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.

 

 

 

Freedom of the Press and Freedom from the Press

Wikipedia photo

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution says simply that Congress shall make no law “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” The courts have since bent over backwards to interpret and re-interpret the intent of the framers of the Constitution, depending on who the aggrieved parties were and whose interests were at stake.

The courts ruled on what is protected speech and what is not, how far journalists can go with their information, and how far they are protected when compared to private citizens.

For the longest time, the American public believed the press, the major newspapers, beloved radio personalities whose political biases nobody knew because they never made them public by staying neutral and objective, and sources such as NBC, ABC, and CBS.

We took pride in America in the freedom of expressing one’s opinion without the fear of going to jail for their views. We also knew that, by expressing such a view people left themselves exposed to judgment by their employer with the potential of losing one’s job or of being ostracized from certain organizations.

One of the basic “tenets” of the communist revolution was a free press.  Lenin was quite descriptive in his version of freedom of the press – “We demand immediate and unconditional recognition by the authorities of freedom of assembly, freedom of press and an amnesty for all political prisoners and dissenters. Until this is done, all words about tolerance, about religious liberty, will remain a miserable game and an indecent lie. Until freedom of assembly, of speech, and of the press is declared, there will not disappear the shameful Russian inquisition which persecutes profession of unofficial faith, unofficial opinions, unofficial doctrines.” He was, of course, referring to his communist brethren who were languishing in prison for various offenses, he had no interest in extending such freedom of the press to those who disagreed with the communist ideology. (Lenin, “The Autocracy is Tottering, Sochtneniya, Vol. VI, p. 314)

Nikita Khrushchev talked about an “objective press.” He decided which articles were objective and asked that they be published in the Soviet press because he believed they were “truthful and objective.” He was the arbiter of truth. But the “free press” the Soviets were cherishing was not really the press that the West viewed as free.

At the time, Turner Catledge of The New York Times wondered why foreign correspondents were censored by the Soviet Union but were not censored in the West. As we well know today, major U.S. publications are quite leftist and openly support socialism, the precursor to communism, and censor those who disagree with them.

Khrushchev responded to Catledge that wasting money on telegraph communications and paper would harm society with news that distort the real life of Soviet Russia and slander and manufacture instead of benefiting society. In such cases, he said, the authorities are justified in withholding false reports and not publishing them.

The USSR Constitution guaranteed “freedom of the press.” Pravda (The Truth) stated on December 26, 1958, “Article Seven – Anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda. Agitation or propaganda, conducted with he aim of undermining or weakening the Soviet power or committing individual, particularly dangerous crimes against the state, the spreading of slanderous fabrications with he same aim, defaming the Soviet state and social order, and equally the spreading of printing or storing of literature of this nature with the same aim will be punishable by imprisonment for a period ranging from six months to seven years or banishment for a period ranging from two to five years.” Discussions of war (“war propaganda”) was particularly distasteful and egregious to the Communist Party. So much for freedom of the press, Soviet style.

TASS, the communist party approved Soviet news agency, said in 1959, “We have no censorship, only control to prevent misuse of the freedom of the press.”

As most historians know, it was mandatory for all regional (oblast) newspapers in the Soviet Union to publish the exactly worded propaganda that appeared in Pravda. It was like today’s Democrat party giving its marching orders to anchors on various leftist channels who repeat the script religiously.

James Reston of the New York Times wondered “why poets, writers, and musicians followed a very narrow line of work” and why Pravda can be bought in New York, but the New York Times could not be sold in the Soviet Union.

The answer was priceless. Subscribers to the New York Times in the Soviet Union were almost non-existent because “Soviet people want the truth and your papers print a lot of untruths and misinformation. Why should we force that on our readers?” The Soviet authorities want their people to understand internal and international events more clearly and not be misled. And western journalists are incapable of understanding the Soviet writers and poets’ literary work. “You understand their literary work quite incorrectly.” (To James Reston of The New York Times; TASS, Oct. 11, 1957)

A “bourgeois newspaper” correspondent not “rightly assesses what he sees, just as not everyone can gaze at the heavens and see the sun as it really is.” In other words, the press can be “objective,” but the definition of “objectivist” is “objectionable” by Soviet ideology.

An op-ed in Pravda on January 27, 1960, said, “The press is a powerful force in the ideological indoctrination of young persons. However, at one time certain newspapers and journals of Latvia were somewhat drawn to objectivist reporting of various aspects of life in capitalist countries. Weak and ideologically depraved literary works were also printed. Party agencies were forced to take serious measures for improving the ideological content of printed matter.”

