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Speakers Nahm Lam, Slavko Martyniuk, and
Agustin Blazquez |
“Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of
ignorance, the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of
misery.” - Winston Churchill
The Ronald
Reagan lecture series introduced three distinguished speakers, two survivors of
communism from Cuba and Ukraine, and the American child of a Vietnamese family
who fled communism, to the student body at George Mason University in Fairfax,
Virginia, on October 3, 2016 with the idea to warn the audience about the
dangers of socialism and communism. The event was hosted by the College
Republicans of which less than five were present. Four more GMU students
attended “out of curiosity” and the rest of the audience was composed of older
adults from the local community.
I could
guess the audience would be sparse as soon as I saw the statue of George Mason
in front of the Johnson Center. He was bedecked in a carnival mask, green
ribbons tied in bows around his ankles, green and yellow balloons in his hands,
and various signs were attached to his body announcing a job fair. The center
was full of students milling about, drinking coffee, having dinner, and
chatting enthusiastically as any young person would.
The basement
was quiet; a small sign in front of the theater announced the topic, “Is Socialism
the Answer for America?” Apparently the students had better things to do that
day or already know from their vast life experience that socialism is good for
America because it sounds so socially just in theory. Not one professor, not
even a history professor, showed up for the event which was advertised in
advance and had to be approved by the administration.
The first at
the microphone was Agustin Blazquez, born and raised in Cuba, having left Cuba
in his twenties, coming to the U.S. in 1967. He produced over 200 films and
documentaries. He had escaped with his family after the fall of Battista and
the rise of Fidel Castro.
Agustin
lived through the step by step “fundamental transformation” of Cuba from
capitalism to socialism, eventually to a totalitarian communist government.
After Castro took over Cuba in 1959, even though warnings were coming from
China and the Soviet Union, Cubans chose to believe that nothing bad would
happen because someone else was in the control and he was implementing
socialism correctly. But the techniques of repression and population control were
exactly the same everywhere – they used the same manual of coercion.
What emerged
was a two-class system, the powerful elites and those supporting them. The
equality they promised resulted in an equality of poverty and misery for which
they paid a heavy price. Poor centralized planning, low salaries, low morale,
no work ethic, and low production eventually cause the economy to collapse. The
working class (proletariat) spent their days hoping to get food while the elites
got everything they wanted and fattened their bank accounts. Rationing of food
and confiscation of private property resulted in more poverty. The workers were
crammed in low-income, hastily build apartments while the elites occupied the
best houses. Regulations and executive orders left most of the people
destitute, at the whims of the socialist government agitators. Rationing of
everything was forced on the masses, electricity, water, heat, food, clothing, medicines,
medical care, and everything else like toilet paper.
Agustin
brought out a roll of toilet paper, a rare commodity under the central planning
of socialism/communism. I still have a few strips of toilet paper I brought
with me from Romania in 1985 as show and tell to my college students. The paper
is pink and has splinters in it. Imagine having to use splinters on your
behind! Yet we felt lucky to have it because we were so deprived!
“Progressives
kept the people preoccupied with survival from one day to the next, keeping
them busy, with no energy to protest against the government,” said Agustine. No
freedom of association was allowed, no freedom of speech, guns were
confiscated, thus making it impossible to remove Marxists from power.
A powerful military
and secret police protected the elites from the people, but the people were
told that they were there to protect the people from “evil” capitalism, the
enemy of Marxism, a bold face lie.
Venezuela is
a more recent example of the disastrous socialist policies of Hugo Chavez. An
oil rich country, Venezuela has now devolved into such a poor country that
people must stand hours in line each day in order to survive. The military and
the police were brought in to distribute food and to keep violence at bay. The
oil revenues continue to pour in but they line up the pockets of the elites in
control. The bamboozled low information working class keeps voting for these
lying socialists thus perpetuating their own poverty.
Venezuelans
tried to revolt but, without guns to defend themselves, they were repressed back
into submission by the powerful police and the military.
“Cubans
always blamed their poverty on the U.S. embargo but there never was any embargo
against Venezuela,” argued Agustin.
There are no
human rights under communism. The government dictates where you can live, where
you can work, where you can move, where you can study, what you can study, what
you eat, and the meager salary you earn for the rest of your life. “Communists
paint a rosy picture of free education, free college, and free medical care in
order to gain votes.”
Nobody
trusts anybody, not even your own family. Agustin was afraid to even say good
bye to his family members for fear of being reported that he was planning to
escape. “The people of today in Cuba are different from me, they have learned
to lie and steal to survive, and they have no work ethic.” That is why, when
they come to the U.S. now, they commit crimes because that is what they are
used to doing in Cuba in order to survive, said Agustin.
Agustin was
surprised how entrenched Marxism is now in our capitalist society, thanks to
the openly Marxist main stream media, Hollywood, and academia. Colleges are no
longer places to debate the free flow of ideas, they are places of brainwashing
and indoctrination where snow-flakes Marxist students need their “safe spaces”
to protect them from the “micro-aggression” of rational thoughts of non-Marxist
students.
“Marxism is
the enemy of America,” said Agustin. “These Marxists are subverting your
American way of thinking, the very foundation of this country.” They will
eventually erase all your freedoms, real or imagined, with the help of
Hollywood, leading to an inescapable oppression.
