reserves, Venezuela has become a moderately wealthy country, but its socialist leanings have kept the general public from enjoying any prosperity. During the reign of Hugo Chavez, extensive price controls were enforced that prevented certain goods from being sold above a given price. Even after Chavez’s death, the country continues to pass idiotic controls, such as a 30% ceiling on profits earlier this year.[4] All these regulations and price controls have produced results one might expect—widespread shortage of consumer goods. Some examples of products that are absent from Venezuelan store shelves include flour, sugar, cooking oil, deodorant, milk, butter, beer, coffee, and most desperately, toilet paper. The nation’s Toyota and Chrysler plants recently closed their doors as tires also became increasingly scarce. Many citizens rely on black markets to acquire certain goods, and must deal with the exorbitant prices and endless queues just to purchase a small bag of rice.[5]

            If you never bother to consider the long-term consequences of such policies, price-controls and profit ceilings seem like they might be beneficial, especially to the poor. Many people also take the wide selection of consumer goods in American grocery stores for granted. Most don’t bother to think where these goods come from, why they were produced, or how they were transported to the grocery store. Thus, many people don’t stop to consider how price controls will affect the supply of goods and assume that if the state is making things cheaper, then it must be for the better. However, those firms that produce and supply these goods do so to turn a profit.  If there is no money to be made by supplying Venezuela with toilet paper or deodorant, then firms will take their business elsewhere. The disastrous effects of price controls in socialist Venezuela demonstrates the disconnect between fluffy socialist rhetoric and the cold facts of reality and human nature. The dictatorship of the proletariat is not a world full of cheap and plentiful goods, but a world in which you wipe your ass with newsprint.

6. Communist China Starves to Death

            Between the three years of 1959 to 1961, China suffered a famine in which 40 million people starved to death. The famine was caused almost exclusively by the distribution policies of the government, but those sympathetic to Maoist communism erroneously put the blame on “enemies of the state” or natural disasters. When the government of China initiated The Great Leap Forward, private farms were abolished and the responsibility of grain distribution was placed in the hands of the state. The communes in charge of food production had to produce enough grain to meet state-imposed quotas, and the surplus grain they kept for themselves. However, as the government quotas increased, there became less and less grain left over as surplus. It also didn’t help that the communes had adopted idiotic farming techniques contrived by Soviet pseudoscientist, Trofim Lysenko, which further stunted crop yields. As a result, all the grain being produced by Chinese communes by 1959 was being seized by the state and the peasants starved en masse. For the next three years, China would experience the worst famine in recorded history, marked by violent crime, suicide, death, widespread cannibalization, and the market of human flesh. The eating of children and babies was common, where parents would swap each other’s children so they didn’t have to eat their own offspring.[6]

            Unable to see why the glorious and infallible doctrines of communism could cause such a catastrophe, the Chinese government naturally blamed “enemies of the state” and sent armed thugs across the country to seize any food they could find from peasants. They also initiated what came to be known as the Four Pests Campaign, which encouraged the killing of rats and sparrows, thought to be main destroyers of crops. Millions of sparrows were put to death. However, this only prolonged the famine since the mass death of sparrows allowed crop-eating insects like locusts to thrive and this further stunted the crop production.[7]

Don't kill the sparrows. They're your comrades.

            Widespread famines are not uncommon in socialist countries, but they are almost unheard of in capitalist ones. The fact that even some of these famines were the direct consequence of policies enforced by those socialist governments is a strong indictment against this reprehensible ideology. Fuck Chairman Mao.

5. Lev Mekhlis

            On the eastern front during World War Two, each division under Soviet command was appointed with one political commissar. The purpose of these commissars was to instil party solidarity with the soldiers and to ensure the war against Germany was conducted according to communist party guidelines. During the opening stages of Operation Barbarossa, they proved themselves to be largely ineffectual, as they frequently substituted the orders of the commanding officers with their own. This led to many needless and bloody Soviet defeats. One of the most notorious commissars was named Lev Zakharovich Mekhlis. He was a favourite of Josef Stalin, being such a vocal proponent, as well as participant in the Great Purges of 1936-38. For the whole course of the war, Mekhlis was sent around from headquarters to headquarters, executing Red Army officers for alleged insubordination. His presence was resented by the entire army. Mekhlis was adamant that deserters, malingers, and panic mongers were to be shot on the spot.[8] He also interfered in matters of command, being partially responsible for the fall of Sebastopol and Kerch to German forces in 1942. His orders at Kerch forbade the troops from digging in, and forced the command to move to the front trench. The Germans shelled the front trench and as a result, all Soviet division commanders at the battle were killed.[9]

            The nature of collectivism and socialism allows those like Mekhlis who have no discernable talents besides following orders and murdering people to rise to positions of authority. Mekhlis knew how to suck up to Stalin and he could spout socialist rhetoric, but he was a demonstrably ineffective military commander and he was responsible for thousands of unnecessary deaths. Collectivist ideology breeds complicit pieces of human waste like Lev Mekhlis.

