The Prison that is Socialism

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2015

Imagine a large prison with beautiful mountains that you are not allowed to climb because you are too poor to afford the gear and you must get a permit from the warden. These mountains grow blue spruce and pine forests where bears and other creatures dwell but you cannot visit because important people are hunting brown bears and they’ve paid huge sums to shoot them under the supervision of the game warden.

If you wanted to hunt, it would not be possible because you did not have a license or a hunting rifle. Such weapons had been confiscated from the entire prison population long ago. But the warden and his men are well-armed and prepared to round up the bears or whatever God’s creatures his higher-ups were in the mood to slaughter for sport with their high power rifles.

This prison has beautiful rivers but you don’t own boats and canoes, only those who control the prison can afford expensive boats and licenses to go fishing or to spend leisurely afternoons on the water and on special lakes reserved only for those in power. Some of the rivers are the pride and joy of the elites, but most are heavily polluted by industrial activity because the watchers don’t care about environmental conservation.

This prison has cinder block towers for the residents forced off the land and crowded onto nine-story blocks made of reinforced concrete. The captives within can go about on foot, by train, by bike, and by rickety buses.

They are told how much they can eat and how many calories they can consume daily. It is degrading to be forced to stand in line to get daily rations of food but they are used to it if they want to survive. If they are lucky, they can find better choices twice a year, on Easter and at Christmas.

There are churches that perform baptisms, marriages, and burials. Church bells can be heard joyously ringing on religious holidays but sadly when someone passes. Death is inevitable for those in power and the prisoners alike, they are all equal eventually.

Nobody lives better than their neighbors but they look with envy at the wealth of their captors. The block informers make sure there is a detailed dossier on the comings and goings of every prisoner. Once in a while, a few are rewarded for their loyalty with a trip to a wellness spa with mineral waters and stinking Sulphur baths with magical healing properties.  The majority is not loyal; captive subjects just gave up any resistance in the face of utter defeat, mental and physical. They are very tired, overwhelmed, and in survival mode.

The mountains are rich in minerals and gold, but nobody can go explore even though everyone owns the mountains. If they start digging or even ask to dig, they get arrested for trespassing and theft.

If you want to travel, you have to have enough money saved from your hard labor and ask permission from the state police which is in charge of giving out passes. The police always says no unless the prisoner is an exceptional athlete or musical genius in which case they are told yes but a security police guard follows them around the clock to make sure that they do not escape this beautiful prison built specifically to keep everyone in.

Food is scarce in this well-maintained and state of the art prison; everyone is thin, but not necessarily healthy as nutrition lacks a lot to be desired. People are not given vitamins or supplements unless they are really sick when often time it is too late.

The theoretically trained doctors experiment on the prison population with no consequence for their mistakes. How can one sue the watchers? There is nobody to watch the watchers, they do what they want.

The hospitals are oozing decay and negligence; equipment is rusty, sheets are stained and torn, medicine is missing, and if a prisoner is 70 years old, he/she is left to die because they are old anyway, they’d lived long enough; and the prisoners have no one to complain to or to protect them, crowded as they are in the large wards with chicken wire beds and rusty metal stands which were once painted white. Dubious stains cover the dirty walls, the floors, and even the mattresses.

Patients can pray to God in beautiful churches or in their cells but it seems that priests have forgotten them and are favoring the elites. The church has become an instrument of manipulation, preaching the agenda of the highest contributor. God is definitely lost in the incense wafting from a priest’s silver censer.

It looks dystopian inside but to the world, the outdoors is breathtakingly beautiful and the streets are clean. The prison warden has armies of gypsy bees sweeping the streets and, if as much as a cigarette butt is thrown on the ground, the offender is taught a painful and expensive lesson.

This prison has clean schools where directed curriculum is strict and approved by the chief warden, followed religiously by thousands of busy teacher bees supervised by principals with a waspy demeanor. Prisoners pay for all these equal benefits with their lack of freedom, pretending to work every day while the prison system pretends to pay them in their paternalistic generosity.

Many prisoners tried to escape this jail by cutting the barbed wire at the border, making a run for it and getting shot, or swimming across the large southern river and drowning. Few managed to flee and escape this prison. Many paid the ultimate price while attempting to find freedom.

The democracy spelled out in the socialist republic’s constitution was often hurled at these prisoners as a threat that democracy had gone to their heads and they better behave or else.

