Steaks for the Dogs If You Are a Socialist Dictator

The Ceausescus' Cult of Personality - 1986

I am always perplexed how naïve and easily duped humans are - not just those who are ill informed, but also those who were given a heavy dose of manufactured history in school. Perhaps they contributed to the textbooks that rewrote history in the first place, to fit their agenda.

Can anyone really argue with facts and reality? Apparently, supporters of Democrat Socialists do argue with those who fled tyranny from their own countries and defected to the “land of the free, home of the brave.”

There is plenty of money hanging from the welfare tree to keep the allure for those coming from third world countries, the benefactors of U.N.’s globalist wealth and land redistribution scheme. Under their one world scheme borders and private property become irrelevant except for “good” billionaires with a hypocritical view of the world, and fake journalists who promote socialism, no borders, and the scam of global warming.

There is misfortune around the world, and stories of abuse and tyranny. It is perplexing that socialist Americans would take up the cause of economically self-displaced from other nations, inimical to us, to the detriment of their own brethren whom they now describe as racists and fascists, worse than Hitler. Suddenly conservatives have been labeled “subversives and deplorables” because they want to keep their “borders, language, and culture.”

Tides of misfortune and poverty affect people everywhere. Americans have been generous to nations around the world, but it is never enough for the recipients of American generosity. Now they want everything we have and the land because, according to the U.N., they are entitled to it as global citizens. In a borderless world designed by U.N., the globe and its riches belong to the downtrodden, not to those who created it, developed it, worked hard, and sacrificed a lot.

Case after case of people, who had escaped socialism, risked life and limb, left everything behind to come to America to find freedom, do not seem to alter the opinion of Socialist Democrats in this country who turn a blind eye to the history of 100 million victims of communism buried in shallow graves around the world.

According to Elizabeth Childs, in a wooded area called Sandarmokh Clearing, 100 miles east of the Finnish border in northern Russia, historian Yuri Dmitriev found 20 years ago 200 communal burial pits that held the bodies of an estimated 9,000 people – Russians, Karelians, Finns, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Tatars, Jewish people, gypsies, Germans, Poles – executed in the USSR during Stalin’s Great Purge of 1937-38. http://khpg.org/en/index.php?id=1565835225&fbclid=IwAR0JgdH75-PJ_6iTyi3Jvm_WClLFG4mCCcIQdE0U-fgw3CNQdBl2KSXs5c4

Communist dictators like Stalin, Mao, Ceausescu, Castro, and Pol Pot have engaged in abuse of power and murderous purges in the former socialist countries run by the communist party. People were ordered out of their homes and their land and buildings on the property were confiscated for the “collective.”

Ceausescu, more recently, in the 1980s, had made more than 40,000 people homeless in a three-year span in order to build his palace on a hill, a monstrous building resembling some of Hitler’s grandiose architectural plans, except Ceausescu finished it before his demise. He had built his socialist People’s Palace on a pool of blood of innocents. At the trial in December 1989, the illiterate wife and the cobbler with a fourth-grade education were convicted and sentenced to be executed for the deaths of 60,000 people and other “grave crimes” against the nation.

When the suffering Romanian people were finally freed from the oppression of socialism and the Communist Party rule, they were elated about their new-found freedom to travel and speak freely but mostly for having food in stores again, and enough water and electricity.

When Ceausescu’s daughter, Zoia-Elena, was arrested, the officers found freezers full of steaks for her dogs. Officers were shocked by her demand to keep the steaks because her dogs would only eat steak. This request was beyond repulsive when the population was put on a national forced diet by the Ceausescus who had passed a law to mandate the exact number of calories a person could consume. People could hardly find food and the national past time was standing in line for four hours or more to buy a few bones with traces of meat on them and 200 g of salami.

Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime attempted to turn Cambodia into a socialist agrarian republic in Maoist style and killed approximately 1.5 million people in a four-year period (1975-1979). Moving Cambodians to labor camps in rural areas, he forced them into hard work, physically abused them, starved them, neglected them when they got sick, and mass executed them for dissention.

The Holodomor genocide in Ukraine, the result of famine engineered for political gain by Stalin’s socialist regime in 1932-33, killed millions of Ukrainians. http://holodomorct.org/

According to historian Frank Dikötter , Mao’s Great Leap Forward killed 45 million Chinese. “At least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death in China over these four years; the worldwide death toll of the Second World War was 55 million.”https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/maos-great-leap-forward-killed-45-million-in-four-years-2081630.html

David Satter wrote in 2017 about the 100 years of communism and the 100 million dead that resulted from it. The seizure of the Winter Palace in Petrograd, he said, “set in motion a chain of events that would kill millions and inflict a near-fatal wound on Western Civilization.” https://www.wsj.com/articles/100-years-of-communismand-100-million-dead-1510011810

One reader commented, ”Capitalism/Republicanism may not be a perfect form of economy/government, but socialism is by far the most corrupt, murderous, group-think, non-productive economic/political system that persecutes individuals who do not march in lock step with the leaders.  

Socialism is the enemy of individual freedom. Look at the criminal Left and what they have done to college campuses with violence against individuals who do not agree with them. 

Bubonic plague and smallpox have been less destructive.  Individual freedom has enabled more people under a capitalistic system to prosper, and their prosperity has lifted others.   

The role of government in a capitalistic society is not to run business, but to ensure those with immense wealth and power not to abuse those who are not as fortunate.  The Socialist Democrat party of today with the aid of MSM are abusers of individual freedom.  Oppression is what they do! The modern Socialist Democrat party has no resemblance to the Democrat party of JFK.”

