Mao Zedong became Chairman of the newly created People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949. There was joy, ecstasy, rejoicing, and dancing in the streets as millions upon millions of happy Chinese people shed countless tears of bliss, thinking this man would bring them a golden age of happiness, freedom, and prosperity. What a jubilant event in the history of China.
Or, so countless people thought at the time.
They never saw what was really coming.
Mao Zedong was the supreme mass murderer in human history. In his 27 years as Chairman of the socialist/communist regime in China, he was estimated to have killed between 60-70 million innocent people in his terrors, the “Great Leap Forward,” “Cultural Revolution,” and other oppressive, torturous atrocities. In 1949, the Chinese people never saw the death that was coming in the next 27 years.
The people of Russia suffered the same fate. Vladimir Lenin began the Russian Revolution in 1917, and after a bloody civil war, the Union of Soviet SOCIALIST Republics was founded. Lenin, after murdering countless numbers, died at a relatively young age, and Joseph Stalin soon became dictator (and killed nearly all of Lenin’s compadres who helped start, found, and build the revolution). In his 25 or more years of despotism, Stalin made it to number two as the greatest mass murderer in history. His total may have reached over 50 million innocent deaths. Nobody will ever know for sure how many people Mao and Stalin really killed. All in the name of “socialism,” Marxism, atheism, “utopia.”
When Lenin came to power, the people in Russia who supported socialism had no idea what was going to happen in the next 30 or more years. They never saw the millions of deaths, and in their joy to support the new regime, would no doubt never have believed such mass socialist slaughter was possible. But it happened.
“We are socialists! We are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system…” So said Adolf Hitler. We know what happened in Nazi Germany. What German would have believed that their “Führer” was capable of such horrors, that German people would tolerate such barbarities from their socialist government?
They were wrong. They were naïve. They never saw it coming. And countless millions died in the 12 years of Hitler’s rule.
Those are just three among many examples in the last 100 years, but we can trace this “never saw it coming” mentality back much farther in history than the past century. One of the more frightening examples is found in the book of Jeremiah in the Old Testament. Frightening because the people it happened to should have known better.
In Jeremiah 3, Jeremiah discussed the destruction and Assyrian captivity of the Northern Kingdom of Israel approximately 100 years before. They had been warned (by Hosea, Amos, etc.), but the people of the North didn’t believe their prophets and…never saw their captivity coming. God punished them for their grievous sins. "And… her treacherous sister Judah saw it" (verse seven).
Jeremiah began his prophetic work under the magnificent king Josiah (c. 640-609 B.C.). The people of Judah were in good hands; surely they would follow the Lord. But they didn’t learn, and even under the great Josiah, Judah “'has not turned to Me with her whole heart, but in pretense,’ says the Lord” (v. 10). And thus, “Backsliding Israel has shown herself more righteous than treacherous Judah” (v. 11). Judah saw what God did to Samaria, and then followed the exact same course, thus being even more blameworthy. Even the best king (or President) can’t save a rotten, decadent people.
Judah never would have believed the coming destruction of their temple (586 B.C.) and resultant Babylonian captivity. They didn’t learn from history and thus never saw their own future death and destruction arising.
The Northern and Southern Kingdoms of Israel weren’t atheistic, Leftist, socialist Marxists, but they were blind to their own failings, which led to catastrophe. Americans have three major examples — and one could add Cuba, North Korea, Cambodia, Vietnam, and other socialist hellholes to the list with innumerable more murders. But let’s just center on the most numerous — Mao, Lenin/Stalin, and Hitler. This is what Leftist socialism produced: mass murder, torture, oppression, slavery, poverty, incalculable misery for their own people and others. And the people of those countries, in the beginning, never saw it coming. Surely, had they known, they would never have followed the path they did. Right?
Well, let’s remember how Judah answered that question. They saw…but didn’t believe it could happen to them.
The Democrat Party in America has become a socialist party. Some of them loudly proclaim their socialism and glory in it. They either are totally ignorant of what socialism did to other countries in the 20th century (and is still doing in the 21st) or somehow, someway, for some reason believe America can avoid the fate Mao, Stalin, and Hitler brought upon their people. “Oh, it won’t happen in America!” No doubt the people of Russia, Germany, China, Cambodia, Cuba, et al, would have said the exact same thing before it happened to them. But it did happen. It’s what Leftist, atheistic, Marxist socialism did everywhere it went. Without one single exception.
And the people never saw it coming.
Why, why, why do Americans think it will be different here?
Judah, within 100 years of Samaria’s downfall and captivity, had learned nothing, and the same horrible fate befell them. Democrats, within 100 years of horrors in Russia, Germany, China, etc., are trying to drag America down the exact same path that led to hundreds of millions of deaths, with torture, oppression, poverty, and misery for countless millions more. The poor people of Russia, etc., never saw it coming.
And the naïve, godless Democrats don’t see it coming, either. Let’s pray that enough Americans do see it coming to stop it.
Check out my Substack: “Mark It Down! (mklewis929.substack.com), and “Mark It Down! Bible Substack” (mklbibless.substack.com). Both free. Read my great tales of the Old American West, available on Amazon and Kindle: Whitewater, River Bend, Return to River Bend, Allie’s Dilemma, and Kendrick and other stories. Follow me on “X”: @thailandmkl.
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