Anyone who doubts the monstrosity of communism need only consider the death toll racked up by Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong during the first half of the previous century. These two butchers made Adolph Hitler, a genocidal madman in his own right, look like a mere piker — and they did so while murdering almost exclusively their own people.

We mention this because China wants to rule the world and because its thuggish leaders, from Xi Jinping on down, know that in order to do so, they must first supplant the United States from atop its geopolitical perch.

On this front, we’ve helped the ChiComs immensely by “electing” Joe Biden. Nothing makes one’s rivals look stronger and more serious than a weak, irresolute, and downright embarrassing leader, and Biden, having first been co-opted, is now cooperating.

Having thus made the American president look bad, China has also resolved to make the American people look bad — to hook our consumerist selves on its cheap goods and to hook our young people on that infamous ChiCom spyware and mind poison otherwise known as TikTok.

But beyond TikTok, there’s another American addiction that the Chinese have been spearheading, and they’ve done so with deadly efficiency. I’m speaking about the fentanyl epidemic that’s ravaging our country to the funeral dirge of some 70,000 dead Americans every year.

According to the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, China has been subsidizing the manufacture and export “of illicit fentanyl precursor chemicals and other synthetic narcotics through tax rebates and other means.” Translation: China is intentionally poisoning us with fentanyl.

Former Trump Attorney General William Barr agrees, asserting that the ChiComs are knee-deep in the fentanyl crisis: “The [People’s Republic of China] is the source of the fentanyl that is slaughtering Americans,” he said. “China produces nearly all the illicit fentanyl precursors used and the fentanyl introduced into the United States. These are the indispensable ingredients that drive the fentanyl trade.”

Barr made the remarks while testifying on Tuesday before the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party on a 64-page report titled “The CCP’s Role In The Fentanyl Crisis.”

“There is no practical alternative for anywhere near the volume of precursors necessary to fuel this trade,” Barr continued. “Simply put, without China’s production and export of fentanyl and fentanyl precursors, there would be no fentanyl crisis in the United States and the mass slaughter would effectively stop.”

As Barr told Fox News earlier this week: “It’s clear that they’re not acting in good faith. And when they do something, it’s window dressing. They’re knee-deep in this. They’re active. … They’re driving the trafficking. They’re incentivizing the trafficking.”

As The Washington Times reports: “Key findings from the investigation reveal that the Chinese government provided grants and awards to companies ‘openly trafficking illicit fentanyl materials and other synthetic narcotics,’ the report states. ‘There are even examples of some of these companies enjoying site visits from provincial PRC government officials who complimented them for their impact on the provincial economy,’ the report said.”

Asked what the ChiComs’ angle is in all this, Barr says: “I think a big part of it is strategic. That is, they believe it weakens the United States. It tells the world that we’re a decadent society and a disciplined society like China’s is the future, and it distracts us. And so, if it’s bad for us, it’s good for them.”

Journalist Peter Schweizer also knows a thing or two about the ChiCom threat. His new book, Blood Money: Why the Powerful Turn a Blind Eye While China Kills Americans, makes clear that while the U.S. might think it’s in a cold war with China, China is engaged at a much higher temperature. As Schweizer told podcaster Andrew Klavan, there’s a term that describes the ChiComs’ behavior toward the U.S. — disintegration warfare — which is based on Sun Tzu’s preferred strategy of defeating one’s enemy without actually fighting him in kinetic fashion — indeed, without actually firing a shot. They’re fighting us with fentanyl, which is now the leading cause of death of Americans under age 45.

And, as Schweizer notes, by enlisting the Mexican cartels as junior partners and doing their trafficking dirty work, the ChiComs are committing what they call murder with a borrowed knife.

That’s the Communist Chinese: plunging a borrowed blade between our nation’s ribs.

Barr isn’t optimistic about any lessening of the crisis, at least not from the Biden administration, whose obeisance to the ChiComs knows no bounds. He says the Chinese and the Mexicans are giving us “happy talk” and that they’re both complicit.

Maybe it’s time for a tougher foreign policy — one that puts the lives and interests of American citizens before the sensitivities of our greatest geopolitical foe. If only our nation had a president who was tougher on China than our current one.

“The key point here is that the PRC and the CCP have the capacity to shut this down,” said Barr. “This is not taking place in the rain forests of Burma. This is taking place among a manageable number of companies in industrial parks in a modern surveillance state. The Chinese can push a button with a keystroke, find somebody in one of their cities within less than a minute, know exactly where they are. They know what’s on the internet. There’s no question they’re aware of what’s happening.”

Barr also said that although Joe Biden met with Xi Jinping, we haven’t seen any lessening of China’s fentanyl flood into the U.S.

Here, we have to wonder: Would it not be an act of war for a foreign country to actively conspire to poison American citizens by the bushel? Asking for a dead friend.

And given all this, why, as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in “Full Metal Jacket” might’ve asked, are we not stomping China’s guts out?

It’s a great question.