A quick check of the history of the blog shows that I've really devoted very little space to covering May 1st and the last one I can find is actually from the "Occupy Whatever" protests in 2012. Things are different this year, since we seem to be well into an attempt at communist takeover of the country.
For all of my adult life, whenever people feel comfortable talking about such things, there's an alarming tendency for people who have grown up in the freedom and plenty of the 20th century United States to advocate communism. If any of us would say something like, "but that never works; it has been tried over and over and it has never worked even once," that's when they give the most sorry cliche' answer in all of history and say whatever country we bring up, "just never did it right," "that's not real communism," or something just as lame. These days, if the question comes up I say, "so what makes you think these people are the smartest and best in all of human history that can make something work that nobody else ever could?" I've yet to get an answer to that. They just leave.
It's hard for me to understand that argument because I grew up Miami in the '60s. My brother (older than me) had a close friend whose family escaped Cuba just before the communists came to power and began their genocide of the Cuban people. Since we were all within a few years of each other, I knew this friend as well. His friend's father was an architect, so while he had to start over in Miami, he didn't have to bring lots of things with him. As the years went by, I had several friends who were Cuban refugees and had lots of exposures to the stories of how bad it was there. Of course, the news regularly carried stories of refugees putting together anything that might float long enough to make it to the US to escape the tyranny.
For the life of me, I
can't understand why the idea is attractive to anyone but psychopaths
and the deliberately blind today. In a way, it's easier to forgive the first ones, the 1917 Russians and maybe the National
Socialists (Nazis); after all, they had no history to look at. The people who let
it happen didn't know that there would be nearly 50 million of their
neighbors killed by the government. But even by the '60s, when Bill
Ayers, Bernadine Dorn,
and the Weather Underground wanted to force communism in place here,
they not only knew it would lead to millions killed, they apparently
wanted to do the killing. An FBI informant told of them openly talking about "eliminating" 25 million
hard core Americans who wouldn't go along with their little utopia. I
guess the gulag's not such a bad place as long as you're the one doing
the killing.
Today, with communism blamed for the death of over 100 million people, it's harder to understand how it could be so attractive. In contrast to the guys who want to start the killings, today's useful
idiots seem unaware of any history or the reality of communism -
it's all magic unicorn farts and rainbows. Famines and death camps?
Not so much. It's as if they don't know the first things about Venezuela, Cuba, or China, and their horrific treatment of people.
Originally lifted from The Smallest Minority, a decade ago.
There are none so blind as those who will not see.
They don't teach about the death toll of communism in schools. Also communists these days are typically losers without any prospects for success in our current society. Therefore tearing everything down and murdering the successful is a feature, not a bug. The hypothetical utopia that would come with "real" communism is just a lie they tell people to distract from their real endgame, which is mass murder.
ReplyDeleteThroughout history, communism has been shown to kill.
ReplyDeleteRemember, our pilgrim fore-fathers tried full communism and it was one of the reasons they went from 120ish including crew to 53 including crew, in one winter.
Yes, they arrived late season, but they were healthy when they landed. Not so much soon after as communism reared its ugly head.
Just look at the number of people that the US administrations killed US citizens during our two big socialist administrations. That would be Woodrow Wilson and FDR. Whose administrations attacked minorities and people with mental and physical illnesses.
My Spanish teacher in Junior College was a refugee from Havana. She also taught my sister, who went to the same school six years earlier. She'd get quite upset at the campus "protesters", and said they had NO idea what they were asking for.
ReplyDeleteThe seed of communism in the leaders is lust for power. The seed in the followers is self-hatred.
ReplyDeleteHumans are not an instinctual 'blank slate', able to be trained into any social arrangement such as New Socialist Man. Rather, the genetically coded human political instincts are to organize in the communism of a monkey troop of up to 150 extended family members. But increase that group size 300E6/150 = 2 million times, and the tuning constants of the heuristics are all wrong; the head monkey now has far too much power.
ReplyDeleteIf you reject communism, you must do it intellectually while overriding your instincts. Most people won't/can't do that without strong evidence such as friends who were survivors. This is why I think 'conversion to libertarianism through education' rarely works, and works mostly on (my speculated number) the 1/100 of humans who are born freethinkers. You cannot train most humans to be New Libertarian Man. Concentration camp survivor Jews can't even convince the rest of the Jews that communism is bad, despite lots of good work publicizing the horrors. Communism is extremely difficult to stop believing in.
Two quotes:
ReplyDelete"You can't argue a man out of a position, using facts and logic, that he didn't use facts and logic to get into in the first place."
"A man who isn't a socialist at 20 has no heart. A man who's still a socialist at 30 has no brain."