What is the Difference Between Socialism and Communism?

The young socialists of today call themselves Democratic Socialists. They are "green" on the outside and "red" on the inside. They truly believe that they can do socialism in America much better than it was done in the twentieth century in the Soviet satellite countries which called themselves democratic socialist republics.

These countries were not democratic; they were tyrannies controlled by the Communist Party. The Communist Party represented about ten percent of the population while the other ninety percent were subjugated by the total control of the top Communist Party executive leaders.

The Communist Party leaders had a huge standing army, a huge street police apparatus, and a large security police controlled by the Dear Leader. The ultimate power resided with the tyrant and his wife.

What is Socialism?

Socialism is a societal form where the central government [the Communist Party] controls all the means of production, the centrally planned economy, government banking, all press, education, travel, health care, all churches, arts, publishing, and all media.

When asked what socialism is, people on the street answered this way:

-           Socialism is a political party that takes care of people; you Americans are not taking care of your people

-           Socialism is being friendly and sociable with others

-           Socialism is compassion, fairness, and equality  

-           Socialism is the other word for communism, and it was horrible, it killed a lot of people

-           I don’t know and I don’t care

-           Socialism is like a worm which destroys its host nation

-           Free stuff like the Nordic people get

Twenty-first century American socialists or Democratic Socialists as they call themselves believe that they can dispense with the political tyranny of socialism and keep the economic programs and thus do socialism the right way, never explaining what the right way is.

The elephant in the room is that under socialism, economic programs did not exist, you had to work hard for a meager salary. There was no incentive to work harder since everybody was paid about the same. This gave rise to the performance motto: “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.”

Under socialism, land and farms were confiscated, private real estate like nicer homes and hotels were confiscated. Any criticism of the government’s decisions landed one in prison for years and worse.

Shouldn’t rational human beings be able to learn from the experience of millions of people who suffered and died under socialism in the twentieth century, without having to live it personally in the twenty-first century?

The most obvious case against socialism is that it creates abject poverty, loss of all freedoms, and no prosperity because no human is so altruistic that would be willing to share all personal wealth and hard work with the lazy.

Socialism is propaganda, deceit, lies, and false promises. The Government uses force to control and change society. It is a tyrannical society of thieves. The main goal of socialism is communism. Vladimir Lenin wrote, “what is usually called socialism was termed by Marx the ‘first,’ or lower, phase of communist society.”

According to Paul B. Skousen, socialism has seven pillars. (Paul B. Skousen, The Naked Socialist, Ensign Publishing Co., 2014)

1.      All powerful RULERS

2.      Society divided into CASTES (see India) and CLASSES

3.     All things in COMMON

4.     All things REGULATED

5.      Compliance is FORCED

6.      Control of INFORMATION

7.      No UNALIENABLE RIGHTS

Skousen also wrote that there are 46 goals of modern socialists:

1.      Promote Socialism

2.      Demean capitalism

3.      No national boundaries

4.      Install Environmental Rulers (green energy)

5.      One-world currency

6.      Control the Internet

7.      Establish economic rulers

8.      Economic equality

9.      Ruler’s Law (bypass national law)

10.                             Render Congress irrelevant

11.                             Subordinate local government

12.                             Destroy representation (no free elections)

13.                             Deflate constitutional convention

14.                             Uphold 17^th Amendment

15.                             Regulate all transportation

16.                             Regulate all energy

17.                             Eliminate private property

18.                             Destroy family culture

19.                             Redefine normal and healthy

20.                             Destroy the sacrament of marriage

21.                             Discredit the traditional family

22.                             Destroy gender distinctions

23.                             Universal access to abortion

24.                             Limit family size

25.                             Replace God-centered religion with Humanist religion

26.                             Destroy church economies (tax exempt status)

27.                             Eliminate cash in the marketplace

28.                             Nationalize health care

29.                             Supreme World Court

30.                             One-World Super-Legislature

31.                             Environmental rights supersede Human rights

32.                             Nationalize all natural resources

33.                             Destroy nuclear weapons unilaterally

34.                             Neutralize Israel

35.                             Nationalize all industry

36.                             Synch animal rights with Human rights

37.                             Infiltrate and regulate all education

38.                             Control all information

39.                             Infiltrate and regulate labor

40.                             Uphold all labor as Optional

41.                             Discredit the U.S. Constitution

42.                             Discredit all Freedom Heroes and Founding Fathers,

43.                             Rewrite history to discredit American culture.

(The Naked Socialist, Paul B. Skousen, 2014, pp. 493-500)

What is communism?

Communism is a classless, stateless society. Communism promises that a communist society, even in the absence of work incentives, will produce greater quantities of goods than any other economic and political system in existence and each person will be provided according to his/her needs.

In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote that property is to be eliminated and used for public purposes, income tax must be progressive or graduated, property of all emigrants and rebels should be confiscated, credit, transportation, and communication should be centralized in the hands of the state, a common plan for all production and agriculture must exist, all must labor in industrial armies, town and country must be abolished, agriculture and manufacture must be combined,  and education must be free.

“Communist production will produce a state of absolute saturation where all human needs will be satisfied. Supplies are to be stockpiled and distributed according to the needs of every person. Services are also to be made available at central depots and are to be available in such quantity that all elements of competition among consumers will be eliminated.” (W. Cleon Skousen, 2014, The Naked Communist, p. 87)

So, greed, selfishness, jealousy, coveting, markets, money, and prices will disappear? And who decides the needs of each person and by what metrics? You will own nothing and be happy about it? Who will measure your happiness quotient? Who will suppress dissention and dissatisfaction? How would selfishness be eliminated, which, according to communists, leads to class struggle?

 

Electricity Was a Luxury under Communist Rule

Today, when I enter a public building or store where the lighting is dim, I am immediately transported to the depressing life we lived under communist rule. The immediate reaction is to exit the building.

My entire childhood, grandma’s house, six miles from the biggest refinery in the south, was illuminated by an anemic oil lamp. Years later, their village finally got electricity.

A 40 W bulb was dangling from the ceiling, too weak and inefficient to even light up grandma’s small bedroom. Things and people inside looked yellow and sickly.

The six-mile road from the city to the village remained a gravel road until the communists were dethroned. The rickety bus we traveled on to see grandma had a large hole in the floorboard and fumes and dust billowed inside. There was no running water and no septic tank, just an outhouse. We pumped water from a well.

We did not complain because there was nobody to complain to, the Communist Party bureaucrats ran everything, with the greatest ineptitude. They provided sporadically our electricity, water, hot water, gas, steam heat, food, health care, and concrete apartment housing in which we were forced to live. Their rules and governance were neither efficient nor humane.

When I left in late 1970s, people were desperate to escape the life of misery they endured under the boot of the Communist Party’s socialist republic regime, but few were able to. I considered myself lucky to leave even though I left behind everything I loved, my parents, my family, and my friends.

When people thought that life could not get any harder, it did. The dictator decided in 1981 that Romanians should sacrifice more and live by the light of candles and oil lamps - electricity was cut off daily at sunset. If people had refrigerators, food inside spoiled. Elevators for high rise apartments (nine stories) stopped between floors when the power was cut off, and the unlucky riders were left stranded inside.

In 1981 Ceausescu’s regime also invented a new program called “rational illumination.” According to this irrational program, a two-bedroom apartment could only have one 40 W bulb. An energy snitch was assigned to each bloc entry to check apartments for violators. If the bulb was 60W, a fine was given on the spot. TVs could only run two hours a day. The programs were not great, but it was the interdiction that angered the population.

This forced rationing of energy intensified in 1984-1985. It was bad enough that people had to ration food, water, gas, hot water, steam for heat, and even space, but energy? While the people tripped in the dark, Romania, a major producer of oil and gas, was exporting energy elsewhere so the country could pay its debt to the west.