This dystopian prison country was the police state called socialism. One day the prisoners had had enough exploitation and mounted a revolution with the help of the army, arrested the socialist dictator who was trying to escape by helicopter, and executed him and his wife after a brief trial.

That free men and women from other societies want this kind of prison in their countries today, it is baffling to those who escaped the police state called socialism.

 

Late Summer Rain Brings More Memories

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2015
Water pump installed long before
I was born

The hot summer has been suddenly replaced by a cold-driving fall rain. The water is soaking steadily into the parched dirt. There is a hurricane on its way, disguising its ugly wrath under a flowery name, Florence. Nature can use the rain but not the wrath and destruction of this massive swirling giant, picking up speed in the Atlantic and moving towards the Carolinas.

We gave up watering the dry lawn a few weeks ago as the grass turned brown from the oppressively humid heat. It rained a lot earlier in the summer but then it stopped.

Wild animals, deer, rabbits, coyotes, and raccoons were coming closer and closer to the front door, looking for fresh water. I filled the three bird baths daily but the water was always gone. Deer trampled the flower beds searching for water and fresh green grass. Why this water tasted better than the pond or the river nearby, I would never understand.

On days like this, my memory takes me to my grandma’s clay dirt and straw brick house with its tiny windows. When it rained, the interior became quite dark so I sought the outdoors under the large awning over a concrete patio. I enjoyed sitting and watching the rain fall, turning the grassless yard into a sloshy landscape with tiny rivers dug into the mud. The yard birds chirped and the pig squealed with joy. Thunder in the distance broke the domestic tranquility and lightning cracked an invisible whip in the sky.

I was too young to know or understand why grandpa never graveled the yard, installed pavers for a pathway, or planted sturdy grass that we could walk on without sinking into deep mud. Grandma’s rubber boots helped if they did not get sucked in and stuck ankle deep with a grip so powerful, no pulling could disentangle the vice like hold of the mud. He probably could not afford pavers or gravel, raising six children even in the country was not easy.

I was just happy to be with him, to ask questions to which he always had a fascinating answer. Grandpa was a self-taught man who loved books. He instilled in me the love of reading, exploring, and asking questions of scholarly men from whom I learned so much.

He always brought out the few copies of National Geographic which a team of American archeologists had left behind when they finished their summer Roman digs at the edge of the village. They stayed with grandpa as he had a beautiful and fully furnished brick home that was never used by family unless his youngest son visited from the city 60 km away. He unlocked this magical house for him and I would sneak in and play with his Roman coin collection or grandma’s shoes and purse from her dowry trunk. As was the case with everyone, his brick home did not have running water or a sewer system. The outhouse was in the back and the cast iron water pump was in the middle of the yard.

The rest of the year, grandpa and grandma lived and slept in the tiny two-bedroom mud and straw brick house with the kitchen at the other end and a generous loft where he kept hay, dry corn, and wheat from that year’s harvest, along with armies of mice and numerous flee-infested cats who kept the mice population under control.

The peasants were lucky to get electricity in the early 1970s even though the village was located only 9 km from a very large industrial town. Before then, the oil lamps were the only form of light at night. No street lamps either, just the starry nights, darkness, and scary stories sitting with the neighbors outside the gate on the wooden bench, specially made for this purpose, for chatting with neighbors and catching up on the village news and gossip.

People lived so close to each other and crowded, separated only by a wooden fence, with no land in between homes. It was impossible not to know everybody else’s business. The rest of the land was used for personal gardening and for Communist Party’s collective farms.

Bolsheviks were U.N. Agenda 21/2030 compliant long before the globalists of today decided to install worldwide communism and force people off their private property into high-rise, mixed-use buildings in the city under the guise of Green Growth, Sustainability for the sake of environmental protection - such an easy way to control the dumbed-down and crowded population.

Grandpa commuted to work 18 km round-trip for over 40 years on his bicycle, rain or shine, even in the snow. He could not afford the rickety communist bus that ran twice a day to and from the city and riding for free in the open cargo area of a large factory truck like cattle was out of the question.

Today’s globalists are attempting to remove us from our cars and force everyone into public transportation and bikes. They are even going to tax bike users on the many expensive bike paths that are being built around the country in a mad rush to socially engineer everything we do because, if it worked so well for communist China and socialist Europe, it must be good for us too.

