Yes, it’s May Day. Remember the fallen. [updated]

[UPDATE: Ilya Somin argues May 1 should be proclaimed internationally as a Victims of Communism Day. Discuss.]

“When, at the age of twelve, at the time of the Russian revolution, I first heard the
Communist principle that Man must exist for the sake of the State, I perceived that
this was the essential issue, that this principle was evil, and that it could lead to
nothing but evil, regardless of any methods, details, decrees, policies, promises
and pious platitudes. This was the reason for my opposition to Communism then—
and it is my reason now. I am still a little astonished, at times, that too many [adults]
do not understand the nature of the fight against Communism as clearly as I
understood it at the age of twelve: they continue to believe that only Communist
methods are evil, while Communist ideals are noble. All the victories of Communism
since the year 1917 are due to that particular belief among the men who are still free.”
- Ayn Rand, in the Foreword to her novel We the Living

Back in pagan times, May Day was a time for barely-dressed young maidens to dance around a 40-foot phallus, celebrating fertility and the dawn of spring. At least that was the way that I remember it.

In the last century or so, it’s become instead a day to commemorate a political ideology responsible for more than 100 million murders—a day when communists used to to announce their moral superiority to the world with day-long march pasts of tanks, guns and nuclear missiles. These days, now that their ideology has been exposed as bankrupt, they just dress up in black and head downtown to break retailers’ windows.

Those who take the deadheaded apathy of today's communists for granted should however use May Day as a day to commemorate the 110,000,000 people it murdered, and the hundreds of millions more it enslaved.

Everybody should know as much about communism as they know about flu viruses and lethal bacteria, and for the same reason: Communism is a killer. A Red Plague.

Isn’t it fortunate that full-blown communism now only exists in Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, and the bedrooms of Martyn Bradbury’s friends.

To remind yourself of the size of the communist tragedy, begin by reading The Red Plague by R.J. Rummel.

And add these short pieces to your May Day reading. (Hey, send the links to dear old Lenin-loving Robyn Malcolm.)

• What if Lenin's Stroke Came Five Years Sooner? by Bryan Caplan at Econlog
• Torture and Tyranny: The Real Che by Randall McElroy
• Victims of Communism Day by Ilya Somin at The Volokh Conspiracy
• The Conspiracy of Silence Around the Romance of Evil
  by Michael Strong at Let A Thousand Nations Bloom
• Down and Out in the Hermit Kingdom by Jonathan Wilde, at Distributed Republic
• "Joyful sounds mean nought to the traitor" by Jonathan Wilde, at Distributed Republic
• The Road To Hell Was Paved With Bad Intentions by Bryan Caplan
• Cambodian Year Zero by Jonathan Wilde
• Hoeryong: Peering Inside a Death Camp by Rainbough Phillips
• Trofim Lysenko: Ideology, Power, and the Destruction of Science by Matt McIntosh
• Ecocide: The Murder of the Aral Sea by Brian Doss
• Remembrance by Jonathan Wilde

[Links from the old Catallarchy blog, which used to host a May Day link-fest every year as part of its annual May Day commemorations.