Without electricity life was even harder in wintertime. Heating with steam was minimal at best. People slept with their clothes on. Windows were covered with comforters to stop the frigid air from coming in. The room temperature was 45 Fahrenheit, and people had to wash with freezing water, dress in darkness, and travel to work on streets without lights. The regime touted on its national radio the “bright accomplishments of socialism.”

Ever the survivalists, people bought large bags of candles and built a reserve in their closets. Students studied by candlelight or oil lamps inherited from their grandmas.

The bizarre situation of living in a modern city in high-rise apartments with elevators that did not work and older people stuck in their apartments because they were unable to climb stairs daily, was best described by the coined phrase “blindman’s Sunday.”

The communist system was so irrational that people kept mostly in darkness could watch their dear leader, during the two hours of television allowed, dedicate energy from power plants and hydropower plants for export while Romanians stayed in darkness and their food spoiled in refrigerators in the heat of summer. In winter, window sills became their refrigerators but had to fight the clever crows.

Restaurants and cafeterias were permitted to have three items on the menu. It is unclear why there were only three since the atheists did not believe in the Trinity. Food portions were weighed in grams and people were assigned specific caloric daily values according to the exertion in their professions. Customers ate in semi-darkness.

It is hard to imagine electricity as a luxury good or service, but it was. We take electricity for granted in this country, cheap and easily available energy. Considering the massive development of energy-gobbling data centers, we should not.

As Romania has proven, electricity was a luxury which the police state gave and took away as it pleased. One communist dictator kept twenty-three million humans in darkness for years, with light from candles, while exporting their energy abroad.

The moral of the story is, stay away from socialism, communism, and any other ism that guarantees free everything because there is no such thing as free, someone has to pay for it. 

Remember that there is no such thing as democratic socialism, it’s a Democrat Party invention, but there is socialism. The goal of socialism is communism. Communists lie and never deliver on their empty promises. Communism never ends well when their reign of misery and poverty grips peoples’ lives.

Drab Grey Socialism and Communism Are Popular in the U.S.

If you ask the young American generations if they believe that capitalism is evil and socialism is good, they will answer with a definitive “yes.” When asked to explain the fundamental differences between the two and whether socialism is the steppingstone to communism, silence will follow.

They repeat the media sound bites that socialism is for “the people” and “things are free.” They do not know exactly what is free, but they enumerate things they want such as free abortions, free food, free housing, free schooling, free transportation, free day care, and free travel. None of these were free in socialist countries ruled by the Communist Party and nor are they free under capitalism. There is no such thing as a free meal, someone must pay for it.

The answers are sad, as they reveal the fact that young Americans have no historical idea about the end-product, communism, and its murderous and sordid history. They believe the media’s and the Democrat Party’s NGO’s disinformation machines that feed them lies daily on every platform possible.

Young women and Jews turned out in droves to vote for the self-described communist for Mayor of the largest U.S. city, a young man with no working experience, who had been an American citizen less than eight years. He promised rent control housing and city-run grocery stores among other things.

Communism has been promoted in public schools and in academia as the future of all Americans. Teachers shamelessly avoided teaching the subjects they were assigned and pushed political activism; they promoted communism verbally or through clever choices of class activities and assignments that had little to do with the subject matter and all to do with their political ideology of Democrat Socialism, a term invented by the left.

Imagine my surprise upon the realization that the corporate globalists have decided in the last few years to transform the face of our colorful society into a drab and communist-looking tapestry: the exterior of buildings, the depressing colors, the lack of colors and offerings in stores, the promotion of grey, ash, concrete grey, black, white, and brown, to include cars, a bothersome uniformity which I recognized from my previous 20 years lived under communism. Why would communism pick such drab, dark, dull, and uninspired colors? Because they wanted to keep the population under their control, oppressed, depressed, and sad. Everything became a soul-less grey and darker grey, barely lit train station as if to conceal the stains of misery.