The oppressed proletariat in the Soviet Union and the other Iron Curtain countries was not stupid. They watched shows like Dallas and saw for themselves how American people lived under the maligned capitalism and the abundance of food in their grocery stores while communist stores were empty. They knew there was a better life beyond the tall barb-wired fences that kept them prisoners in the communist grey paradise.

It is laughable when an apparatchik was quoted saying, “In Moscow there is no censorship. Every correspondent can write what he wants except lies.” And that correspondent would never be heard from again after writing what he wanted.

William Randolph Hearst, Jr., agreed that the free American press has a different view of censorship from Khrushchev’s view. “If I fired everybody who wrote opinions with which I disagree at times, I’m afraid we would not have many people left in the editorial department.”

What about the “freedom to listen” to programs that the communist party found objectionable? The Soviets jammed the Voice of America radio programming because, they said, those voices were dissonant, and the communist authorities did not want the Soviet people to have a “wrong picture of the American people and their voice.”

Speaking to the Economic Club of New York on September 17, 1959, and Irritated that the public was interrupting him, Khrushchev offered to stop speaking if they did not want to hear what he had to say. “The Question of how and what our people should hear is the affair of our people. These questions are decided and will always be decided by the Soviet people themselves and their Government, without foreign interferences.”

It is sad to note that today, conservative Americans have restricted access to social media platforms, and many are periodically banned, and some are shadow banned. Invisible computer censors tell us that we “violate community standards” if we try to read an article, post a photograph, or a video that the leftist censors find objectionable. We are not sure exactly what these community standards are, but they must be quite specifically designed to encompass only conservatives and their viewpoints.

Some conservative Americans have the means to fight back against censorship in a court of law, which is something the communist era victims were not permitted to do. Coral Gables is being sued right now for censoring the showing of the ‘Trayvon Hoax’ movie. Unfortunately, few win against the powerful progressive machine that controls the freedom of speech and the freedom of the press. https://www.wnd.com/2020/01/american-city-sued-censoring-trayvon-hoax-movie/?utm_source=Email&utm_medium=wnd-newsletter&utm_campaign=dailyam&utm_content=newsletter

In the era of algorithmically designed information highway, do we really have freedom of speech, the freedom to post an opinion, to listen, read, or view? When the press receives its marching orders from the leftist elites who own all venues of the mainstream media, do we still have freedom of the press even though it is guaranteed in the Constitution? What good is a guarantee if it is not enforced? Do we even have freedom from the fake press that overwhelms the airwaves, bookstores, and the printing press?

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.  

                                                                                               

Rule of Party of One

Photo credit: Wikipedia web

It is upsetting to find out that a principal asked a high school student to remove his baseball jersey at a game where everyone was encouraged to wear patriotic t-shirts.  His white jersey sported the American flag, the name Trump, and number 45. The student had to remove the shirt deemed as making questionable political statements and incite violence. It is hard to understand how our president’s name and number would incite violence. One may not agree with his policies but he is our president, governing over the best economy in decades.

But our country now is negatively transformed and divided by one party, the Democrats, who are busy inciting mob violence among their followers and even paying them to create violent mob situations in the public arena, wearing dark clothing and masks like the cowards that they are, harassing innocent Americans in restaurants, shooting Congressmen on a softball field, banging on the doors of the Supreme Court, blocking traffic in Portland while one policeman is watching, interrupting Senate hearings with chants of hatred, shoving elderly people and hurting peaceful protesters, carrying bats and injuring anyone who dares to wear a hat or t-shirt supporting our president or attending his rallies.

Democrats are masters at demonizing the opposition, accusing them of hate crimes, and calling them Nazis, bigots, xenophobes, islamophobes, racists, and many other descriptors of sheer hatred and intolerance. They are following in the footsteps of Soviet communists and Nikita Khrushchev’s “conquest without war” to fundamentally transform life around the globe.

Nothing could stand in the communists’ way. When Ukrainians refused to collectivize their agriculture, to give up their land and private property for the “greater good,” peasants were attacked with demeaning and dehumanizing words craftily chosen, “kulaks” and “enemies of the people.”

