A Hard-Cheated Pyrrhic Victory and a Mute Wedding

As I watched millions of well-fed, educated Americans dancing in the streets, cheering, and gloating over their hard-cheated pyrrhic presidential win to install the much-desired socialism, touted in the press and academia, all I could think about was the 100 millions of people who had lived and died under a socialist dictatorship ruled by the Communist Party and other millions who risked their lives to flee such a socialist society. And I was numb that people can be so naïve and easily swayed by clever rhetoric, just like people were enchanted a century ago by the Bolsheviks. I never once met an American who fled to Cuba or North Korea unless they were criminals sought by the law. But I sure met a lot of defectors and refugees from tyrannical regimes who sought shelter in America.

While a student in the 1980s at a southern university, I met dozens of people from Iron Curtain countries, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Soviet Union, East Germany, Romania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, who had left everything behind in order to escape to the freedom of the west.

We formed a union of sorts, sharing food from our respective cultures, learning about our new country, loving and respecting America who took us in, and speaking against the oppressive regimes we had fled from with just the clothes on our backs in some cases.

Now it is entirely different. Americans have been convinced that socialism is great, and they must have it at all costs, including a pyrrhic election victory. What is a pyrrhic victory? It is a victory won at such a damaging toll to the victor that it looks more like a defeat because it will destroy any long-term progress.

Pyrrhus of Epirus was a Greek king who opposed the expansion of early Rome, often compared to Alexander the Great in his tactical war efforts. But some of his victories were won at such a great loss to his troops and kingdom that history remembers him as having won battles with such unacceptable losses that the term “pyrrhic victory” was coined in his name.

Which brings me to the presidential election – a pyrrhic victory won at all costs, losing the soul, honor, integrity, and Constitution of a nation in order to achieve the promised socialist utopia of a globalist cabal who stopped at nothing to fundamentally alter its foundations and Constitution through technology, hacking, deceit, mass media indoctrination, unethical activist judges, utterly corrupt politicians, and fraud.

While America’s young generations are dancing in the streets with joy that a man with incipient dementia and a Marxist have won the White House, I see pictures flashing through my mind of people escaping from tyrannical socialist societies through Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin, cutting through barbed wire, dodging bullets, flying low in makeshift aircraft, stealing a train and braking through a barrier, digging tunnels, swimming across the Danube and other treacherous rivers, floating in makeshift boats, a dingy, fighting sharks across 120 miles of ocean from Cuba, stowaways on ships, on plane cargo holds, fitted inside the seats of cars, or too close to the engine compartment, all to flee to the freedom of the west.

I see a young woman holding her breath while the airport checkpoint officer discovers that she has not signed her legal passport. Instead of being turned away, the guard demands a carton of Kent cigarettes to allow her to sign the passport in front of him. And she complies – the $20 carton of cigarettes at the time was a cheap escape from imprisonment within socialist borders.

I see another woman being stripped of her jewelry because the socialist law does not allow anybody to leave the country with any gold and silver except a tiny wedding band.

I see people’s homes, personal belongings, savings, and land being confiscated by socialists and distributed to their Communist Party activists for their personal use. I see people being hauled to jail for non-compliance, protesting their incarceration until the prison door is slammed shut.

I see people standing in line to find food, toilet paper, paper towels, and sanitizing products, just like the recent lines we had to stand in at our local grocery store for months after Covid-19 lockdown. People were irritated and impatient, herded like cattle behind yellow lines, set arbitrarily six feet apart. Shelves were bare for a while but imagine doing this every day to get food?

Imagine the online ordering and curbside pickup going away if there is no adequate production planning, manufacturing, and delivery because the government is run by inefficient socialists in the same vein as Venezuela?

Starry-eyed people who get mad because their latest XBOX supply runs out before they can hit the order key on their computers, will discover a new reality, a reality of shortages of essentials.

A good friend, who read my first book, Echoes of Communism, was skeptical and could not understand how the entire population was so deprived in their daily lives by a small percentage of activists who belonged to and were loyal to the Communist Party who indoctrinated everyone initially into the “wonders” of socialism.

The day his wife called him in a panic that the shelves of their local grocery store in Virginia were bare because of the first Covid-19 lockdown, disruption of production and delivery in March 2020, subsequent hoarding of essentials, and when their refrigerator was nearly empty, he understood. They felt for a few days what we felt every day for 49 years of oppressive socialism. Once installed, the socialist republic rule of the Communist Party did not go away, the suffocating control grew like kudzu, one foot per day.

The Silent Wedding, a movie made in 2008, artistically wove the alleged “real” story of a couple’s wedding from an isolated village in Romania. The ceremony and the reception that followed, held in March 5, 1953 (a Thursday), was allegedly interrupted by a communist activist from the city and a Soviet officer who brought the news that the USSR tyrant Joseph V. Stalin had died and thus seven days of international mourning were decreed in which public celebrations of any kind were prohibited. The celebrants held a mute wedding.

Likely a fictional event, this artistic story brings to mind the fact that Americans are not allowed to celebrate Thanksgiving this year in their homes with more than six people as guests, a breaking of familial tradition disrupted and imposed by state governments around the country.  Neighbors are encouraged to snitch, [and they did already in New York] if such draconian executive orders are violated.

Ten months since the first Covid-19 lockdown, healthy people are still forced to wear masks for the good of the collective, not for their own protection, since masks are not really effective as it is stated on the manufacturer’s packaging.

This is America, of course, shortages of food and necessities cannot happen here, we have an abundant economy, optimists and the naïve repeat ad nauseum. What will happen to this horn of abundance when the socialists just elected will enforce their New Green Deal, and solar energy and wind power will not even begin to supply our country’s huge energy needs? How will cars run? How will truckers deliver food? How will products be manufactured and hauled? Joe Biden’s fairy dust?

When Joe Biden’s rhetorical pixie dust, which blinded many to choose socialism, will lift, they will be left with very little to go on and will be begging the omnipotent government to feed them and house them. Computers, technology, social media, politicians, and the mass media produce nothing of consequence that sustains life, they manufacture hot air, advertising, socialist indoctrination, and are quite good at spending trillions of other people’s money.