We stand, now, today, at a historic crossroads. The Democrat Party, here in the United States, is being co-opted (honestly, has been co-opted) by the far left, including the so-called "Democratic Socialists," who even have their own organization within and without the Democrat Party — the Democratic Socialists of America. Young people here in the United States are seeing socialism in a more favorable light than they have in decades past, and this 2026 midterm election and the 2028 election to come, where we will choose the next president, will set the course for American politics for a generation or more.
The left will keep pushing for socialism. Socialism has, however, born bitter fruit throughout history, everywhere it has been attempted. The results are all too similar: Mass arrests, work camps, "re-education," mass executions, starvation, and economic collapse. On the other hand, capitalism, while it isn't perfect — no system created by humans is — has lifted more people out of poverty and into prosperity, has created more wealth, and has resulted in more technological advance than any other system of economics and government.
In this series, we'll take a look at some of the more notorious events to rise out of socialist and communist systems, as a warning for this election season: It could happen here. It very well could happen here. In this installment, we'll have a look at the Holodomor.
The Holodomor was a man-made famine in what was then Soviet Ukraine, in 1932 and 1933. It was a small part of a much larger failure in Soviet agriculture, from 1931 to 1934, that resulted from Joseph Stalin's collectivization of Soviet agriculture, which resulted in catastrophic crop failures. This decision by Stalin was not based on any science; he was in fact listening to the fraud Trofim Lysenko, who was in (disastrous) charge of the Ukrainian All-Union Institute of Selection and Genetics in Odessa. Lysenko's work was scientifically unsound (that's something of an understatement). Stalin and the other Soviet leadership favored Lysenko not because he was competent — he wasn't — but because he was ideologically reliable.
Stalin had decided to collectivize Soviet agriculture in 1929. Farms and farmland in private hands were seized. The more successful (and wealthier) farmers, who the Soviet Union called kulaks, were deported, often to labor camps, along with any other peasants who resisted. Soviet agriculture was reduced to a collectivist industrial enterprise. Incentives were erased. There was no hope of gain, and therefore, no reason to strive; a better old bit of dark humor from the Soviet Union in those days was "they pretend to pay us, so we pretend to work."
Remember this whenever a Democrat politician here and now advocates for collective healthcare — or collective anything.
Ukraine, in 1932, wasn't having any. Soviet "republic" they may have been, but the Ukrainian people protested these land seizures and Lysenko's incompetence. A series of peasant revolts started. Stalin was worried about losing Ukraine — so he cracked down. Farms, villages and cities were blacklisted. Food was confiscated, or just not delivered. Peasants were forbidden to travel, even to seek food. More and more food was confiscated and sent elsewhere in the Soviet Union.
Things came to a head in 1933. Death rates were at their peak. As many as 5 million people died of hunger across the USSR, about 3.9 million of which were in Ukraine alone. Things were bad enough that, when the Wehrmacht stormed into Ukraine in 1941, they were initially greeted by many as liberators, until the SS showed up. And in the Soviet Union, the massive famine and horrifying death count of the Holodomor were forbidden topics, even after the war, even up to very nearly the end of the USSR, until in 1986, the Soviet government first admitted to it in a statement about the Chernobyl event.
Mass starvation. Death on a horrible scale. And this wasn't the worst such event to take place under a socialist or communist government. Not by a long shot.
Think it can't happen here? We already have seen, just in the last few days, a sitting United States Senator, Elissa Slotkin, stating openly that young Republicans should be targeted with baseless lawfare cases, to attempt to ruin them, to intimidate them, to prevent them from seeking to be involved in government. We have a Mayor Zohran Mamdani in New York, whose "free" grocery store scheme threatens to bankrupt a whole new generation of "kulaks," namely, the deli owners, bodega owners, and small grocery stores that supply so many of New York's food needs. We have an increasingly angry and even violent movement from younger members of the left.
It could happen here. It could very well happen here. And if we aren't diligent, it will happen here. Many on the left would like nothing more, and we should believe them when they say so.
These are the fruits of socialism and communism. This is the precipice we may be on the edge of. This is history. And this is what we must, at all cost, vote to prevent happening here.