In the insane world of Bolshevism and communism, it was patriotic to kill the opposition. Stalin even “decreed the liquidation of the kulaks as a class.” During a very dark period of history, 1929-1933, the number of deaths rose to 10 million, with another 10 million placed in slave-labor camps in Siberia, Central Asia, and the Far North. (Conquest without War, Pocket Books Inc., 1961)

When Stalin tried to go further, asking permission to execute members of opposition groups within the Communist Party, the Politburo and the Central Committee refused. But it was only a temporary reprieve as the blood bath escalated.

After Sergei M. Kirov, a Politburo member, was killed by a young Party member, the annihilation of “class enemies” exploded. It is important to note that young party members were always the “useful idiots,” short on real knowledge, and long on ginned up ideological hatred and class animosity rhetoric.

Historians agree that Kirov’s murder was the signal to escalate the repression. Show trials wiped out all the Bolsheviks who led the Revolution, all the surviving members of Lenin’s Politburo. Communists ate their own useful idiots. They had dared to raise their voices against the carefully crafted cult of personality of Comrade Stalin and thus against the “teachings of Marx, Engels, and Lenin.”

Made-up, unfounded, and unproven accusations sent millions of useful idiot Russian communists and non-communists in front of the firing squad. It was a horrible way to get rid of the opposition.

It is for this reason that the recent Kavanaugh Supreme Court hearings in the American Senate were hard to watch and daunting as the “show trial,” complete with screaming paid communist Democrats in the gallery, was based on allegations from 36 years ago, and not corroborated by any credible evidence or believable witnesses.

It was eerily reminiscent of a Soviet-style “show trial.” Instead of the person being executed after the Soviet “show trial” where the outcome was already predetermined, in the American “show trial” called hearings, the accused’s entire life and professional life were assassinated in a legal system in which the accused is supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, not guilty until proven innocent.  

Even though the Senate is not an actual court, the guilty “accused,” who had to prove his innocence, was already sentenced in the blaring court of public opinion.  The precedent has been set. If you ever find yourself in a real court and in a similar situation, who is going to come to your defense when you are already deemed guilty in the court of public opinion?

If you don’t have freedom of speech and assembly, and are afraid for your life in a public place, are you really free, or are you living under the rule of the party of one and their paid violent mobs?

Easy-Cheesy Socialist and Free College Degrees

“It is a socialist idea that making profits is a vice. I consider the real vice is making losses.”
– Winston Churchill

Because I lived the utopian nightmare of socialism/communism, I think I am qualified to explain the big lie to the young men and women who dreamily and robotically applaud the socialist candidate, Bernie Sanders, for his promise of handouts and especially of free college education.

I am sure, the young  Americans, many with worthless easy-cheesy  social work and racial/gender studies degrees and some with worthy college degrees, who find themselves unemployed, will be happy to know that, under Bernie’s mega trillions economic plan, they will find themselves unemployed for free, no college debt. They will “Feel the Bern” of socialism and rejoice in it.

Education, like medical care, was free, but it came with huge strings attached and it was not worth much because the pay was equal, regardless of effort. And you had to go where the government decided to send you in order to pay back your indebtedness to government. Nothing was free, just because they said it was free, it was basic economics, even though socialists called it something else.

If you were an educator, you had to teach in a small and remote village without roads, running water, and electricity, housed in some primitive home with a thatched roof. If you were a doctor, you had to practice for years in a far-away community who had never seen a nurse in their lives or the inside of a hospital.

To get to your assigned post, you had to travel the last leg of your trip in an oxen-pulled wagon.  If you were an engineer, you had to go by train to different locations around the country where the dear leader was building his latest megalomaniacal projects. Nobody ate for free! You had to work, even if it was just sweeping streets, planting trees, weeding the fields, gathering crops, or digging ditches. Nobody was too educated for menial labor.

Before you were able to enter the university, you had to pass the muster of many examination boards, starting in middle school and college. If your grades were good, that was not enough; your communist pedigree and activism had to equally match your academic performance. If your parents were not members in good standing with the communist party and licked their boots, it did not matter how smart you were or how perfect your grades were. Your chance of getting in was slim to none. On the other hand, students who barely passed in high school but were children of prominent communist party leaders got in first. Membership in the communist elite had its privileges.

Free Castro-style medical care was one of the staples of socialism but it came with rationing of care, unqualified personnel, bribes to be seen on time or first, rationing of drugs, empty pharmacy shelves, and early and unnecessary death at the hands of uncaring and half-baked doctors and atrocious hospital conditions.

