Something bothers me about the far left, beyond cancel culture, or more recently, political violence. It’s the quiet way ‘the wrong’ people get treated as if they don’t exist.
‘Unpersoned’ in effect. That will lead to “Well I can kill you, because you aren’t a person. It’s only murder if you kill a person.” It often has gone that way historically.
Blocking someone online or getting them fired for kicks is one thing. What’s stranger is when friends or family simply pretend you’re not there. A relative of mine (through marriage) is a typical far-left radical social-justice activist. He knows I disagree with his views, so I’m basically dead to him. When we’re in the same room, it’s like I’m invisible—he looks right through me, the way people ignored Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense. I’m not even a living person to him.
This isn’t new. In revolutionary communist systems, certain groups were systematically stripped of full human status. Once labeled class enemies, parasites, or “enemies of the people,” they no longer counted as moral persons. Killing them, starving them, or working them to death became acts of social cleanup. This happened in the Soviet Union, Mao’s China, and the Khmer Rouge’s Cambodia. Ideology first made the targets less than human; the state then treated them that way.
The idea came from class struggle. Wealthier peasants, intellectuals, and others weren’t just opponents—they were obstacles to the perfect future. Propaganda called them parasites, flies, swine, or trash so removing them felt like cleaning house, not murder.
In the Soviet Union under Stalin, better-off farmers were called kulaks (“fists”) and targeted for “liquidation as a class.” Activists were told they were parasites. One participant later said they used words like “kulak menace” so they wouldn’t have to see the people as human. Roughly two million were deported; tens of thousands were shot.
Stalin said: “In order to eliminate the kulaks as a class, it is necessary to openly break their spirit and resistance, and deprive them of the sources for further existence and development. The party’s current policy in the towns and villages marks a new procedure for eliminating the kulaks as a class.”
This fed into the Holodomor famine in Ukraine (1932–33), where the regime took grain and sealed borders, causing 3–5 million deaths. The “enemy of the people” label also covered the Great Purge and the Gulag camps, where over a million died from overwork, cold, and starvation. Family members lost jobs and rights; children inherited the stigma. Later dissidents were often declared insane and locked in psychiatric hospitals.
Mao’s China followed a similar path. During land reform and the Cultural Revolution, landlords, “rich peasants,” teachers, and anyone not enthusiastic enough faced “struggle sessions”—public beatings and humiliation. Victims wore signs, had their hair half-shaved, and were forced into painful positions. Red Guards beat them, sometimes to death. Nearly two million were killed and over 100 million persecuted. Many survivors went to re-education labor camps. Class labels passed to children, blocking education and jobs for life.
The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia (1975–79) went furthest. After taking the capital, they emptied the cities. City people became “new people,” treated as corrupt exploiters. Intellectuals, anyone with glasses, monks, and former officials were marked for death. A slogan said “to dig up the grass, dig up the roots”—kill entire families so no one seeks revenge. Between 1.7 and 2.2 million people (about a quarter of the population) died from execution, forced labor, starvation, and disease. “New people” got less food and harder work by design.
In each case, dehumanizing language let ordinary people participate without normal moral hesitation. Once a group was declared outside “the people,” they lost basic protections. Labels stuck and extended to relatives. The same ideology that promised liberation created conditions where large numbers of people could be treated as disposable.
The pattern is clear: defining some humans as not fully human removes the main internal brake on mass cruelty. The historical record shows this repeatedly under socialist and communist regimes. It remains relevant wherever political language sorts people into those who count and those who do not.
– BrandX