The 20th Century was probably the bloodiest century in the history of mankind so far. The world wars probably claimed over 50 to 60 million people alone, with civilians and military casualties. But, by far, the biggest killer of them all was communism.

Globally, estimates of the number of “wrongful deaths” by communism range from between 100 and 200 million people, most of them under Stalin and Mao. By strange coincidence, I’m reading the biography on Mao right now (I’ll get to Stalin later), and a more disgusting, perverted and terrifying person I have never met before in my entire life.

The picture that emerges is of a man who is capable of coldly murdering millions upon millions of people, when it suits his particular interests, to gain power. Arguably, he is together with Stalin and Hitler one of the greatest mass murderers of human history. The stories about Mao are so disgusting that I can only read one or two chapters, and then I have to put it away and do something else. (One of Mao’s poems: “Look when we kill your evil landlords today. / Aren’t you afraid? / Knife after knife cutting through flesh.”)

In close relation, the picture that emerges of communism is one of the most deceptive, ruthless and violent political doctrines ever. The orders from Comintern, the Russian political organization for spreading communism around the world, were “Burn, burn, burn! Kill, kill, kill!”… “kill every one of the class enemies and burn and destroy their homes”… their recommendations taking the form of “align with other radical organizations, use and exploit them, and when finished liquidate them all”…

I sometimes wonder why I can’t forget about the whole thing, lay down the books I read and read about flowers and other fluffy stuff instead. But then I realize that there are hundreds of millions of people throughout the last century that were massacred, murdered, tortured in every way possible. I was not part of that; I was never torn from my bed in the middle of the night by KGB or Securitate; I was never sawed to pieces with long knives by Mao or his men; I won’t have to freeze to death or starve in a communist labor camp. But countless others did.

I imagine this great crowd of a hundred million people then looking at me and saying “You don’t have to go through what we went through. We’re not asking you to do that. But can you at least read about it?” Is it really too much to ask, to at least read about them? To know what happened? To remember all those who perished under the heavy hand of “political idealism”?

Some people believe that people don’t really die as long as you remember them. This is the very thing that haunts me: One hundred million people, looking at me, and voicelessly forming these words:

“Remember us.”