You should ask yourselves, if socialist health care is so great, why do Hollywood elites and wealthy foreigners seek treatment for their serious illnesses at the best hospitals money can buy in the United States? Why are they not going to Cuba? Michael Moore spoke non-stop about the superiority of Castro’s medical care when compared to our evil capitalist healthcare.

Did we get free cable? Not really, we got two channels daily and one educational channel at certain hours. And we had to pay every month voluntarily. Inspectors would show up unannounced randomly to check our passbook to make sure all the payment stamps were in order for both TV and radio subscriptions. Nobody got to listen to the dear leader’s Pinocchio speeches for free or to classical music.

We did get subsidized housing because salaries were so equally low. It wasn’t much space, 300-400 square feet, the size of a nice hotel room today, but it was in brand-new, concrete block apartments, with wonderful stairs we had to take turns to sweep and mop, and no elevators. The proletariat needed a good workout every day, going up and down.

Not only will you not get a free Prius or Smart Car, you will be lucky to ride the public transportation for a subsidized fee. We got to ride on buses with subsidized fares or we could walk as far as our feet could carry us. Biking was a daredevil’s adventure – many riders and pedestrians were run over by cars and buses. Life was pretty worthless in those times. Offenders still went to jail though.  And bikes disappeared before you could say “stolen.”

Dormitories looked like army barracks, with walls peeling paint like a bad manicure, and furnished with WWII-like era beds with chicken wire. University cafeterias served the standard fare, cabbage or soup with a few pieces of meat floating on top and plenty of cooking rapeseed oil and garlic to drown the lack of taste. Bread was plentiful, hard as a rock, and difficult to chew.

We got to go to the movies in a large group for one leu a viewing because we were so poor. It was the commie’s way to pacify the oppressed and throw them a bone once in a while in the form of subsidized movies, a concert, or a play. Only the elites could afford such entertainment on a regular basis.

For those of you young and entitled Americans who like the idea of anything free, especially marijuana clinics, rest-assured that, under communism, you will be put in jail for any drug use and they will lose the key forever.

There was plenty of booze and cigarettes but income was so equally low, you had to give up other important staples in order to buy them. You could drown your miserable life and sorrow in cheap vodka or home-made “tzuica” and darken your lungs with economical “Marasesti” cigarettes. It is still quite fashionable to smoke all over Europe today. You cannot look cool and sophisticated without a lit cigarette and a cup of very bitter and thick coffee.

But don’t take my word for it, vote for Bernie Sanders or his Democrat Alinsky-style adversary, and you shall “Feel the Bern” while you stand in line in sub-zero temperatures to get your “free” welfare rations.

For all my “free” education I received under communism, I had to pay the state back the sum they decided it was worth, once I left the country to live free in the United States. Why should the “capitalist pigs and spies” benefit from my excellent communist education?

Freedom has a heavy price but young people are mesmerized by the empty words of current communists because they never studied their history or forgot what little they did know and are now going to repeat it, with disastrous results.

And those of you who are so accustomed to smart phones, iPad, iPhone, blackberries, laptops, and other gadgets, Smart Cars, your expensive bikes, remember that equal and meager pay will not buy you such luxuries. And, if you are on welfare and the government is providing them, they can be taken away just as easily as they are given.

Look at the “free” healthcare you are now getting under Obamacare for a hefty monthly premium, huge deductions, and large fines for non-compliance (in 2016, $695 or 2.5% of income, whichever is greater), if you are lucky to find a physician who will accept your worthless government insurance, or find a qualified specialist within your area. Stories of the victims of such socialist healthcare are beginning to filter through the Internet.

The fact that Stalinists, Leninists, and Bolsheviks cannot possibly deliver on any of their promises is exemplified by Dr. Aurel Mircea, a medical doctor, who grew up under communism and eventually fled to freedom in the United States.

“The founders of European Socialism, the Marxist-Leninist scholars, all a bunch of ideologues without the slightest experience in job-creation, advocated free education from k-12 and college. When the communist economies held a tight grip on the people’s lives, the slogan promulgated all over was “Social Equality.” Sure, by then, everybody was equally miserable and poor. As far as the education was concerned, everyone was equally brainwashed and forced to accept revised history, junk science, fabricated political data, and submission to the rules of the Proletarian Dictatorship. The trend still continues to this day, all over the word, shrewdly disguised as new democracies and social justice.”