At least the Soviets pretended to care for agriculture, for the food supply of the people. They forcibly confiscated their property and moved them off the land into crowded villages in order to form their collective farms on the joined land where everybody worked and, regardless of effort applied, got an even portion at harvest time, while the commies took their lion’s share first.

Some of the villagers worked harder than others but they shared the harvest equally. Humans are not so altruistic that they would put forth effort for others indefinitely. Pretty soon everyone slacked off.  There was no incentive to work harder. The factory communist motto, “we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us,” eventually stretched to farming as well and fields remained unproductive and full of weeds. Such was socialism, it bred laziness - everyone became dependent on the omnipotent government who doled out crumbs.

 

Public Shaming of a Hoarding Comrade

Newspaper clipping of  article about Baciu Viorel
from the 1980s during
Ceausescu's oppressive communist regime

People used to ask me what we ate when I was growing up in communist Eastern Europe. Women were quite thin and beautiful, on the “Ceausescu diet.” We were not just told how much to eat by decree but food was quite scarce and highly rationed. If a person dared to stash more food than the Communist Party deemed necessary, that person paid dearly in fines and eventually jail. Of course the elite class, in the classless utopia of a socialist country on its way to communism, had its own stores and food supply at low prices, never having to suffer the indignity of a rumbling empty stomach.

The heaping single plates of meat I see in American restaurants today would feed a family of three for quite a while. My mom, who is quite thin now in her advanced age, joked that she is back to the Ceausescu era thinness. In those times, if a person was overweight, others told them with a tone of envy, how good and fat they looked; they had found enough food and prosperity to afford to eat and gain weight without being investigated, shamed at work, or fined.

When the dear leader wanted to visit a grocery, dairy, or bread store to see how “his people” lived, fresh bread loaves and milk bottles were trucked in and then taken away as soon as he left. Staples like cooking oil, sugar, flour, and butter were also brought in from the communist apparatchiks’ stores and then whisked away before anyone had a chance to purchase anything.

The bread, milk, butter, oil, flour, and sugar lines were part of daily life and the socialist milieu. Walking around money was not to bribe politicians but to purchase food or scratchy and splintery toilet paper in case one encountered a long line where something needful would be sold that day.

In addition to fines and possible jail time, food hoarders were publicly shamed in the local and national newspapers which were run by the Communist Party.  Since their address was also provided, the readers were expected to ostracize them and sometimes beat them for their greed.

Such was the case of Baciu Viorel from Tirgu-Mures, domiciled on 1 Brasov Street, who decided to stock food for himself, perhaps his extended family, and maybe intending to sell some for profit to those who did not have time or stamina to stand in endless lines. The economic police raided his house and found too many bottles of cooking oil (34) and 26 kg of sugar in his pantry.

Obviously well-fed when compared to the gaunt proletariat, this man was presented as the enemy of the collective, to be condemned and derided. The 1980s article said that “Men like him disrupt normal commercial activity. Even though there are sufficient quantities of sugar and oil in stores, because of people like him who buy in excess of what they need, the stores are emptied daily. When food arrives, long lines form, causing thousands of people to lose precious time shopping. To end this situation, it is necessary to combat such hoarding, to brand those who are so selfish as to gather large quantities of food, interrupting normal commerce in stores.”

Having experienced the indignity of standing in endless lines in cold and hot weather to buy rationed food with rationing cards, food that often ran out before everyone in line had a chance to buy something, it is economically ludicrous to believe the Communist Party lies that one man’s hoarding disrupted delivery of enough food to the starving proletariat.  

It was the inadequate supply of everything that caused severe shortages of many items that Westerners take for granted in economies based on supply and demand. It was the centralized planning of economically ignorant community organizers who formed the Communist Party rank and file who made ill-advised production, supply, and distribution decisions.

Did Viorel deserve public opprobrium because he tried to survive by selling extras on the black market, the market the ineptitude of a socialist/communist regime had created? Who can blame him for hoarding food when nobody knew if they would find anything to eat the next day, when people fought in lines over bones stripped clean of any meat? Yet people used those bones to make soup. Extras in the pantry insured survival for many days without having to stand in those awful lines every day.

Was Viorel causing the long lines? Of course not, but socialists and communists are not known to be rational thinkers, they are indoctrinated sheeple who memorize and repeat what they are told without questioning, in exchange for special benefits.

When it comes to survival, other people were willing to pay the black market higher price in order to have food for their families without standing in line.