4. Explosion of Birth Rates in Communist Romania

            During the early 1960s, Communist Romania was approaching zero population growth. Nicolai Ceausescu, the dictator of the country, decided that if the Romanian population was to grow, it would be through government legislation. Thus his government passed laws that abolished abortion, outlawed contraceptives, and divorce, collectively known as Decree770. Gynaecology exams were also mandated and pregnant women were closely monitored by the government to ensure that they did not get an abortion. Romanian couples who did not have children were forced to payer higher taxes, whereas non-working mothers received subsidies from the state. As a result of these policies, Romania’s birth rates exploded, nearly out of control. In 1968, Romania’s population had increased by nearly 100%.[10][11] It also didn’t help that Communist Romania faced a debt crisis during the 1980s that reduced the standard of living drastically. Families were forced into overcrowded apartments without heating or adequate food. Orphanages became bloated, nightmarish hells full of starving unwanted children. Even long after Ceausescu was thrown out of power, his idiotic pronatalist policies could be seen in the Romania’s overcrowded orphanages, prisons, and mental asylums.[12]

            The failure of these policies stands as testament to the ineffectiveness of central-planned economies and of collectivism in general. Outlawing all forms of birth control has the tendency to make birth rates explode, but in the poverty of communist Romania, such high birth rates could not be sustained. How his country was going to accommodate all the children being born under these policies, Ceausescu likely did not take into account. I believe such negligence is characteristic of most laws passed by other socialist regimes.

3. Massacre of Innocents in Cambodia

Cambodia was subjected to the brutal dictatorship of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979. Pol Pot rose to power following the escalation of American bombing campaigns during the Vietnam War. In 1970s, American bombings had spilled over into Cambodia, galvanizing hatred towards to west and an embrace of The Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot’s anti-imperialist rhetoric. Pol Pot’s dictatorship was marked by mass killings, starvations, imprisonments, and torture. The dictator’s wrath was mostly directed at racial minorities such as Chinese and Vietnamese, as well as intellectuals, of whom Pol Pot was distrustful. Others who were targeted for killing included businessmen, artists, professionals, Buddhist monks, former government employees, and anybody accused of “economic sabotage.” Most victims of the regime were not shot, but were beaten to death savagely with tools such as shovels and pickaxes in order to save bullets.[13] All this bloodshed was an effort by Pol Pot’s communist government to establish a radical agrarian socialism, where former city-dwellers were forced to work in the fields for long hours each day. For those who dared criticize the regime, prisons such as Tuol Sleng were established where inmates would be starved and brutally tortured for months before being executed. Estimates range about how many were killed by The Khmer Rouge, but the figure is generally accepted to be in the millions, possibly as high as three million.[14] The systematic effort by the Khmer Rouge to murder its own people goes to show the true face of socialism. As with most collectivist states that commit genocide, most of those executed are innocent—their lives completely disposable, extinguished on a whim by a sociopathic dictator. So many of those who were exterminated were intelligent and productive people, and would have worked to make the world a better place had their lives not been wasted in the pursuit of a twisted socialist utopia.

2. North Korea

"This isn't my hair-dryer!"

            The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is such an exhibition of bureaucratic incompetence and human cruelty that it would be difficult to pick one single blunder for this list. Since its official establishment in 1948 DPRK has run up a laundry list human right abuses. Economic mismanagement caused a massive famine between 1994 and 1998 in which 3 million people died. Even today, long after the famine officially ended, food is still scarce throughout the country—especially in the countryside. Peasants regularly starve to death in the hundreds. In 2013, the UN estimated that 84 percent of the country had “poor” levels of food consumption. Meanwhile, the current dictator of DPRK, Kim Jong-Un does not want for anything; in 2012 alone, he spent nearly 7 million dollars on goods like handbags, luxury watches, cosmetics, and alcohol. In that same year, he also spent 1.3 billion dollars on ballistic missile programs.[15] The North Korean Army, which is the fourth largest in the world, has an annual budget of 6 billion dollars.