Dr. Thomas Sowell wrote, “One of the most important reasons for studying history is that virtually every stupid idea that is in vogue today has been tried before and proved disastrous before, time and time again.” This includes socialism in Cuba, China, Soviet Union, Vietnam, Cambodia, North Korea, and Iron Curtain countries in Europe.

Venezuela is a more recent painful case in point, destroyed in a short few years by the socialist government of Hugo Chavez and now Maduro. The country has severe shortages of food, fuel, water, and electricity – people are starving while Maduro’s socialist elites live well, busily adopting social behavior score cards developed by the Chinese.

If you don’t behave the socialist way, they are going to deny you medicine, food, travel, and everything else you enjoy. You will reside in a virtual prison of socialist abuse, want and despair. Your economic boat will sink like lead.

Socialist Brats

Woodcut entitled "The Ship of Fools"

As more high school and college students are indoctrinated by their teachers and professors into accepting socialism as the only solution to their future, the country seems to fall deeper into anomie. Anomie is “the social instability resulting from a breakdown of standards and values.” 


They are so lacking in knowledge of their own country’s history that they believe what the Marxist professors and the MSM have been repeating ad nauseam, that we are a democracy when we are a constitutional republic. Lies, when repeated enough times, become reality.


Pampered by capitalist society and parents, young people, steeped in moral relativism, have become paid angry activists determined to force the rest of us into accepting their Marxist ideology. 


The astonishing lies about socialism, irrational tolerance of sexual perversions, drugs, immorality, Christo-phobia, destructive multi-culturalism, self-loathing, and the overt anti-Americanism have turned them into illogical drones who cannot be ignored.


Soon they will be the majority in the country as more rational and hard-working Americans die off, replaced by their brainwashed children, grandchildren, and illegal aliens with no love in their hearts for America. When they become the majority, the country will be a totalitarian regime ruled by like-minded factions.


And it will not be Denmark, a constitutional monarchy of approximately 5 million citizens who rely on socialized generous welfare. Denmark is one of the heaviest taxed countries in the world, taxes paid by both citizens and successful capitalist corporations.


Young Americans, who demand socialism, want the Danish style welfare system, but they also call for the elimination of capitalism. If capitalism is abolished, the government will be the sole provider of all the “free stuff” they demand, without the revenue from capitalist taxation. Like all socialists who eventually go broke because the system is not viable (see Venezuela), the government will withdraw all handouts just as easily as it had given them. https://news.gallup.com/poll/257639/four-americans-embrace-form-socialism.aspx


America is a much larger country than tiny Denmark. It will be very challenging to put 330 plus million people and illegal immigrants (40 million by latest estimate) on socialist welfare at the same time and have the American government, which is trillions of dollars in national debt, pay for all the free stuff from cradle to grave – housing, education, child care, medical care, food, etc.


As everyone knows already, there is no such thing as a free meal, someone must pay for it. There is an opportunity cost to any free market economic activity, but socialists rely on other people’s money. While socialists are idle, enjoying life and finding themselves as one famous Congresswoman suggested, will robots do the work?


It will take an army of robots, computerized and human, working around the clock, to produce the national product, to provide energy, oil, water, basic services such as police, fire, emergencies, medical care, drugs, build and repair roads, run heavy industry, education, and agriculture in order to produce enough food for indolent Americans who will presumably be doing what they enjoy.


I have taken many groups of students on trips to socialized Western Europe, countries that were on par with U.S. economically, yet the standard of living is not the same, far from it. Students could not wait to get back home and, when they did, they said so elatedly. 


Whiny students complained that the foreign food was bad and they bee-lined for the nearest McDonald’s even though the local food was delicious, healthy, and included in the price of the trip.

They also complained that hotels, beds, showers, facilities were not as comfortable as American ones, roads and elevators were too small, and they had to carry their suitcases up a few flights of stairs. Rooms, like apartments, were tiny, because space was at a premium. Some places did not have hot water during the week. People were not friendly, and basics were too expensive. Some out of the way villages had outhouses. The litany of complaints was quite long. 


Europe has a lot of history, art, architecture, and museums. But it is not a comfortable place to live in like America. Red tape stares you in the face at every turn, far worse than any bureaucracy you can imagine in the U.S.


You must take public transportation, walk everywhere, gasoline and food are expensive, housing is expensive and scarce, and homeownership is not part of their dream, most Europeans rent apartments all their lives. Generations inherit the right to rent the same apartment as if it was their own property.


I had asked students to write down their impressions of Europe and the remarks ranged from the ridiculous to the sublime. It was a disappointing foray into the minds of spoiled Americans who have little appreciation for what they have and for their amazing country.


One punctilious German Pullman bus driver said to me, Americans are rich beyond belief and they do not appreciate anything they have, nobody teaches their kids to appreciate their good fortune. I asked him why he said that, and his answer was, look at these high school brats, how many Europeans do you see who are sufficiently well-off to send their school age offspring on spring break vacations to America?


The collegiate social justice warriors are still looking for the six-figure salary their advisor promised. They cannot even earn a living wage while working for their socialist guru, Bernie Sanders. Who is going to pay for their high-tech gadgets, fancy tattoos, and organic foods? Unlike Europeans, young Americans hate well paid trade jobs, it is beneath them.


Bernie and other Democrats, who have become millionaires while “serving” you in public office, will keep droning on about socialism and equality after which they will retire to their gated and walled mansions you probably paid for. The “democratic” elites will always live well off the backs of the people, no matter who is in charge.


The Democrat Socialist Millennials clamoring for equality will have an eye-opening experience. The Marxist experiment will reveal the true measure of equality and equity of the exploited proletariat, asked to give up everything for the good of the “collective.”