Offensive ‘Social Justice’ Corporatist Pandering

Pat Tillman,
American
hero
Photo: Wikipedia

If I had a dollar for every young and ill-informed brat in this country who believes that our nation is oppressive and in need of a communist “social justice” makeover, supporting the benched quarterback who kneels during the playing of our National Anthem, I would be rich.

It would seem that education would clarify the confusion these brats experience. However, most educators are hard-core socialists and they indoctrinate every student who is unfortunate to enter their classrooms, to reject the very system under which their parents and grandparents have prospered.

As someone said on rightbias.com, “In countries where people are free, people are not ‘equal.’ In countries where everyone is ‘equal,’ people are not free.”

The benched quarterback in question is Colin Kaepernick, the face of Nike’s ‘Just Do It’ newest ad, “Believe in something even if it means sacrificing everything.” What exactly did Kaepernick sacrifice? What is that “something” that he believes in and is it good for America or even American?

Pat Tillman, a real American hero, left a lucrative NFL career to join the U.S. Army Rangers after the Muslim terrorist attacks on 9/11. He really made the ultimate sacrifice when he lost his life in service to our country. He is the face of an American hero, not Kaepernick.

Kaepernick’s latest stunt is about money and about disrespect for our country. Half of the country will probably buy more Nike products while the other half will donate or burn their tennis shoes, switch to a different brand, and the Nike stock prices will drop.

It is a stunt about money and corporatist pandering to the faux narrative of “social justice,” a non-existent oppression in a country where Kaepernick, a minority, was given every opportunity to succeed and made millions as a footballer. His jihad against American values and truth will not endear him any time soon to the NFL fans.

Corporatist Pandering 101 is best exemplified by a Facebook meme showing a photo of Asian women making Nike shoes with the caption, “These factory workers (which are 80% female) are making Nike shoes for 20 cents an hour, working 70-80 hours a week, so that Nike can profit enough to pay Colin Kaepernick millions to speak out against oppression and justice.”

Sean Hannity said on his show, “There are millions of men and women who really sacrificed everything for strangers they didn’t even know so the world, this country, could be a better, safer, freer place.”

Untold numbers of unknown American heroes, men and women, who did not make millions, are buried in graves around the world, having sacrificed their lives so that Kaepernick can disrespect our National Anthem to make the false point that American minorities are oppressed and thus America must be turned into the image of his fellow travelers.

Every minority member of this society has the same rights and responsibilities as the majority, to follow our Constitution, not Sharia Law, to obey our laws, to respect our flag and our National Anthem, to pay taxes, to work hard, to go to school, respect the police, and study hard to become the best they can be.

Minorities are not oppressed, on the contrary, they receive special benefits and allowances that are not available to the majority especially when they go to college, seek employment, receive adjusted entrance scores, special scholarships and grants, and other benefits.

Sen. McCain embodied real sacrifice when he spent five years of his life as a prisoner of war in a Vietnamese jail.  No matter how you feel about him, he sacrificed those five years for his country. Only people who were in that hellish jail with him, captured and tortured by the Vietnamese, can really speak about the irretrievable loss of those five years.

The rest of us cannot possibly understand any more than the village idiots pushing socialism and communism, individuals who were asleep in class when lessons were taught about the Soviet gulags, torture, starvation, and the death of 100 million innocents living under socialism/communism who died by the hands of their socialist/communist tormenting masters, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Ceausescu, Castro, Pol Pot, to name just a few.

Various unions were successful in organizing parades on Labor Day in the “flyover country” where Democrats control the voting block and the narrative agenda of communist “social justice.” It is easy to convince people to vote for and support socialism now as they are promised free healthcare, living wages, daycare, college education, and freedom from manufactured oppression of minorities in a country where tolerance, personal success, and wealth at every income level are not found anywhere else in the world.

Alexandria Ortasio-Cortez was pictured recently with school children, speaking to them about her Democrat Socialist ideas. Democrat Socialism is an oxymoron since by definition Socialists can only be Democrats. But school children do not understand history or civics. They are a rapt and impressionable audience, mesmerized by the confusing words and ideas of one young “socialista” from the Bronx who is peddling socialism.

These social justice brats in the making, who are not missing any meals and amenities of a full and happy life, will become social justice warriors upon graduation from high school or college.  Their brains would have been washed and re-wired to hate everything remotely resembling capitalism, adopting socialist ideas and slogans, while living economically successful lives when compared to the rest of the world. They will know “capitalism and Christianity are evil” because their smart devices, corrupt politicians, and teachers would have told them so at nauseam.

