By Bela “Bill” Suhayda
All my life I’ve told people of the hell communism is. I’ve even written a book about it entitled “From Tyranny to Liberty.” I’ve exchanged books with Cubans and Eastern Europeans who have experienced what I’ve experienced. We all tell similar stories. There is a common thread concerning the evils we all encountered and wrote about.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were the engineers of modern day Communism.
They wrote of a Utopian world without classes in which the individual is subservient to the group. No one owns anything. It is the abolition of private ownership, which goes hand in hand with the elimination of the individual person and individual rights.
Charles Coddington gave us his musings about communism, telling us the fairy tale version of the “glorious” system in which the State nationalizes everything so no one has or makes any more money than anyone else. There are no classes and everyone has equity living in “perfect” harmony.
Coddington has no experience living in a country in which these ideas have been enforced, although there are plenty of examples he could use to learn from. But he refuses to live in reality. He chooses to live in books. So what Karl Marx and Coddington have is a social theory without implementation. If we had things their way, we would live in the hell my family escaped. Miguel Faria, Laszlo Oroszlany, and John Kadar, are authors I’ve traded books with. We have commonality in experience of what happens when individuality doesn’t exist and the state is all powerful.
After communism died in Germany, the Berlin Wall came down, and after the Iron Curtain was no longer, people could finally visit countries that had been shut away from the rest of the world for close to a half century. So I started visiting with my cousin Gyula almost on a yearly basis in Budapest Hungary.
On one of these visits, Gyula told me a story of the Soviet style communist government that took power and how they announced their utopian idea that the state owns everything. The government first demanded the people notify authorities of anyone who spoke or acted against the new order and it’s mandates. They offered a bounty to those who turned in their fellow countryman.
It fractured the country. In one moment of time, every person in the country became a potential spy who could turn in anyone whose conduct or speech was against the state. The paranoia spread, fracturing communities, relationships, and families. The mandate assured peoples fear of going against laws and mandates set forth by government or conspiracies against government. The regime had already implemented their confiscations of businesses, banks, farms, private property including homes, farm machinery, and even harvests. Everyone was equally poor!
A new mandate came down concerning agricultural products and the limitations placed on their consumption. This meant what people used for food, even if they had produced it, belonged to the (State) collective. The mandate stated no live stock could be slaughtered for any reason including consumption as food without permission of the local magistrate. Gyula’s neighbor didn’t want to risk the local mayor of the village denying his request to slaughter his pig for food for his family…so he slaughtered the pig without permission. Neighbors must have heard the squealing of the animal during the slaughter because the (AVH) secret police, came to the man’s door, dragged him out of his house, and hung him from the nearest telephone pole. They left his body dangle from the rope for a week before taking him down. They wanted to set an example, warning the family and neighborhood only the AVH could take him down.
Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely! The AVH took the pig!