1 Red Terror
During the “Red Terror” of 1918, Communist secret police in Orel (in Russia) “poured water on naked prisoners bound in the winter streets until they became living ice statues.” In Ukraine, they “rolled people around in barrels studded internally with nails.” Upwards of 1 million people died.
2. The secret police in Communist Romania subjected the leaders of a 1977 coal miners’ strike to 5-minute chest X-rays to ensure that they developed cancer.
3. Former Chinese President Yang Shangkun told his doctor before his death that the crackdown on June 4 (Tiananmen Square) had been the Communist Party’s “most serious mistake in its history, a mistake he couldn’t correct but which would eventually be corrected.” He had initially opposed the use of force on students.
4. In 1991, a fake Russian TV program on Leningrad TV convinced many citizens that Lenin consumed a lot of psychedelic mushrooms, eventually even becoming a mushroom himself. The Leningrad communist party had to declare that “Lenin could not have been a mushroom” because “a mammal cannot be a plant.”
5. In 1950, residents in Mosinee, Wisconsin held a mock Communist invasion that had concentration camps, a purged library, and inflated prices. The mayor, seemingly unaware of the plan, died due to the excitement.
6 Coco
The Pixar film Coco, which features the spirits of dead family members, got past China’s censors with 0 cuts. In China, superstition is taboo due to the belief that spiritual forces could undermine people’s faith in the communist party. The censors were so moved by the film, they gave it a full pass.
7. Boris Yeltsin’s first trip to a Texas grocery store in 1988 shattered his belief in communism. He told his fellow Russians in his entourage that if their people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw the U.S. supermarkets, “there would be a revolution.”
8. During the Bodo League Massacre of 1950, more than 100,000 suspected communists were killed by the South Korean government. US, Australian, and British officials witnessed and photographed the political genocide.
9. During the “Hundred Flowers Campaign” of 1956, China allowed and encouraged people to speak freely and openly express their opinions about the communist regime. After a year, the campaign was withdrawn and the Chinese government imprisoned those who spoke critically about them.
10. When the Monopoly game was introduced to communist Czechoslovakia, private businesses were illegal and mortgages didn’t exist, so they turned it into a horse racing variant.
11 Los Frikis
In the late 1980s, young punk rockers in Cuba, known as “Los Frikis,” were so fed up with the stifling life of the communist regime that they chose to inject themselves with the AIDS virus so they could live in a sanitarium and be free from constant police-state harassment.
12. Out of the 10,000 members of the Communist Party USA in 1957, 1,500 were FBI informants.
13. The French Marxist philosopher Guy Debord’s first book ‘Mémoires’ was bound with a sandpaper cover so that it would damage other books placed next to it.
14. Bob Marley wrote a song called “Zimbabwe” in support of the Marxist-Leninist and Maoist guerillas fighting against the Rhodesian government. After Robert Mugabe became the leader of the new country of Zimbabwe, Marley was invited to perform at the country’s independence celebrations.
15. The Indonesian Communist Party was once the largest non-governing Communist Party in the world and was effectively dissolved through a US-supported mass killing of 500,000 of its members.
16 Mengistu
Mengistu, the brutal communist dictator of Ethiopia, who had thousands of people executed and may have personally murdered Emperor Haile Selassie, is alive and well under asylum in Zimbabwe.
17. The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia wanted to build a state-of-the-art subway network with better trains, but the Soviet Union forced them to use their old, inefficient train designs for the benefit of the Soviet Economy.
18. The Communist Party of China was on the verge of defeat in the Chinese civil war in 1946 and would probably have lost the war, but Americans persuaded the KMT (Chinese Nationalist Party) to stop fighting to prevent an all-out civil war. Consequently the Communists regained their strength and won the war.
19. Khmer Rouge, the genocidal Communist regime in Cambodia, was toppled by Vietnam, but due to Cold War politics, many Western powers supported Khmer Rouge’s claim to be a government in exile and gave them a seat in the United Nations.
20. To apply to become a Communist Party member in China, you need to write periodic “thought reports” for two years, detailing your opinions on society and about your personal life. Additionally you have to attend classes once a week for three months and pass a final exam.
15 Most Controversial & Costly Blunders in History
21 Marxist-Leninist Party of Canada
The Marxist-Leninist Party of Canada hasn’t been able to secure a single seat in the Canadian Parliament despite running candidates for every election since 1974.
22. Canada had a top-secret list of suspected Communists they intended to detain indefinitely. If they tried to escape, they would be shot. One of the people on that list was Tommy Douglas, the founder of the current Healthcare and CPP programs.
23. In 1925, Bulgarian communists killed a general in order to gather the government in the church, and detonated a bomb inside the church, killing 150 and injuring 500. The king survived since he was late, after attending the funeral of another general who was killed in an attempt on the king’s life.
24. The Marxist–Leninist Party of the Netherlands (MLPN) was a fake pro-China communist party in the Netherlands set up by the Dutch secret service BVD to develop contacts with the Chinese government for espionage purposes.
25. To fight a communist insurgency in the Philippines, a CIA operative would drain the blood from captured enemy soldiers through two holes in their neck and leave the corpse to be found to spread rumors of vampire (aswang) attacks.