We spent the entire last century rightly obsessed with the horrors of fascism and nazism, but whenever anyone brings up the actual body count, there is this massive intellectual blind spot in public discourse. Nazism slaughtered around 17 to 20 million people in a few short years and dragged the world into a catastrophic war. It is pure unadulterated evil. But right alongside it, communist and state-collectivist regimes quietly racked up between 60 and 100 million dead bodies while grinding entire nations into absolute dirt. Mao's China engineered the single biggest man-made famine in human history during the Great Leap Forward, wiping out 30 to 45 million people through sheer starvation and forced labor. Stalin's USSR intentionally starved millions of Ukrainians in the Holodomor and filled the Gulags with anyone who looked at a commissar the wrong way. Pol Pot's Cambodia executed or worked to death roughly a quarter of its own population in four years simply because they wanted a society without currency. Fast forward to modern times, and Venezuela managed to take the country with the largest oil reserves on the planet and turn it into a place where citizens literally lost double-digit body weight from hunger and millions fled on foot. The crazy part is the branding. Nazism advertised its genocidal hatred right on the packaging, so society instantly recognized the poison. Communism wrapped itself in a pretty smile, preached equality and sharing, and then slaughtered millions in the basement. Whenever the supermarkets run dry, the money becomes worthless, and the firing squads come out, modern leftists just cross their arms and say that wasn't real socialism. Every single time a government tries the playbook of abolishing private enterprise, seizing all capital, and handing total control to an omnipotent state, it produces the exact same result. It never fails. A hundred percent failure rate, mountains of corpses, and citizens risking their lives on makeshift rafts just to escape to capitalist countries. Yet you still see people in university halls and online forums wearing Che Guevara t-shirts and advocating for total wealth confiscation like we don't have a century of empirical carnage staring us in the face. The day society stops treating communism as a noble failed experiment and starts calling it what it actually is, which is history's most murderous ideology, we might actually make some intellectual progress

From Empire to Inequality: Who Pays the Price?
Britain’s imperial past didn’t simply disappear into the history books. The questions of who owns the land, who controls the wealth, who makes the decisions and who pays the price are still very much with us.
Today, we see growing inequality, a housing crisis, poverty, people with disabilities fighting for support, and institutions that too often fail those who need them most. Meanwhile, wealth and power remain concentrated in the hands of those best placed to protect their own interests.
Are we really building a fairer society, or are the same old power structures simply taking different forms?
I’ve explored these connections in my latest article. Here’s the link if you’d like to read more:
https://heidi575513.substack.com/p/from-empire-to-inequality-who-pays?r=4x1epb&utm_medium=ios