I hope the Socialist brats will eventually remember that, without capitalism, they will be living in “grinding poverty” at the mercy of a dictator.

Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia

From my friend, Livia Bota:

"Fifty-one years ago on Aug 20th, the Warsaw Pact countries, led by the USSR minus Romania, invaded Czechoslovakia.

There was an overall fear that the Soviets would also invade Romania as punishment, so, the day after, my Mom decided that I would spend the night with her at the hospital where she was due for a night shift (Brancovenesc hospital).

Because of the excessive iodine vapors (iodine was used in all Romanian hospitals as disinfectant), I was terribly sick all night, something I will carry with me forever, but the bravery of those Czech rebels, baring their chest in front of the Soviet tanks, far outweighs the misery of my discomfort.  I have never seen this photo before today, and always thought the Tiananmen square confrontation was unique."

Photo shared from Alexandru, thank you!

                                              Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968

Karin McQuillan's "What I Learned in the Peace Corps in Africa: Trump Is Right!

A different perspective posted by a friend - not all cultures are created equal:

“What I Learned in the Peace Corps in Africa:  Trump Is Right!
By Karin McQuillan  January 17, 2018

Three weeks after college, I flew to Senegal, West Africa, to run a community center in a rural town.  Life was placid, with no danger, except to your health.  That danger was considerable, because it was, in the words of the Peace Corps doctor, "a fecalized environment"

In plain English: s--- is everywhere.  People defecate on the open ground, and the feces is blown with the dust  onto you, your clothes, your food, the water.  He warned us the first day of training: do not even touch water.  Human feces carries parasites that bore through your skin and cause organ failure.

Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that a few decades later, liberals would be pushing the lie that Western civilization is no better than a third-world country.  Or would teach two generations of our kids that loving your own culture and wanting to preserve it are racism.

Last time I was in Paris, I saw a beautiful African woman in a grand boubou have her child defecate on the sidewalk next to Notre Dame Cathedral.  The French police officer, ten steps from her, turned his head not to see.
I have seen.  I am not turning my head and pretending unpleasant things are not true.

Senegal was not a hellhole.  Very poor people can lead happy, meaningful lives in their own cultures' terms.  But they are not our terms.  The excrement is the least of it.  Our basic ideas of human relations, right and wrong, are incompatible.

As a twenty-one-year-old starting out in the Peace Corps, I loved Senegal.  In fact, I was euphoric.  I quickly made friends and had an adopted family.  I relished the feeling of the brotherhood of man.  People were open, willing to share their lives and, after they knew you, their innermost thoughts.

The longer I lived there, the more I understood: it became blindingly obvious that the Senegalese are not the same as us.  The truths we hold to be self-evident are not evident to the Senegalese.  How could they be?  Their reality is totally different.  You can't understand anything in Senegal using American terms.

Take something as basic as family.  Family was a few hundred people, extending out to second and third cousins.  All the men in one generation were called "father."  Senegalese are Muslim, with up to four wives.  Girls had their clitorises cut off at puberty.  (I witnessed this, at what I thought was going to be a nice coming-of-age ceremony, like a bat mitzvah or confirmation.)  Sex, I was told, did not include kissing.  Love and friendship in marriage were Western ideas.  Fidelity was not a thing.  Married women would have sex for a few cents to have cash for the market.What I did witness every day was that women were worked half to death.  Wives raised the food and fed their own children, did the heavy labor of walking miles to gather wood for the fire, drew water from the well or public faucet, pounded grain with heavy hand-held pestles, lived in their own huts, and had conjugal visits from their husbands on a rotating basis with their co-wives.  Their husbands lazed in the shade of the trees.
Family was crucial to people there in a way Americans cannot comprehend.

The Ten Commandments were not disobeyed as they were unknown.  The value system was the exact opposite.  You were supposed to steal everything you can to give to your own relatives.  There are some Westernized Africans who try to rebel against the system.  They fail.

We hear a lot about the kleptocratic elites of Africa.  The kleptocracy extends through the whole society.  My town had a medical clinic donated by international agencies.  The medicine was stolen by the medical workers and sold to the local store.  If you were sick and didn't have money, drop dead.  That was normal.
So here in the States, when we discovered that my 98-year-old father's Muslim health aide from Nigeria had stolen his clothes and wasn't bathing him, I wasn't surprised.  It was familiar.

In Senegal, corruption ruled, from top to bottom.  Go to the post office, and the clerk would name an outrageous price for a stamp.  After paying the bribe, you still didn't know it if it would be mailed or thrown out.  That was normal.

One of my most vivid memories was from the clinic.  One day, as the wait grew hotter in the 110-degree heat, an old woman two feet from the medical aides who were chatting in the shade of a mango tree instead of working  collapsed to the ground.  They turned their heads so as not to see her and kept talking.  She lay there in the dirt.  Callousness to the sick was normal.

Americans think it is a universal human instinct to do unto others as you would have them do unto you.  It's not.  It seems natural to us because we live in a Bible-based Judeo-Christian culture

We think the Protestant work ethic is universal.  It's not.  My town was full of young men doing nothing.  They were waiting for a government job.  There was no private enterprise.  Private business was not illegal, just impossible, given the nightmare of a third-world bureaucratic kleptocracy.  It is also incompatible with Senegalese insistence on taking care of relatives.

All the little stores in Senegal were owned by Mauritanians.  If a Senegalese wanted to run a little store, he'd go to another country.  The reason?  Your friends and relatives would ask you for stuff for free, and you would have to say yes.  End of your business.  You are not allowed to be a selfish individual and say no to relatives.  The result: Everyone has nothing.

