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Based on a rough mishmash of multiple historical estimates, 100 million is the number of people that communist regimes murdered in the 20th century. The Black Book of Communism claims a body count of around 95 million. R. J. Rummel, an expert in “democide” and “deka-megamurderers” (his neologism for those who kill in the tens of millions) suggests the total may be as high as 150 million. Estimates vary widely, but no historian worth their britches would say it’s under 50 million. Whatever way you slice the omelette, that’s a whole lotta broken eggs.

So the next time some horn-rimmed slack-shouldered left-wristed snark-monster dribbles that they represent the compassionate, caring, and pro-human side of the political spectrum, remind them of all the inhumanities perpetrated by the blind adherents to Mr. Marx’s Gospel of Universal Love.

Remind the world’s naïvely utopian “fellow travelers” of how Marx endorsed “revolutionary terror” and Engels gleefully foresaw “the disappearance from the face of the Earth…of entire reactionary peoples” and how Lenin called for “ruthless extermination” of “ideological enemies” and how Trotsky said “We have to run a hot iron down the spine of the Ukrainian kulaks” and how Mao said “Deaths have benefits” because “They fertilize the ground.”

Remind them of the Soviet Union’s unsung horrors—the emaciated children of the Holodomor and the mass murder in Katyn Forest, and the million or so executions during the Great Terror and gulag workers forced to eat their own feces and their skulls squeezed with iron rings and NKVD officers good-naturedly referring to their practice of shooting prisoners in the back of the head and watching their blood swirl down the drain as “wet work.” Remind them of the hundreds of thousands of clergy beaten and tortured to death, crucified on gates and left in the cold to freeze into ice columns. Refresh their recollection about the stranglings and the machine-gunnings and the interrogations and the mental torture and the electric shocks and the tens of millions ground into oblivion in the state psychiatric hospitals and Siberian slave camps. Remind them of the engineered mass famines where peasants reverted to cannibalizing their own infants.

Remind them of the 20-40 million Chinese peasants who starved to death when Mao stubbed his toe during his Great Leap Forward, of the Cultural Revolution where “enemies” were paraded, taunted, and thrashed to death in public. Of Red Guardsmen randomly selecting “black elements” to pounce upon and club to a paste. Of “enemies of the people” being mobbed, set ablaze, and bludgeoned with cold steel shovels. Of “class enemies” having their organs cut from their bodies while they were still alive, then eaten in psychotic “human flesh banquets” of class-war triumphalism. Of the estimated 20 million who perished in the forced-labor camps of Chairman Mao’s workers’ paradise. Of re-education, forced confessions, and threats—all in the name of vague humanitarianism and eternally unverifiable delusions of socially enforceable equality.

NEVER let them forget.

It’s said that both Hitler and Stalin remarked on how easily ex-members from the other side converted to and assimilated into their respective new sides. Sounds about right to me.

“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” also sounds swell—that is, if you’re disabled and needy. Otherwise, it sounds unfair. Utopian schemes are by definition unrealistic and unworkable. State-sanctioned egalitarianism will always lurch into totalitarianism because it’s based on a fundamentally flawed idée fixe—the nursery-school notion that everyone is equal. In its infantile insistence that not only is life unfair, but that something can be done about it, communists threw a tantrum that led to historically unprecedented bloodshed. They destroyed 100 million square pegs by vainly trying to squeeze them into round holes.

The atheistic folk religion of Marxism inevitably became totalitarian in practice because it is unflinchingly scriptural in its assumptions. It postured itself as the scientific culmination of the historical process, then, in the name of this higher calling, it murdered anything that got in the way. This movement of “the people” wound up killing a hundred million of them.

So if you insist on waving your little red flag, don’t forget why it’s red.