The worldwide socialist project killed something like 100 million people over the course of the 20th century. But not all of its victims are dead.
The worldwide socialist project killed something like 100 million people over the course of the 20th century. But not all of its victims are dead.
E arlier this month, one ghastly chapter in a particularly ghastly story came to a kind of a conclusion as the Czech government agreed to make restitution to thousands of women, mostly members of the Roma minority, who were subjected to coerced sterilization by the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.
The socialist strongmen of the 20th century differed in important ways from their progressive admirers in the United States and the rest of the free world, but they had some fundamental things in common: “Central planning” was never an idea that was limited to economic life, and the planned in “Planned Parenthood” is very much the planned from “planned economy,” meaning that the “planning” involved was to be at the social scale rather than merely at the family scale.
Eugenics and population control were obsessions of central planners from Moscow to Washington to Beijing, and, to some extent, they still are. Deng Xiaoping gave China its “one-child policy,” which Chinese leaders are today desperately trying to reverse as a declining birth rate pulls the country toward economic and military decline. Russian ideologues linked eugenics to the creation of the “New Soviet Man.” The geneticist J. B. S. Haldane, one of the founders of modern evolutionary science, was also a committed Marxist who argued in the pages of the Daily Worker that “the dogma of human equality is no part of Communism,” and insisted that dealing with “innate human inequality” would be the real “test of the devotion of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to science.”
(The main brake on eugenic excess in the Soviet Union was, of all things, Stalinism, which objected on ideological grounds to “biologizing” social issues.)
In socialist Czechoslovakia, doctors bribed those the state considered undesirable into accepting sterilization, misled them into believing that it was medically necessary, or simply performed the operation without women’s consent during other medical procedures, typically caesarian sections. Plus ça change: Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger was a great enthusiast for sterilization, and, to this day, the organization markets sterilization to women on the grounds that it — and this is a direct quotation — “can even make your sex life better.”
Just as we know from colonial-era literature that even slaveholders such as Thomas Jefferson understood the intrinsic evil of that practice, we know from Czech records that many of those living under socialism saw the sterilization campaign for what it was: a prologue to genocide. The dissident group Charter 77, whose leaders included Václav Havel, denounced this genocidal work in plain terms at the time.
The program was supposed to have come to an end with the fall of the Soviet Union, but, in reality, it continued sporadically for years afterward. Earlier this year, a Vice report charged that it is still going on. Again calling to mind the case of American slavery, this is an example of how a great evil can deform a society in ways that last for years, even generations, after the formal abolition of that evil and the legal dissolution of the institutions that carried it out. It is a superstition of democracy that to change the law is to change the world.
In the understanding of its adherents, socialism wasn’t just an ideology — it was science. “The science of the history of society, despite all the complexity of the phenomena of social life, can become as precise a science as, let us say, biology, and capable of making use of the laws of development of society for practical purposes,” Joseph Stalin wrote in 1938. “Hence, the party of the proletariat should not guide itself in its practical activity by casual motives, but by the laws of development of society, and by practical deductions from these laws. Hence, socialism is converted from a dream of a better future for humanity into a science.”
Science is an eager enough handmaiden to power, as Stalin knew. In his particular socialist paradise, dissent was medicalized and dissidents locked up in insane asylums where there was no practical distinction between therapy and torture. (More often, they were shipped off to the camps or simply shot in the head in one of Lavrentiy Beria’s dungeons.) Sterilization and other instruments of population control and eugenics have traditionally been directed at political dissidents and indigestible minorities such as the Uyghurs in China and immigrants in the United States. Apparently, many of the doctors who carried out the Czech sterilizations did so having been informed that it was the medically desirable, or at least the standard, thing to do after the birth of a second child.
At its most influential, eugenics shone with the prestige of science and commanded the loyalty of the cream of the Western intellectual world, from Sir Francis Galton to H. G. Wells to George Bernard Shaw. Malthusian cranks and fanatics such as Paul R. Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, remain fashionable in progressive intellectual circles today, and “overpopulation” remains a hot topic even as much of the world prepares to grapple with the challenges of population decline.
“I have seen the future, and it works!” declared the progressive journalist Lincoln Steffens upon returning from the Soviet Union. But those who lived under that “scientific” materialism saw things differently. The worldwide socialist enterprise killed something like 100 million people over the course of the 20th century, from the gulags and the Holodomor to the tens of millions who died in the Great Leap Forward. But not all of its victims were murdered. Some were only scarred, tortured, subjected to medical experimentation, exiled, or driven to suicide or another death of despair. Many of the women forcibly sterilized by the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic have died by now, of course, but there are survivors. They’ll be compensated with 11,000 euros each, if you were wondering about the price of being gutted on the way to utopia.