The more I worked there and visited government officials doing absolutely nothing, the more I realized that no one in Senegal had the idea that a job means work  A job is something given to you by a relative.  It provides the place where you steal everything to give back to your family.

I couldn't wait to get home.  So why would I want to bring Africa here?  Non-Westerners do not magically become American by arriving on our shores with a visa.

For the rest of my life, I enjoyed the greatest gift of the Peace Corps: I love and treasure America more than ever.  I take seriously my responsibility to defend our culture and our country and pass on the American heritage to the next generation.
African problems are made worse by our aid efforts  Senegal is full of smart, capable people.  They will eventually solve their own country's problems.  They will do it on their terms, not ours.  The solution is not to bring Africans here.

We are lectured by Democrats that we must privilege third-world immigration by the hundred million with chain migration.  They tell us we must end America as a white , Western, Judeo-Christian, capitalist nation to prove we are not racist.  I don't need to prove a thing.  Leftists want open borders because they resent whites, resent Western achievements, and hate America.  They want to destroy America as we know it.

As President Trump asked, why would we do that?

We have the right to choose what kind of country to live in.  I was happy to donate a year of my life as a young woman to help the poor Senegalese 
I am not willing to donate my country.”

In Memoriam

Rest in Peace, Dr. Bruce Lesley! 

You were a wonderful friend and mentor to thousands of students and their anxious parents who sent their children to college in hopes that they would adjust quickly and learn. They found joy, happiness, and knowledge in your classes.

Your remarkable personality, infectious smile, boundless energy, and rare talent have touched so many lives during your musical and teaching career. 

An accomplished pianist, organist, and conductor, Dr. Lesley's music resonated in the halls of academia and in his beloved Church. 

You have brought happiness to my mom and joy in our hearts with your music. And we enjoyed together many meals at the local Mexican restaurant on birthdays when you came to honor us with your presence.

I thank you for discovering my daughter's talent, teaching her, mentoring her, and guiding her to eventually become an accomplished opera singer. Our family will never forget you! 

You are now with the angels, directing that perfect concert in heaven but the world of music on earth sorely misses your talent and patient teaching.

Memory Eternal!

4 in 10 Americans Want Socialism

“The trouble with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money” – Margaret Thatcher

Nikita Khrushchev in 1963

Photo: Wikipedia

I don’t put much value in polls. They can be often skewed by the composition of those polled and the honesty with which they answer questions, however, I paid attention to a Gallup poll which claimed that 4 in 10 Americans want socialism, the precursor to communism. If this poll is correct, then Khrushchev’s “conquest without war” would have come to pass decades after his death.

Those asked about their views on socialism, generally have no ability to explain it, or why they desire it; they just think it’s a good idea and they want “free stuff.” Such advocates of socialism have never opened a history book on socialism, nor have they studied the basic Principles of Economics.

They hate capitalism while enjoying the freedom to say so without fear of being sent to a gulag, and owning goods produced by the very capitalism they loathe. To say that they are uninformed fools and tools of the few who are designing the one-party state (Democrat Socialist), is an understatement.

None of the advocates of socialism understand that the European socialist welfare they admire, is supported by high taxes and strong capitalist corporations with shareholders and investors, who pay taxes to the state in order to support such lavish welfare.

In 1903 Lenin founded what was to become eventually the Communist Party with a group of “close knit dedicated professional revolutionaries” who would blindly follow without question the decisions of the leaders. It is important to focus on the word professional, indicating people who were well-trained in political activism, community organizing, and manipulation of the masses. Their goal was to establish “the one-party state” better known as the Party.

The Party allowed “democratic centralism,” meaning that discussion was permitted within certain parameters, until a decision was reached. Once the decision was “adopted,” all minions had to follow it faithfully. The Party was illegal as they were aiming to overthrow the Czarist regime, an act which eventually came to pass.

In 1905 the Party had 8,500 members and a few months before the October 1917 Revolution only 23,000. By 1961, statistics indicate that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had 8,708,000 members, about four percent of the population. (Conquest Without War, Pocket Books, Inc., 1961)

Membership was limited to those who wished to join. “Only workers, peasants, and intelligentsia who are enlightened, active, and devoted to communism are admitted.” They had to understand communism and be “its active soldiers,” supporting its ideas as Karl Marx had envisioned.

One representative (deputy) per 300,000 Russians was chosen to be in the Soviet of the Union, one of the two houses of the Supreme Soviet. These representatives were nominated by the Party, trade unions, cooperatives, youth and cultural organizations, all under the boot of the Party’s control. An electoral commission could reject any candidate without giving a reason. The unopposed candidates always received 99 percent of the votes.

In the long line of communist leaders of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev is less known today than Stalin, his contemporary who is responsible for the death of millions. I’m not sure how many victims Khrushchev left behind during his tenure as supreme leader.

During Khrushchev’s formative years, the socialist propaganda was intended for the working class, quite a “minority in overwhelmingly rural Russia.”

The socialist propaganda in today’s America is aimed at affluent college indoctrinated Millennials who decry their “whiteness and white privilege” which happened at the expense of other races. How that suddenly occurred in the 21^st century in one of the most tolerant and law-abiding countries in the world where discrimination of any sort is punishable by law, is unclear and irrational.

The “Party schools” in the Soviet Union were indoctrination centers for the Communist Party membership. It was a privilege to be admitted to such schools, not the phony variety “white privilege” Democrat Socialists in America suddenly claim. Soviet privilege consisted of living in substandard conditions in crowded, unheated dormitories with little food, setting the standard for future modest living conditions under communist dictatorships around the world.