America Fundamentally Transformed

Photo: Ileana Johnson

In the spring of 2007 I was teaching a small class of non-traditional students, some as young as eighteen and some older than I was. It was an interesting mixture of blacks, whites, Hispanics, civilians and military who had jobs during the day and took classes at night to finish their college degrees. They were not the pampered and entitled snowflakes of today; they were hard-working Americans from all walks of life, some receiving Pell grants and some on military scholarships.

We always had interesting discussions as most brought their experience to class to contribute to our economic lessons. A few detracted from it with their unruly and disrespectful behavior. It was a bit too late to teach social manners to the two young black women who always arrived late, answered their phones in the classroom, and left often for bathroom breaks but returned with sodas, hamburgers, and fries from the nearby bowling alley.

Everyone was hungry, most students did not get a chance to get supper but some were patient enough to wait for the large break between the three-hour long classes before they bought food.

The two women, who wanted an A just by showing up for class, asked provocative questions such as, why does our textbook separate everybody by groups, age, disability, education, race, when giving economic statistics? Can we all not be just Americans, men and women? The fact that most textbooks are written by liberal college professors and are chosen as part of the curriculum by more liberal college professors and administrators did not dawn on them.

The “maverick” candidate Obama with his “beautiful family” and what he could do for our country and the black community economically was often the talk during breaks. One young man was especially excited as he was campaigning for him around the state.

My traditional college students during the day would often miss classes or arrive late with starry eyes from campaign rallies in support of this “transformational” candidate who would revolutionize America and give everyone free housing, health, food, and college. The excitement was so palpable, you could package it in gold tin foil with a blue ribbon. A few students even endangered their lives by standing in the middle of busy intersections holding signs in support of the unknown Chicagoan’s candidacy.

Schools staffed with Democrats to the rafters organized trips two hours away to hear candidate Obama who, as president of the largest economy on earth at the time, would “fundamentally transform” America into the socialist paradise of his anti-American and racist ideology. He was going to be a uniter and make everything that ailed this country better. At least that’s what everyone thought.

A local radio shock jock was asking listeners who they will vote for President in November. One caller said he would choose the unknown half-black candidate Obama because, “he would screw up things so badly, nobody would ever elect another socialist to office.” He was wrong on the election part. Obama was elected twice and more socialists and communists are elected to office today.

Eleven years later, we are divided more than ever along ideological and racial lines. The economy is improving thanks to the leadership of President Trump who is presiding over a 4.2% GDP growth unlike his predecessor who was busy telling us that a weak economy, less than 2% growth, was the new norm. President Trump is making good on the many promises candidate Trump has made to make America great again, his campaign slogan.

The Democrat side is busy telling us that America was never great. I wonder why everybody is risking life and limb to come to America if it is such a bad, racist, and intolerant place to be.

The entire country is in a social and political ailment. Communists, socialists, and anarchists are slowly taking over the country. Washington is a political Swamp nobody can possibly ever drain. People not qualified to answer a simple history or geopolitical question are elected to Democrat office by Democrat voters equally ignorant, lacking basic information, civics, and history knowledge, and who often do not speak English and vote legally and illegally.

The education of our children that used to be the envy of the world has taken an intolerant Marxist tone. Violent fascist and racist organizations like ANTIFA and BLM have found nests on campuses around the country, formed as their perceived need to enforce social justice. Their anger that the Democrat candidate Hillary lost the election is endless and incurable.

The media is bashing President Trump non-stop, vilifying him, his family, and everything he does. A man who has given up so much to do what is right for our country has become public enemy number one for all Democrat voters who seem to have lost their minds, mired in pure hate and insanity.

Hollywood college dropouts and ball players have joined in the fray of anti-Americanism. They use their microphones afforded by successful roles in movies which have suddenly made them experts, telling us how to live and how to become globalists by giving up our language, borders, and culture to invading hordes of economic refugees from third world countries.

The then transformational candidate Barack Hussein Obama, who promised to heal all the wounds and right all the wrongs, give his supporters free food, education, health, housing, cars, has turned our country into such an anti-American and welfare-centered direction that it is uncertain right now that we would ever be able to recover.

What is good has become bad, evil has become good, and moral values have been replaced by moral relativism, decadence, and filth. America continues to be fundamentally transformed from the shadows.