“There is no difference between communism and
socialism, except in the way of achieving the same ultimate goal: communism
proposes to enslave men by force, socialism by voting. It’s the same difference
between murder and suicide.” - Ayn Rand
The grocery store from the communist era is still standing. Photo credit: Ileana Johnson 2012 |
Membership and influence are growing because the New York based Communist Party USA’s rhetoric appeals to the lowest denominator, to those who are already on welfare, illegal aliens, and permanent residents coming from third world dictatorships, and union members who are controlled by communist leaders. A constant and highly successful propaganda is waged by the Democrat Party and progressive elites, using the communist slogans of “hope and change,” “forward,” “social justice,” “environmental justice,” “white-privilege,” and “income inequality.”
Communists appear so successful because Americans have a short collective memory, short attention span, and know, thanks to a socialist academia, very little of their own non-revisionist history, and even less world history. College graduates are hard pressed to answer correctly basic questions about history, geography, and government. Yet they know what the latest Hollywood celebrity ate for supper yesterday. The MSM, academia, and Hollywood are the main propaganda arm of mass indoctrination, comprised of “useful idiots,” a term coined and used by Stalin.
Saul Alinsky described in
his book, Rules for Radicals, the
eight levels of control necessary to create a socialist regime. Healthcare, welfare (food, housing,
income), and education must be
controlled by the state. Religion
must be made irrelevant by removing it from government and schools. Guns
must be confiscated in order to create a police state. Create as much poverty as possible. Poor people are
easier to control. Explode national debt
to unsustainable levels by out of control spending fueled by new and
suffocating taxes that create more poverty. Use escalating class warfare rhetoric to fuel the division between “rich” and “poor,”
causing discontent. Malcontent would then drive the welfare poor to rebel
against the “greedy rich” who “do not pay their fair share,” and to demand that
they be taxed more.
How did people get ahead
under the former communist Soviet-ruled Iron Curtain?
They became members of the
communist party and their sympathizers, and displayed their loyalty by copying
and emulating everything Marxists did. They made themselves useful by spying on
other people, on their own relatives, on their own immediate families, reporting
to the thought and economic police on their activities, and through loyal
nepotism.
How did people get ahead
in our former Constitutional Republic? Americans excelled through hard work,
long hours, study, sacrifices, risk-taking through entrepreneurship, and education.
Now they get ahead through crony
capitalism, nepotism, corruption, strict adherence to the Democrat Party
platform, race baiting, claiming faux discrimination, invoking the manufactured
and non-existent “white privilege,” using oppressed minority claims, lawsuits, socialist
and environmentalist brainwashing in public schools, and radicalism wrapped in
extreme feminism and homosexual rights.
Karl Marx wrote about
capitalism as a conflict between the wealthy factory owners (the capitalists)
and the proletariat (workers who had to toil for the capitalist in order to
survive). Marx, a leech himself, wrote that capitalists took advantage of the
proletariat. He attempted to explain that “as long as capitalism existed, the
misery of mankind would grow greater.”
To solve this problem, “workers would rise and start a revolution that
would bring comfort and control over their lives and jobs.” We know this took
place across the former Soviet-led communist countries with disastrous results –
the workers became much poorer, more miserable, more oppressed, living in a
totalitarian regime, while their communist handlers became richer by stealing “communal
property.”
The followers of Marx (a
bum supported financially by rich friends) split into two camps: the socialists
(those willing to reform capitalism) and the communists (those willing to
destroy capitalism). The “soft Marxists,” called in Russia “Mensheviks,”
preached for a slow pace to learning self-governing. The “hard Marxists,” Bolsheviks/communists
led by Vladimir Ilich Lenin, believed men were not disciplined enough to grow,
they had to be forced into revolution. Lenin is considered the first Soviet
dictator, and Joseph Stalin, who came to power after Lenin died, the second
dictator.
After bloody struggles
such as the Civil War in Russia, 1918-1921, the rebuilding and arguing period,
1921-1928, the first five-year plan, 1928-1932, and unprecedented progress in
building a modern industrial empire between 1932-1953, Russia became a country
admired by “people in India, Africa, and China.” (Alfred G. Meyer, What You
Should Know About Communism, p. 23)
Having lived under
socialism/communism, I know from first-hand experience that five-year plans
were a joke. We constantly struggled to find basics because not enough finished
goods and food were produced to satisfy demand. For example, a Soviet factory
that was scheduled to produce 50,000 tractors in 1930, managed to build only
3,000. The factory received the “Order of the Camel” for “breaks in the plan and
wastage.”
The important questions about
communism are:
1.
Was there
equality and democracy under communism?
2.
Did everyone
experience the same and equal quality of life and the “the good things of life?”
3.
Was the struggle
between classes non-existent?
4.
Were classes
abolished forever?