The curricula were composed of interminable meetings during which daily life was deconstructed into Marxist terms and the students’ behavior and attitude toward the “class struggle” was carefully monitored and dissected. They were taught how to better control “the lives of others” through carefully scripted guidelines of mental and physical oppression, depriving the population at large of any choice and of their freedom.

After the Russian Revolution of 1917 and Lenin’s death in 1924, a contagion spread across Europe - Russian communists stirred upheavals in Germany, and in other capitalist nations.

The Soviet leadership offered a new brand of “socialism for a new class.” Stalin launched the slogan “socialism in one country,” a socialism that would not turn out to be the promised egalitarian society, but a society in which the Communist Party members would be the sole beneficiaries.

Subservient communist functionaries became the apparatchiki, the bulldozing machine of control through fear, snitching on neighbors and relatives, jail, repressions, and purges. Even the Marxist Trotsky was beaten and exiled as a “left winger,” and the “right wingers” were labeled “petty bourgeois” by Stalinists.

Apparatchiki forced peasants to give up their land, equipment, and animals into collective farms (kolkhozes). If apparatchiki wavered, they were swiftly eliminated as “untrustworthy elements.”

Apparatchiki also watched one another. “Socialist vigilance required the uncovering of deviations and deviationists, the unmasking of the class enemy who might have wormed his way into the Party.”

When the Ukrainian peasants were not delivering enough grain in 1927 and 1928 to feed the urban population, Stalin sent the Party apparatchiki and the secret police on a requisition drive, “liquidating” with machine guns the “kulaks,” peasants they saw as enemies because they were “unwilling to satisfy the demands of the Party agitators.” Peasants resisting collectivization were not just attacked as “kulaks” but as “enemies of the people.”

Stalin “decreed the liquidation of the kulaks as a class,” and peasants, who could hire workers and owned their farms and agricultural equipment, existed no more.

After “squashing the enemy” of the Party, the “socialist construction” expanded by building up Stalin’s “cult of personality.” The purges that followed eliminated people and confiscated their property which was later distributed to loyal party members for their personal use. The Communist Party was infallible, so scapegoats were found for every failure of the system.

When Stalin died in 1953, a period of “de-Stalinization” began. Khrushchev promised a “great leap forward” for his proletariat who would outproduce the U.S. in per capita meat, milk, and butter and “to make Soviet toilers wealthier than the capitalist slaves.”

Not at any time did the Soviet proletariat live better or wealthier than the “capitalist slaves.” To this day, the Russian overall standard of living is lower than the American standard of living even though the cost of living in Russia is cheaper. The average monthly disposable salary is five times higher in the U.S. https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Russia/United-States/Cost-of-living

By the end of the 1960s Khrushchev “stopped the terror of the secret police, emptied the concentration camps, gave his people enough to eat, new apartment housing, and promised détente and peace.”  He even wore a very bourgeois sable-lined winter coat. (Conquest Without War, pp. 39-41)

In his lifetime, Khrushchev failed “to see the communist flag fly all over the whole world” as he so zealously desired, but progress is made in the 21^st century U.S.A. through domestic communist activists, anti-American politicians, and the MSM.

Communism, conceived as a world philosophy and a world movement, “Proletarians of all lands, unite” (The Communist Manifesto), declaring that social class, not nationality, not race, is the important link between humans, has killed 100 million innocents in its quest to conquer the whole world.

Krushchev believed in the “inevitable triumph” of socialism because, he said, “Capitalism is a worn-out old mare while socialism is new, young, and full of teeming energy.”

Having experienced and endured a tough life and severe hardships under the socialism he spoke of, I can honestly say that I would choose capitalism any day over socialism. Nobody will be able to “bury capitalism” as he so enthusiastically desired. Humans are born entrepreneurs.

If the Soviet version of world-wide socialism were to triumph, it logically follows that large countries like Russia, China, or both, with plenty of experience in socialism, would become the world power.

I should also mention that Lenin taught followers in his lifetime that war was inevitable if “imperialism” existed.

An interesting question begs asking, if the socialist proletariat, prompted by the elites of the Communist Party, does conquer the whole world, what are they going to do with it?

                                                                                                                 

                                                                                                                

America’s Marxist Fever

Communist dictators who killed millions

of their innocent citizens

America is burning with repulsive Marxist fever which has reached a scorching level. Like sharks circling mad in bloody waters, the mainstream media, academia, the Democrat Party, and its American supporters are engulfed by Marxist fever and stirred into a daily frenzy devoid of logic and truth, ready to impeach our president and deport anybody who is not a Democrat Socialist.

The social/racial justice warrior activists are determined to replace the “evil capitalism” they suddenly detest and reject, with “equitable, classless, non-racist, and socially just socialism/communism.” They have no idea what socialism and communism really are but that is of no consequence - they just want their promised “free stuff.”

Community organizers and agitators from the media, Hollywood, academia, Democrat Socialist and Communist Congresspeople, and the Communist Party USA are telling them that in Marxist utopia they will never have to lift another finger to provide for themselves, the government will do it for them. It sounds intoxicating and enticing to useful idiots and low information voters - except that it is one big, fat lie.

Some Americans have always been in love with Bolshevism and Communism, stemming from their ignorance, naivete, and gullibility. Past and present Americans have chosen to visit Cuba and Russia with a large entourage or to move permanently to the former Soviet Union, praising their socialist/communist blissful and superior way of life.

Aside from Democrat presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, who chose to honeymoon in the former Soviet Union and praised its clean metro and cheap concert tickets (government subsidized), many groups of Americans moved to Stalin’s “paradise” after the Russian Revolution. None were as famous as the Finnish Americans.