            The most appalling side of North Korea is not its gross economic mismanagement, but its unsympathetic brutality towards its populace. Those who have escaped the many prison camps throughout the country testify to acts of extreme cruelty and barbarity. Inmates in these prisons face constant threats of arbitrary beatings and executions by the guards, who reportedly enjoy torturing inmates with cattle prods. Women are regularly raped and given forced abortions.[16] The number of political prisoners within North Korea has grown dramatically over the past five years, with an estimated quarter million imprisoned in 2011.[17] Considering the North Korean government does not release statistics to this effect leads one to wonder how much abuse is happening in the country that we don’t even know about yet.

            Such a disgraceful track record of abuse as that of DPRK is not uncommon for most other collectivist countries on this list. DPRK is but a single entry in the long list of failed socialist states. It is a sad reflection on the mental development of the west that some delinquents still apologize for the crimes of this regime.


1. The Great Purges Decapitate USSR

Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, a prominent victim of the Great Purges.

            Josef Stalin was paranoid of everyone. As dictator of the Soviet Union, he saw enemies wherever he looked for them: among his friends, family, the army, the intelligentsia, fellow party members, and acquaintances. Stalin began his purges in 1936, seeking to eliminate the Old Bolsheviks who fought in the Russian Civil War as well as any political rivals, but as the purges progressed, individuals from all facets of society became targets. Nobody was safe. Ninety percent of Red Army officers were purged, including three out of five Marshals, thirteen out of fifteen army commanders, and all sixteen army commissars.[18] Many talented commanders like Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Alexander Yegrov, Iona Yakir, and Vitaly Primakov were all put to death. Prominent journalists, writers, politicians, engineers, and architects were also killed or imprisoned. All in all, declassified Soviet documents reveal that 681, 692 people were killed from 1937-1938—an average of one thousand executions a day.[19] Many more were arrested and died later in the gulags.

          The needless loss of so many Russian intellectuals and leaders meant that the Soviet Union was wholly unprepared to deal with the German invasion of 1941. Stalin’s purges had effectively decapitated the Red Army of all its best officers. Even the Soviet military doctrine which was written by Tukhachevsky, was replaced by a crude, and wholly ineffective one written by Kliment Voroshilov, a diehard Stalinist. Many of the tragic disasters on the eastern front during the early years of the war such as Smolensk (1941) and Kerch (1942) occurred as a direct result of the lack of well-trained, experienced Soviet officers.

            Those who are sympathetic to Soviet Russia laud the will of the communists to resist and ultimately beat back the Nazi invasion. However, the reason why the Germans had such success against the Russians in the early stages of Operation Barbarossa was  due to the unfit state of the Red Army to repel such an invasion. Stalin’s purges had consolidated his hold over the country and eliminated any opposition, but they were ultimately wasteful and unproductive. The Purges also indirectly led to millions of Russians being needlessly slaughtered during World War Two.

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[1] http://historicaltextarchive.com/sections.php?action=read&artid=671

[2] http://historicaltextarchive.com/sections.php?action=read&artid=671

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_east_germany#Censored_topics

[4] http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/032014-694100-shortages-black-markets-emerge-in-socialist-venezuela.htm

[5] http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2013/sep/26/venezuela-food-shortages-rich-country-cia

[6] http://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/05/books/horror-of-a-hidden-chinese-famine.html

[7] Summers-Smith, J Denis. In Search of Sparrows, pg. 122-124

[8] Roberts, Geoffrey. Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War (1939-1953), pg. 97

[9] James Lucas, War on the Eastern Front: The German Soldier in Russia 1941-1945

[10] http://study.abingdon.org.uk/geography/new/AS/AS_population/Population_policies/pop%20policies%202003/Romania/tsld004.htm

[11] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decree_770

[12] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ISSgupUtpU

[13] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge_period_(1975%E2%80%931979)#Terror

[14] http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/deaths.htm

[15] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/08/opinion/pyongyangs-hunger-games.html?_r=0

[16] http://guardianlv.com/2014/06/north-korea-accused-of-genocide-by-south-korean-human-rights-group/

[17] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/05/world/asia/05korea.html

[18] Courtois, Stephane. The Black Book of Communism. Pg. 98

[19] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge#Number_of_people_executed