Have you heard references to the “failed policies of the past”? I always wonder if they think, as it seems, that freedom is the failed policy of the past. It seems that many in our culture want to replace freedom with more governmental control of all of life.
Ironically, that’s the failed policy of the past.
John Lewis Gaddis recounts how the Communists in China decided to bring “hope and change” to their people on the basis of what “science” called them to do as they pursued their “progressive” policies as “history marched forward” to a better future for the people:
Then [Mao] decided on something even more dramatic: he would merge the industrialization and collectivization campaigns by transforming peasants into proletarians after all, but by means that went beyond anything Stalin had ever considered. He ordered farmers throughout China to abandon their crops, build furnaces in their backyards, throw in their own furniture as fuel, melt down their agricultural implements–and produce steel.
The result of Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” was the greatest single human calamity of the 20th century. Stalin’s campaign to collectivize agriculture had caused between 5 and 7 million people to starve to death during the 1930s. Mao now sextupled that record, producing a famine that between 1958 and 1961 took the lives of over 30 million people, by far the worst on record anywhere ever.
–John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History, 111–12.
Freedom is always better than governmental control. Patrick Henry said, “Give me liberty or give me death.”
The 20th century is a sad tale of Central Planners who took freedom from their people and gave them death.
What they say is true: those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it.