The New York Times wrote on August 24, 1931 that “6,000 Americans will work in Russia;” Peter Filene wrote about “Americans and the Soviet Experiment, 1917-1933;” and Andrea Graziosi wrote about “Foreign Workers in Soviet Russia, 1920-1940: Their Experience and Their Legacy.”

Who were these idealistic Americans who chose to move to the former Soviet Union despite warnings from our government to stay away from the scourge called Bolshevism?

The first group, according to Susan Jacoby and Yelena Khanga, writing in Soul to soul: A Black Russian American family, was comprised of black Americans, “communists and non-communists, [who] were recruited as agricultural experts to Central Asia to aid in cotton production.”

Another group was comprised of foreigners who were recruited as skilled workers and experts in Ukraine and Ural Mountains (Kharkov, Cheliabinsk, Mangitogorsk, Kuznetsk) to work on large industrial construction projects. John Scott wrote about this experience in his book, Behind the Urals: An American in Russia’s City of Steel.

Jewish Americans migrated to Eastern Siberia to the Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobidzhan created in 1931 by Stalin for them. The area was located just north of Manchuria. Robert Weinberg described its establishment and history in his book, Stalin’s Forgotten Zion: Birobidzhan and the Making of a Soviet Jewish Homeland: An Illustrated History, 1928-1996.

The fourth group, Finnish Americans, encompassed, along with Finnish Canadians, 25 percent of the foreign labor force in Karelia, a region in northwest Russia which bordered Finland. Lawrence and Sylvia Hokkanen described them in Karelia: A Finnish American Couple in Stalin’s Russia.

According to Emily Weidenhamer, writing on December 12, 2005 in geohistory. today, these Americans chose to go to the Soviet Union because of the labor situation in America following the Great Depression. Many were promised employment in the Soviet Union and a better life and success. https://geohistory.today/finnish-americans-ussr-disillusionment/

But the Finnish Americans were already wealthy, they did not leave for economic reasons. They owned “homes, cars, farm equipment, and the like. They paid their own way to the Soviet Union, and they emigrated with entire families.” It is safe to speculate that they were motivated by their political beliefs.

Mark Stodghill quoted Mayme Sevander in “Harsh Lessons in Idealism,” who said, “We were not traitors. It must be understood that we were the children of idealists. Their idealism was worded in communist ideals – that there should be equality for all.” (Duluth News Tribune, Dec. 15, 1996, p. 1E)

Emily Weidenhamer wrote that “The Finnish American community in the United States was often politically radical, heavily influenced by left-wing socialist and communist movements. This trend was rooted, in part, in the Finnish national awakening,” an outlet for the Finnish immigrants who labored in lumber camps and mines under horrible working conditions. The anger that they and other foreign immigrants had to endure such unfair working conditions expressed itself in membership in radical political movements, labor unions, socialism, and communism. (Eugene Van Cleef, The Finn in America, pp. 28-29)

According to Carl Ross, the non-political Finns, conservative members of the Lutheran Church, who disliked the radical movement which tainted all Finns, were alleged to have petitioned the immigration officials to deny Finnish socialists’ entrance to the United States.

Mayme Sevander’s father is alleged to have said to potential Finnish recruits:

“Karelia… needs strong workers who know how to chop trees and dig ore and build houses and grow food. Isn’t that what we Finns have been doing in the United States for the past thirty years? And wouldn’t it be wonderful to do that same work in a country that needs you, a country where there is no ruling class, no rich industrialists or kings or czars to tell you what to do? Just workers toiling together for the common good?” (Mayme Sevander, They Took My Father, p. 19)

As it turned out, the Finns discovered rather quickly that there were two classes, the proletariat and the communist apparatchiks, there was a ruler, Stalin and the Communist Party’s Politburo, and the common good was not common, it was the good of the Communist Party elites. And the proletariat had to toil hard for equal and paltry wages.

The departing Finns who caught the “Karelian fever” appealed to “comrades” left behind to rally around communists in America:

“We the undersigned, leaving behind this country of capitalistic exploitations, are headed for the Soviet Union where the working class is in power and where it is building a socialistic society. We appeal to you, comrades, who are staying behind, to rally round communist slogans, to work efficiently to overthrow capitalism and create the foundation of a Republic of Labor.”

As many who have experienced communism, we can only imagine what had happened to the foreigners who chose to move to and stay in the Soviet Union. They experienced the human cost of Stalin’s forced collectivization and pogrom against the kulaks, peasants who owned their farm and could hire labor.

Kaarlo Tuomi wrote:

“All the stations were packed with hordes of exiled peasants from the steppes of Russia and Ukraine… They were literally dying of starvation before our eyes; rags hung on one, and the silent entreaty of the children was unbearable as they went back and forth through the train begging for bread… ‘You can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs,’ Lenin once quipped, and we accepted this grimly. But it was easier to joke about broken eggs than to see broken people and hear their pitiful cries.” (quoted by Widenhamer from Kaarlo Tuomi, pp. 121-122)

The Finns eventually fell victims to Soviet xenophobia and forced Russification, many being tricked into changing their citizenship. A large portion disappeared in gulags and other prisons, never to be seen again. Some were lucky and were able to reclaim their American citizenship and return to the safety of the capitalist U.S.

Anything Finnish was outlawed eventually by the Soviets. Arrests and purges followed in order to force the Finnish group to comply with Stalinism. If both parents were arrested, younger children were placed in orphanages and the “children lost their ethnic identity.”

A study published in Finland in 1934 described that the Finns had been so deceived by the Soviet utopia that “even the most red-hot communists have turned snowy white in their political opinions in a very brief period.”

