Socialism’s Glossy Makeover Hides a Graveyard oann.com

Socialism’s Glossy Makeover Hides a Graveyard

Socialism’s Glossy Makeover Hides a Graveyard

Commentary by: Carrie Sheffield  
Monday, October 19, 2026

Some ideologies have earned their place in history’s graveyard, and dressing them up in artsy, lifestyle branding–as Newsweek recently did with their new magazine cover–insults their victims. 

Communism has never been fully repudiated by left-wing “intelligentsia,” even though it has killed more people than any other ideology in human history.

The Black Book of Communism, published in English by Harvard University Press, tallied between 85 million and 100 million deaths in the 20th century. That included roughly 65 million in Mao’s China and 20 million in the Soviet Union, with millions more in Cambodia, North Korea, Vietnam and beyond. 

They died in engineered famines and in slave-labor camps, buried in nameless, mass graves. Historians still argue over the exact count. No serious one argues that these regimes weren’t murderous.

We don’t need to look back to the last century, either. Venezuela sits on the world’s largest proven oil reserves, and after two decades of “21st-century socialism,” nearly 7.9 million people have fled the country. People don’t desert utopia if it’s actually working.