 

The Armenian Genocide

“Around the world, Christians are facing violence, persecution, brutality in a way we have not seen in generations.”  – Rey Flores, “The Wanderer”

A New York Times article published
December 15, 2015

The hypocritical “war on women” movement is deafly silent, no real effort to save the captives, and good men are doing nothing when faced daily with photographs of Christian hostages on their knees, clad in orange jumpsuits, about to be beheaded, when women and girls are kidnapped, raped, genitally mutilated by ISIS, and driven into a life of slavery as forced converts to Islam.

One year later, the Clarion Project says, “ #BringBackOurGirls” are still sex slaves to Boko Haram, sold into slavery for 2,000 rials each, about $12. www.clarionproject.org/bring-back-our-girls-one-year-later-still-slaves-boko-haram

The Christian genocide continues unabated. ISIS is demanding $100,000 per hostage, for the 250-300 Assyrians who were captured in the Hasaka province. http://www.cbn.com/world/2015/ISIS-Demands-30-Million-to-Release-Christians?

The Pope spoke about the Armenian genocide during Mass in the Armenian Catholic rite at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.  Church leaders and the Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan were in attendance. He spoke about humanity witnessing “three massive and unprecedented tragedies” in the 20^th century.  “The first, which is widely considered, ‘the first genocide of the 20^th century,’ struck your own Armenian people,” he said. The Nazi Holocaust and Stalin’s mass killings were followed by other genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Burundi, and Bosnia.

As Christians, it is our duty and responsibility to keep alive the memories of those killed, the Pope said. “Concealing or denying evil is like allowing a wound to keep bleeding without bandaging it,” Pope Francis continued.

BBC News reported on April 12, 2015 that Turkey was angry with Pope Francis’ description of the mass killings of Armenians under Ottoman rule in WWI as “genocide.”  Turkey plays down the genocide as smaller numbers of deaths resulting from the WWI clashes in which ethnic Turks have also suffered.  Most Western scholars regard the 1.5 million Armenians civilians, who were deliberately deported between 1915-1916 to desert regions where they succumbed to starvation and thirst, as genocide. “Thousands also died in massacres.” Countries like Belgium, Canada, Argentina, France, Italy, Russia, and Uruguay recognize the mass killings of Armenians as genocide. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-32272604

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan offered condolences in 2014 for the first time to the grandchildren of all the Armenians who were massacred in 1915. This year marks a century since the atrocities were committed, and,  until all countries recognize that the genocide had occurred, it is an incomplete mourning exacerbated by the denial stories to this day. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/23/turkey-erdogan-condolences-armenian-massacre

Why were Armenians massacred by the Turks? To understand the reason, you must understand who the Armenians were, how, and why they lived under the Ottoman Empire, and their status as non-Muslims, “non-believers,” and second-class citizens.

Armenians are ancient people who lived in Anatolia some 2500 years ago. They had their own distinctive alphabet and culture. There are 6 to 7 million Armenians today, half living in the Republic of Armenia, while the rest are scattered in the U.S., Russia, France, Lebanon, and Syria.

In the year 301 A.D., the King of Armenia was the first ruler to adopt Christianity as the official state religion, even before the Roman Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity. Captured by the Ottoman Empire in the 15^th century, Armenia was absorbed into the Islamic Ottoman Empire, along with a large swath of European lands. As subject of the Sultan, Armenians had less freedom, had to pay higher taxes, were discriminated against, and were not allowed to serve in the military.

Armenian intellectuals killed
en masse on April 24, 1915

Unhappy with the second-class citizen status, by the end of the 1800s, Armenians demanded equality. In the 1890s the Bloody Sultan who was presiding over a weak government, used massacres as a way to maintain law and order.  In 1894-1896 200,000 Armenians were killed during the Hamidian massacres under the rule of Abdul Hamid II, a foreshadowing of what was to come in 1915. http://www.armenian-genocide.org/hamidian.html

When the Young Turks forced the Sultan out in 1908, Armenians were allowed to serve in the military. In 1912-1913 the Christian regions of Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaria gained their independence from the Ottoman Empire.