The benign-sounding
words, “white privilege, social justice, equality, environmental justice,
racial justice,” are a ruse that will lead to the same disastrous result.
Liberals no longer believe in freedom, they believe in government control usher
in the same Marxist totalitarian rule. They are not progressives, they want to regress
society to a failed and foreign ideology.
The gradual
control of everyday life was incremental and slow. Long-standing problems could
suddenly only be solved by government intervention; and the solution was always
emotionally presented, preventing people from actually thinking clearly and
rationally and realizing that the solution would never work. Those who
resisted, were treated with scare tactics, disappearance, and jail time.
“You don’t want these people to hack into your
phone, why do you want to let these people hack into your life,” concluded
Agustin. “Send them to the trash bin of history this November.”
Jaroslaw
(Slavko) Martyniuk of Ukraine came to the U.S. when his family made a narrow
escape from communism at the end of World War II, legally immigrating to
Chicago. A retired energy economist and sociologist, Martyniuk has conducted “intelligence
work and undercover public opinion polling with visitors from the Soviet Union
on behalf of Radio Liberty.”
His extended
family did not fare so well, they were sent to gulags, “the largest killing
machine in history,” where most perished from torture, malnutrition, exposure,
and overwork behind barbed wire. Martyniuk described the gulags in Siberia, the
Soviet concentration camps for hard labor that were not really meant for
re-education but for extermination.
The political dissidents
sent there who worked underground in the gold mines had a survival rate of 2-4
weeks. He described the horrific and constant cold, the back-breaking labor on
two rations of bread per day, the size of a person’s fist, and watery soup. The
bitter cold, the unsafe working conditions, and the hard labor killed so many
that the estimate of those buried in the permafrost is at least 3 million.
Nobody could keep accurate count, he said, because records were constantly
scrubbed. The gulags were the “the ultimate legacy of the communist experiment.”
The worst of the re-education camps in the Arctic region was Kolyma, the place with
two seasons, “12 months of winter and summer,” the Arctic death camps which
served as a model for Hitler’s concentration camps.
Martyniuk expressed his
disappointment that Americans know so very little about gulags and the mass
killings that occurred during the Bolshevik and Soviet purges. How could 25,000
Bolsheviks control 25 million people? They confiscated their guns first.
Martyniuk explained that
socialist ideas continue to live on in America because:
-
“institutions of
higher learning promote socialist thinking”
-
“communism has
never been fully discredited,”
-
“revisionist
historians avoid black deeds of communism,”
-
Marxist
professors continue to say that “the idea was noble”
Martyniuk identified
disturbing trends in our society that are similar to those that led to
communism and tyranny in the former Soviet Union:
-
Gradual loss of
free speech
-
Restrictions on
the right to bear arms
-
Expansion of the
police state
-
Promotion of
collectivist thinking
-
Disparaging individualism
-
Denigration of
liberty and religion
-
Authoritarian method
of governance through expansion of centralized bureaucracy, “governing wars,”
inciting class warfare, denigrating free markets, i.e., “Free markets have
never worked”
-
Centralization of
government
-
Loss of faith in
free-market capitalism due to crony capitalism
-
Redistribution of
wealth and promotion of “class warfare” based on race and ethnicity
Martyniuk spoke of
authoritarian regimes that first remove weapons from the hands of the people
and how important it is to guard our Second Amendment. He gave examples of the
1932-1933 Ukrainian famine-genocide called Holomodor,
and Germany and Austria’s gun confiscations in the 1930s.
He pointed out that the
most egregious was the restriction of First Amendment free speech through the
doctrine of political correctness, a type of Orwellian “1984 thought control.”
PC guidelines are now everywhere in universities and colleges around the
country. “European speech codes led to arrests and persecutions of high-profile
individuals.” Noted were Leonid Plyushch (The
Case of Leonid Plyushch) and Juan Williams in the U.S., both of whom were
deemed as two men in “need of psychiatric help for speaking the truth.” https://www.amazon.com/Leonid-Plyushch-Tatiana-Sergeevna-Khodorovich/dp/0891586008
Nhan Lam’s parents fled
Vietnam before he was born, surviving navigational errors and being robbed by
pirates six times. When they made safe shore, they were sponsored by a Lutheran
church in the U.S., and his family arrived in Buffalo in 1979 where his educated
father worked part-time as a janitor. Even though his family was very poor at
first, they eventually prospered through hard work.
Nhan Lam became an
aerospace engineer and reached his American Dream through untiring effort and
entrepreneurship. He now runs several real estate companies. He admits being a
liberal in his teens but later becoming a conservative once reality hit him. He
never forgot the lessons about Vietnam from his father. “Never settle with
being good, when your potential is to be great. Never settle for another’s
opinion, when you have the ability to think for yourself.”
One hundred million
victims of communism, including my Dad, disagreed with the Communist Party
Marxist ideology and protested the confiscation of their homes, land, guns,
personal possessions, and the loss of their God-given freedom. They bitterly complained
about the lack of food, heat, water, proper medical care, medications, and a
decent treatment as human beings.
Will young
Americans today who are turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to reality eventually
repeat the fate of millions who fell for the “pie in the sky” promise of
communist utopia?