The short answer to all of
the above questions is no. The complex answer is that communist countries were
ruled by the Communist Party Presidium. There was no middle class, only the
proletariat and the ruling communist elite. Everyone worked for equally meager
pay (regardless of skill, training, or education) for the government which was
staffed only with communist party leaders.
The Five-year Plan was
draconian, covered the entire communist nation, and the workers were either not
equipped, did not have enough resources, skill, machinery, were wasteful, or not
sufficiently trained or paid to meet the outlandish demands. If the plan was
not met, the worker’s pay was cut drastically. If waste and fraud were found,
the person in charge who did not necessarily commit the crime, went to jail for
economic failures of duty. If the worker exceeded the Five-year Plan requirements,
large bonuses were given, but the standards were raised, making it impossible
to meet them again. To get materials in the attempt to fulfill the plan, people
resorted to theft, black market deals, swindles, and bribery, making the Five-year
Plan rather “disorderly” and mismanaged.
As a police state, there
were three organizations that ruled any communist country: administrators who
ran the affairs of the country, the Communist Party who gave directives for
national policy and publicity from its centralized position, and the political
police who watched over the communist loyalty and compliance of the citizenry.
If you think such a
practice of loyalty watch and speech compliance is dead, consider the city of
Barcelona, from the state of Catalonia, Spain, who created recently the “Anti-rumor
Agency” and certified 436 “anti-rumor” volunteer agents to catch and punish
those whose beliefs are not in line with the “consensus,” with “groupthink.” “The
agents will patrol the streets, butt into certain conversations, and spread
politically correct information.” http://mas-ediciones.e-noticies.es/barcelones/agentes-antirumores-contra-el-racismo-58588.html
“Groupthink” is the “consensus”
established and highly publicized through MSM by self-appointed moral know-it-alls,
suppressing any evidence that might question the “consensus,” stereotyping, demonizing,
and denigrating anyone with a divergent opinion or view.
Anyone who questions and
disagrees with the global warming/climate change or any other “consensus” is a “denier,”
“flat-Earther,” “creationist,” “xenophobe,” “homophobe,” “bigot,” “racist,” or “fascist.”
Charles Krauthammer reported in his “Thought Police on Patrol” how 110,000
individuals signed a petition to “his newspaper not to carry any more articles
questioning the fact of man-made global warming.” http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/10853279/Sinister-groupthink-powers-the-modern-world.html
Professor Henrick Moeller,
researcher in acoustics, was fired by the University of Aalborg, Denmark, for
holding the opinion that wind farms are harmful to people living nearby and for
arguing that insufficient protective buffer zones were established by
authorities. His research dared to contradict the university that “conducts
million-dollar research for wind turbine manufacturer Vestas.” http://www.metal-supply.dk/article/view/41295/samarbejde_mellem_vestas_og_aalborg_universitet_fordobles#.U4yJ7IzD_IW
In 1953, the Assistant
Director of the Russian Research Center at Harvard University, Alfred G. Meyer,
advised Americans how to fight world communism as an existential threat. The
first threat was the “powerful war machine.” The second threat was “the
possibility that communist propaganda will convert people of the free nations
to the Marxist cause.”
Sixty years later it
appears that the world communist movement is taking roots in the U.S. quite nicely
from within, lured and supported by the constant MSM propaganda machine. (How
We Can Fight Communism, chapter VII, p. 42)
Alfred Meyer posed an
interesting question in 1953 which rings true today in light of developing “thought
police” around the world. “How does the attempt to silence ideas by punishing
people who hold them square with the American traditions of civil liberties?
How can we remain democratic if any set of ideas is declared illegal?” In the
latest developments, patriotic, Christian, pro-American, pro-Constitution ideals,
ideas, and our freedom of speech have been attacked under the rubric of “hate
speech.” Is it really effective to punish and destroy people who hold ideas and
ideals different from yours?
Is it not despicable to
prey on people’s “feelings” of poverty, economic inequality and insecurity
(caused by the administrations’ economic policies) by promoting the utopia of
communism as desirable alternative to the “failed and unjust” capitalism?
People, who are ignorant and
frightened every day by the MSM, buy into communist dogma, slogans, and
rhetoric. Illegals are an easy sell because they don’t know anything else but
tyranny and are enchanted by the generous welfare that, they think, comes from
the ever full government coffers. Minorities who are told every day they have
been slighted by prejudice and injustice buy into the deliberately deceptive
communist rhetoric as well.
Inequality and injustice
cannot be wiped out by destroying one successful economic model and replacing
it with a failed economic model just because some charismatic promoter says it
will succeed this time because the right people are in charge. At the end of
the day, communism is still a form of totalitarianism no matter how you slice
it.
Author's note: This article is part of my upcoming book, Communism 2.0
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