According to Vahaken Dadrian, Director of the Genocidal Research at Zoryan Institute, as quoted on a film aired on PBS, http://asbarez.com/133128/acclaimed-armenian-genocide-documentary-to-air-on-pbs/

“For the first time in recent history, the glorious Ottoman army suffered a major military defeat at the hands of their former subject-nations, Greeks, Bulgarians, and Serbs,” losing in two weeks 75 percent of their former European territories. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vahakn_Dadrian

The despair borne by such a loss in the Balkans gave rise to a deep hatred against Christians, inflamed by Ottoman refugees’ stories, refugees thrown out of Christian lands, turning angry Turks against their indigenous Christian population, the Armenians – “Revenge, revenge, revenge, there is no other word.”

Ambassador Henry Morgenthau published in 1918 his personal account of the Armenian genocide. Chapter 24, The Murder of a Nation, describes in grizzly detail how Armenian men, who were formerly soldiers and cavalrymen in the Turkish army, were stripped of their arms and transformed into road workers and “pack animals.” Carrying heavy loads onto their backs, these men were whipped and bayonetted by the Turks into the Caucasus Mountains, sometimes waist-deep through snow. 

“They had to spend practically all their time in the open, sleeping on the bare ground. … They were given only scraps of food; if they fell sick they were left where they had dropped,” while the Turks robbed them of their possessions and their clothes. “Squads of 50-100 men were taken in groups of four, marched to a secluded spot a short distance from the village,” they were stripped naked and shot, having been forced to dig their own graves.

Morgenthau describes the fate of an entire Armenian regiment sent to Diarbekir. Agents notified Kurdish tribesmen to attack and kill these weak and starved soldiers “that they might gain that merit in Allah’s eyes that comes from killing a Christian.”

Ambassador Morgenthau explained how “throughout the Turkish Empire a systematic attempt was made to kill all able-bodied men, not only for the purpose of removing all males who might propagate a new generation of Armenians, but for the purpose of rendering the weaker part of the population an easy prey.”

When thousands failed to turn in weapons, the Turks ransacked churches, desecrated altars, marched the naked men and women through the streets, letting them be whipped by angry Turkish mobs. Those imprisoned who did not manage to flee into the woods and caves were subjected to the “bastinado” torture, the beating of the soles of the feet until they burst and had to be amputated.

Crucifixion, pulling of fingernails, of hairs, of eyebrows, tearing of flesh with red-hot pincers, and then pouring hot oil into the wounds were some of the barbaric methods of torture drawn from the records of the Spanish Inquisition.

Torture was just the beginning of the Armenian atrocities. What was to come was the actual destruction of “an entire Armenian race” by deporting it to the south and southeastern part of the Ottoman Empire, the Syrian desert and the Mesopotamian valley. Morgenthau said, “The Central Government now announced its intention of gathering the two million or more Armenians living in the several sections of the empire and transporting them to this desolate and inhospitable region.” They knew they would die on the way of thirst, starvation, or murdered by “Mohammedan desert tribes.”

The deportations took place through the spring and summer of 1915. The entire Armenian population of villages were ordered to appear in the main square, sometimes with little time to prepare, their homes and possessions confiscated for “safekeeping” and then divided among Turks. Once the deported Armenians had traveled several hours, they were attacked and killed in secluded valleys by Turkish peasants with clubs, hammers, axes, scythes, spades, and saws.

The “caravans of despair” originated in thousands of cities and villages in the Ottoman Empire.  Ambassador Morgenthau described how village after village and town after town were emptied of its Armenian population and, in six months, “about  1.2 million people started on this journey to the Syrian desert.” He believed it absurd that the Turkish government claimed to deport Armenians to “new homes,” the real intent was extermination. He concludes, “The details in questions were furnished to me directly by the American Consul in Aleppo, and are now on file in the State Department at Washington.” (Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story:  A Personal Account of the Armenian Genocide, Henry Morgenthau, Cosimo Classics, New York, 2010)

Henry Morgenthau Sr. (1856-1946) “details how Turkey fell under the influence of Germany and how this led to the Armenian Genocide. In a trial run of the extermination of the Jews, the Germans orchestrated the murder and exile of the Armenians from Turkey, with ‘Turkey for the Turks’ as a rallying cry. The similarities to the Holocaust are chilling.”

Also chilling is the recent discovery made by Stefan Petke of the Technical University of Berlin who uncovered rare WWII footage that documents the existence of Muslim units (The Free Arab Legion) in the Nazi army who were used as ‘working soldiers’ because they “were a complete failure in the battlefields of Tunisia in 1943.” http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4645922,00.html

The pogrom against Christianity continues to this day.

Copyright: Ileana Johnson 2015