I came across one episode of a popular series, Northern Exposure, that ran in the 1990-1995. Highly popular then, it received many accolades, and the main actors were nominated for and received several awards for their excellent performance.
The streaming
episode in question, number 25, entitled Zarya, aired during season five. For
me, it was shocking because the entire show advocated for capitalism and
against communism. There was even a brief plug for the crowd pushing global
warming caused by CO2.
I was accustomed
to Hollywood supporting all socialist and communist causes, praising the tyranny
that had killed one hundred million innocent people around the world, including
my own dad.
I knew that
public school students and college students only received a cursory introduction
to the evils, misery, famine, torture, and death that all communist societies
inflicted on their citizens with the Communist Party at the helm.
The communist
ideology, adopted by socialist republics in lock step with the Soviet Union,
originally stemmed from Karl Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. All these countries were
socialist republics run by the Communist Party under the guidance and advice of
the Soviet Politburo apparatchiks.
The episode
presented an imaginary and secret visit by a Soviet delegation led by Lenin to
Alaska post the tumultuous times when the Soviets deposed the Romanovs in
Russia.
As truth has
become a victim of the lies spewed by politicians, the mass media, academia,
and the government, it is important to describe what some of the characters
said during this highly interesting episode of Northern Exposure.
One of the
Russian characters, Mikhail Borisovich, a medical doctor who accompanies the
group, refuses to go back to Russia with Lenin, not because he had lost faith
in the Bolshevik Revolution, but because, as a scientist, he was no longer sure
that “life can be reduced to class struggle, to dialectical materialism, or
any set of formulas. Life is spontaneous and it is unpredictable,” he said to
the fictional Lenin.
The show ended
with the fictional narrative that, “after his return from Alaska, Lenin
instituted the New Economic Policy which allowed for limited private
enterprise. The policy revived the Soviet economy but was scorned by hardline party
members. After Lenin’s death, Stalin abolished Lenin’s reforms and returned the
Soviet Union to ‘Pure Socialism.’”
The loose connection
to the show’s location, the fictional Cicely, Alaska, was brought about by the
fact that Tsar Alexander II had ceded Alaska, his
country’s last remaining foothold in North America, to the United States for $7.2
million.
The real Lenin did propose a New Economic
Policy (NEP) in 1921 where a mixed economy with a free market and capitalism,
both subject to state control while operating on a “profit basis.” The economy
was mixed when the Soviets revoked partially the complete nationalization of
industry and allowed a mixed economy to exist for a short while.
The show’s
storyline reveals what Lenin’s communist-controlled society wrought:
confiscation of private property, total control by the state, politically and
economically, hunger, starvation, and the lack of basic goods and freedoms.
A very
hungry Comrade Borisovich is plied with the abundance of decent food in capitalism,
and he eats the offerings on the capitalist table like the starved and hungry socialist
that he was – a doctor working for Soviet Polyclinic number 6. His female interlocutor
reminds him that on Nevsky Prospekt, he could not buy a new pair of socks nor
needle and thread to darn the ones he has.
The
fictional Lenin visits the local shop to buy bunion shields. He explains to the
elderly shop owner that, “unfortunately, for all the triumphs of our
Revolution, the quality of shoes has declined.” The well-informed shop owner
tells Lenin that she has read about his Soviet Union. “If you remove the profit
incentive, you get shoddy merchandise.”
Lenin
counters that “the middlemen, brokers, like the owner of this shop, are
economic parasites.” She tells him proudly that she is the owner of the shop. “You
mean your husband,” he replies. “I mean me. Why would you presume otherwise?” Lenin
replies, “given the subservient position of women in capitalist society.”
“You utopian
social engineers are all alike,” she replied to Lenin. “If Karl Marx had made
some capital instead of writing about capital, things would have been much
better.” Lenin was shocked that such a “well-adjusted woman could live in a bourgeois
society.” He was accustomed to Soviet
political commissars controlling everything and everybody.
Capitalism
is not perfect, but it does not deny the existence of the soul, of God, of the inventive
minds of people who are unique individuals with God-given rights to explore all
possibilities and opportunities to become the best that they can be, not
hobbled by the communist police state.
It is
surprising that Hollywood produced this episode in 1993, so soon after the “fall”
of the Soviet Union in 1990. It would be ideal if public schools in the 21st
century America would teach students in detail how socialism and communism had enslaved
and terrorized millions around the globe. This education would dispel any positive
opinions young people have about communism.
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