Michael Gelb wrote in 1993 Karelian Fever: The Finnish Immigrant Community During Stalin’s Purges that “virtually all those who could leave Karelia did.”

After the communist Finns realized what Soviet life was really like, how dreadful and dreary, many returned to the capitalist America. Perhaps more Finns would have gone back but Russian authorities held their Soviet passports and did not allow them to go back to the United States.

Under communism, if one was issued a passport and visa for a specific trip, once they returned, if they were not able or smart enough to defect to the West, they had to surrender the passport to the police. A trip and the visa had to be approved months prior to departure and most of the time the petitions were denied.

The excited Finnish communists who left capitalism in America in order to build socialism in the Soviet Union quickly learned that it was a system based on fear and imprisonment of body, mind, and soul.

Mayme Sevander was unable to suitably describe the deep-seated fear but she admitted that “Russians’ lives have been ruled by fear since the days of Ivan the Terrible. As adopted Russians, we American Finns shared that fear.”

Determined to repeat disastrous Marxist history, today’s American communists and other low information agitators, activists, and voters, who plan to replace capitalism with socialism, are carrying the Bolshevik torch and the same Karelian communist fever from the turn of the 20^th century.  

                                                                                               

Beach and the Bikini

Louis Reard and the bikini

Wikipedia photo

I remember the two-piece swimsuits of my youth, hard to find and quite demure by today’s standards but shocking by early 20^th century modest attire.  When women dared for the first time to wear a one-piece bathing suit and later a two-piece swimsuit to the beach, it was quite radical and scandalous.

Historically, evidence has been found of bathing suit-style clothing in 5600 B.C. and at athletic events in Rome. The most famous and best-preserved evidence discovered consists of the mosaics in Villa Romana del Casale.

Quite fitting, the Villa Romana del Casale, an elaborate fourth century A.D. Roman villa, was found about 3 km from the town of Piazza Armerina, Sicily, a place bathed in sunshine, resplendent with beaches, and a balmy Mediterranean climate.

Photo: italianways.com

In modern times, women used two-piece bathing suits as early as the 1930s, but the infamous bikini did not appear on the beach scene until 1946, the creation of a Frenchman, Louis Reard, an automobile and clothing designer.

He dressed a nude dancer from the Casino de Paris, Micheline, in a two-piece bathing suit on July 1946 and introduced her to the public at Piscine Molitor, a popular and fashionable public pool in Paris. It happened three weeks after atomic bomb tests were conducted by the United States on the Marshall Islands Pacific atoll named Bikini, so he decided to name his creation “the bikini.”

The amount of fabric used for such a piece of clothing varies today on the amount of covering it offers to the chest and to the bottom area. The most recent swimsuits are just G-strings, exposing plenty of the human anatomy. However, it is still modest by European nude beach rules.

Going to an American beach today is an interesting fashion show both in clothing choices or lack thereof and in artistic tattoos on various parts of the beach goer’s bodies.

Young and nubile women are sporting naked rears, their breasts spilling out of tiny strips and other unmentionables barely covered, stretching provocatively in the sand to the delight of ogling men who enjoy the narcissistic show. One can barely blame them as so much is on display and beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.

At the other extreme, women in full burkas with their kids and husbands in tow, sweating in black, covered from head to tow while their husbands are wearing comfortable American swim trunks. Perhaps there should be a middle ground between the skimpy bikinis and the burka tents.

Older men are wearing tiny Speedos, confident in their athleticism and manliness, with skin so tanned and dry that it looks positively mummified.

Seaside attire is not the only curiosity at the beach. Young women with verbal diarrhea use the English language in a way that would horrify anyone sitting in their hearing range – the F word or other choice vulgar expressions pepper their vocabulary every other word. Drinking like sailors regardless of age and smoking like chimneys on a cold day, completes the picture of our young American progenies at the beach.

So much societal degradation on display makes me sad. Perhaps I am too old to appreciate “progress,” and the new “feminism.”

Scientific Nutrition, Food Lines, Excess, and Worms

Photo: Compliments of DeWitt E.

It is inconceivable for those born after 1989, who never experienced want of anything, that at one time, the proletariat of the communist dear leader Ceausescu had to survive on a decreed daily rations of food and to stand in line from the middle of the night until stores opened and people fought for the food delivered in the morning.

Standing in food lines had become a method of survival and a national sport. Families involved their children, as young as five, to stand in lines to keep the place for a relative waiting in another line, always carrying an expanding string shopping bag reminiscent of a fishing net and extra cash.

Experiencing shortages of food because of war is something that even developed nations had to endure willingly to make sure that nutrition was available to all. For example, during WWII, there was a ration card issued to shoppers. The reason was obvious, the men were fighting a war and there were less people engaged in the economy to produce enough supply to satisfy demand while more resources were going to the war machine.

But the shortage of food people experienced for decades under Nicolae Ceausescu had to do with his ambitious communist plan to develop the heavy industry, no matter how unprofitable, and to pay off the debt to the west at the expense of the standard of living of the population.

The Communist Party had developed norms of “rational nutrition” based on medical criteria of age, gender, profession, physical condition, and energy expended on the job since the 1964. In case you wonder why they would embark on such endeavor, it was because communists do not leave anything to chance, everything you do must be controlled and enforced by law.

As shortages became more pronounced in the 1980s, the Communist Party issued new legal guidelines for nutrition. A huge control apparatus of propaganda was put into motion: doctors, college professors, the health ministry, the agriculture ministry, nutritional specialists, the communist press, the labor unions, and other political organizations sanctioned by the Communist Party. The declared official scope was to improve the population’s health. But the reality had all to do with the financial situation at the time. The economy was suffocated by Ceausescu’s ambition to pay off western debt and by his very expensive megalomaniacal projects to glorify him and his communist rule. He was, after all, the “maverick.”

