Thank God that we live in a free, democratic republic. Pray particularly for millennials to not be misled about the dangers and oppression resulting from communist governments and communist ideas.

There is a way that appears to be right, but in the end it leads to death. (Pr 14:12)

View Comments (4)

This year marks 100 years since the Bolshevik Revolution took place in Russia. That year, the centuries-old czardom of Russia and the brief liberal democracy that replaced it collapsed and was soon replaced by the Soviet Union, the world’s first stable communist state.

It was that year, a long, bloody, century ago, that the class warfare and revolutionary ideas of Marxism went from being the fanciful talk of disaffected intellectuals to a serious international political and historical force.

Since that fateful event, which the title of John Reed’s “Ten Days that Shook the World” so aptly captures, communism through its various forms and adherents has directly led to the deaths of well over 100 million people and the subjugation of countless more across the world….

Over the course of the 20th century, the United States was the center of human freedom and God-given liberty in polar contrast to totalitarian ideologies, most notably communism.

Tens of thousands of American service members lost their lives fighting for the freedom of peoples around the world from communism….

Yet we are already showing worrying signs of forgetting our past.

In 2012, movements such as Occupy Wall Street attempted to capitalize on the real hardships many Americans were feeling in the wake of the financial crisis….

Since then, many of these attitudes have not dwindled but grown.

A 2016 poll by YouGov showed that while millennials still saw communism “very unfavorably,” they did so at a rate (37 percent) that was significantly lower than Americans as a whole (57 percent).

Furthermore, many millennials expressed worrying sentiments, such as distrust of capitalism, ignorance of communism’s record and history, and support of Marx’s quote “from each according to his ability to each according to his needs.”

“Democratic” socialist Bernie Sanders ran on redistributionist policies and class warfare rhetoric….

Ironically, the fact that communism has never taken root in America is likely a major cause of current increasing comfort with and interest in some of its tenets….

On this 100th anniversary of the October Revolution, it is time for all of us to remind ourselves and others of the ideals that define America — individual liberty, the Constitution, rule of law, and God-given freedom…. (Excerpt from Erich Reimer’s article in the Washington Times, The tragic Bolshevik legacy, 100 years on.)