A specialized commission proposed by the Health Minister in 1976 took its sweet time to develop norms of “rational nutrition.” It was not officially approved by the Communist Party’s “The Great National Gathering” until 1984. This “rational” program of nutrition led to a general suffering of the entire population unlike any other before.

People were starved but did not have to eat grass, leather, or engage in cannibalism as was the case in Ukraine. The man-made famine in Holodomor (Ukrainian for ‘murder by hunger’) happened in 1932-1933 when 28,000 people a day died of starvation. Stalin’s Soviet regime had taught Ukrainian farmers a lesson they never forgot. http://holodomorct.org/

An article in “Financial Times” of October 25, 1984, mentions that “Romania surprised its skeptical creditors by paying off a debt of $1.5 billion in the first 9 months of the year.” The same article mentions the fact that the payoff was achieved at the expense of the deplorable standard of living of the population, as evidenced by “the sad lines in front of all stores.”

Speaking about Romania paying its debt off ahead of schedule, Washington Post quoted Sen. Dennis DeConcini (D-Arizona) in April 1989: "Fuel and electricity have been rationed for years. Staple foods, including milk, bread and flour, are rationed, and in many localities even these are unavailable. Meat is a rarity; soup bones only occasionally appear in stores. Decades of financial mis-planning and inefficient industrial development have led to the dire condition of the Romanian economy, making it the poorest in Europe after Albania." https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1989/04/14/debts-paid-romania-says/89557c5f-9f4d-4810-8e15-91538f134a3f/?utm_term=.c580cd34e479

The communist party leaders concealed the draconian rationing of food to pay off its debt by implementing the “scientific program of feeding the proletariat.”

The severe food shortages gave rise to black markets and hoarding, even though having excess food was punishable with jail time. People also bartered food and services to survive. Food lines became an economic input and the “entire social life developed around the obsession of finding food.” The terms “malnutrition” and “starvation” were replaced by the euphemistic concept of “rational nutrition.” http://www.istorie-pe-scurt.ro/cum-arata-o-cartela-pe-vremea-lui-ceausescu-programul-de-alimentatie-rationala/

An American who lived in Romania in 1983-1986 attested to the many horrors of Ceausescu’s reign of terror called the Golden Epoch. Speaking of food rationing and long-term malnutrition, she said, “I regularly saw people stand in line all day to buy a Styrofoam cup with a few broken eggs in it.  Unrefrigerated raw milk was sold on street corners on hot summer days.”

She continued, “Romania was rich in oil but Ceausescu shut down the urban heating grids [villagers burned wood for heat and there was no running water or indoor plumbing] in the middle of winter so that he could export the oil to the west for hard currency.  The very young and the very old dropped like flies.  We had no heat, no hot water and no cooking gas for 5 months out of the year.  We actually saw miles long gas lines right next to oil refineries.”

Joe Keller, an attaché to the American Embassy in the mid-80s, told another interesting story about food. He had picked up two bags of cherries from a street vendor at the airport. He was having friends over that evening to watch a movie. One of the children went into the kitchen to get a glass of water and came back horrified, telling her parents that there were worms in the kitchen. Sure enough, the table was covered in fruit flies’ worms. Some had crawled out of the cherries they had all consumed in the dark while watching the movie.

I don’t think I had ever eaten fruits in my childhood that did not have fruit flies’ worms. It was extra protein. Years later I wrote a story about that called Wormy Banana. https://ileanawrites.blogspot.com/2012/06/wormy-banana.html

Unscientific and chaotic means of running the socialist economy gave rise to decades of misery caused entirely by the communist dictatorship with its “golden” dear leader Ceausescu and his wife Elena.

The arbitrary and forced industrialization of Romania under his reign of terror gave rise to industrial giants which produced goods inefficiently, with massive energy consumption, massive raw material use, and high costs at the expense of the destitute people. Food and water were always rationed and in short supply and electricity and thermal energy were delivered arbitrarily on the whims of the apparatchiks in charge.

Nobody dared to object as the communist ideology ruled supreme. This perverse philosophy intended to shape the “new man,” a human being willing to enthusiastically approve and cheer the dictator’s random and destructive political and economic decisions.

Copying North Korea and China, Ceausescu developed his cult of personality. Millions were required to idolize and sing praises to the dear leader and his wife. Revisionist history placed him and his wife in the hall of revolutionaries, turning them into “the mother and father of the country.” Ceausescu, with just an elementary education, became the Honorary President of the Academy. https://istoriiregasite.wordpress.com/2012/06/16/romania-in-timpul-regimului-ceausescu/

While malnourished proletarians lived in Spartan conditions, barely heated concrete block apartments often without hot water and even cold water, the dear leader was chauffeured to different residences and his family luxuriated in the “Spring Palace” in Bucharest, built in the mid-60s.  This permanent family residence was decorated with one of a kind gold leaf mosaics, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, mahogany, rose, and teakwood furniture, hand-made brocaded draperies and tapestries, an extensive collection of original paintings and sculptures by famous Romanian artists, a trophy room, a wine cellar, and a bunker. There was Limoges, Baccarat, Mainz and other expensive porcelains and crystals. The 5,000 square meters residence had 170 rooms spread on two levels and a basement (88 rooms). His Swiss bank account was flush with millions of dollars. https://www.punctul.ro/in-vizita-la-fosta-resedinta-a-familiei-nicolae-ceausescu/

While the proletariat stood in food lines, subjected to “scientific nutrition,” the communists engaged in obscene excesses.