I have noticed after the lockdowns that all public buildings, restaurants, fast food chains, and even apartment complexes had undergone a similar transformation of dark grey, black, brown, and beige everywhere.

Fast food buildings removed large windows and added small, prison-like windows, and the previously happy colors and signs disappeared. The choices of towels, furniture, cars, clothes, and other products have narrowed to the same basic colors, grey, black, white, beige and brown. Many excused this trend as minimalism. I knew it as Bauhaus utilitarian ugly.

The Bauhaus or Staatliches Bauhaus (state building house) was a German art school which existed between 1919 and 1933. Its vision of mass production and function was quickly adopted by all former Iron Curtain countries in Europe which started churning out ugly concrete block apartments where the helpless populations were herded into from their former homes and farms which the Communist Party had confiscated.

Walter Gropius’s (1883-1969) vision from Weimar spread into modern design, modernist architecture, graphic design, interior design, industrial design, and typography. The Bauhaus school was closed in 1933 under pressure from the Nazi regime who considered it “a center of communist intellectualism.”

Bauhaus spread internationally to the United States and to Tel Aviv via Jewish Bauhaus architect immigrants. According to some sources, “The White City of Tel Aviv has the highest concentration of Bauhaus architecture in the world.”

As Bauhaus spread increasingly across the world, selected and pushed by globalist corporate controllers, it is no surprise that the color chosen for this decade is grey and the style is Bauhaus utilitarian.

Recently, while visiting my favorite department store which was always decorated by red, white, and green everything, long before the Christmas season, I was unpleasantly surprised to see the Christmas decorations in the form of a grey table with grey chairs, grey plates, black glasses, and white napkin holders. One solitaire painting of a red bush surrounded by green background was overlooking the dismal and funereal décor.

It is not just about depressing the population with ugly buildings, cars, and grey, it is about the global transformation of the west into a socialist/communist society to better control the hapless population in every way.

The freedom to choose anything will completely disappear once digital currency will be imposed on all citizens.

Ronald Reagan aptly said, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”

And that refers to the freedom to choose anything we want or dream of, including the colors in our lives.

The Train Wreck of Democrat Socialism

“Communism was never conclusively destroyed, and it was never condemned in some kind of court.”   Vladimir Bukovsky

Without brakes, a train will eventually derail and cause an unimaginable disaster and suffering. Similarly, a free society like the United States which tolerates divergent opinions and groups, will be unable to stop the existence or the activism of communist organizations, groups, and individuals who rebrand themselves as Democrat Socialists who want to fundamentally change America from a constitutional republic to a socialist republic.

Socialist appears to be a much less threatening term than communist, and it is very appealing to half of the country who has slept soundly through American history classes or has been indoctrinated since the 1980s by Howard Zinn’s manufactured version of American history.

Socialism, Democratic Socialism, and Communism are incomprehensible terms and notions to most Americans because they did not study specific details about socialism or communism and how many millions have been killed by the Communists under the ruling of the Communist Party.

Democratic Socialism is a term invented by Democrats who love euphemisms and rebrand old and dangerous ideologies that would benefit their plans for total control of the population that would become dependent on them.

Most Americans adopt the exact words and phrases of the daily MSM broadcast and regurgitate them ad nauseam without really understanding what they are saying, and what they are asking for. Such blatant useful idiot ignorance inevitably leads to New Yorkers voting for a Muslim communist as their Democrat mayoral candidate.

A train that derails causes immediate reaction and alarm. But, once people vote for the pie in sky promises of socialism, communism, Democrat Socialism, the results take years before the oppression of what they voted for rears its ugly head. By then, the possibility of reversal is farfetched. It may take decades to reverse the damage. It is easy to vote for a communist, all you need is a ballot and a ballot box. But you need a revolution to reverse course and undo the damages caused by the Communist Party or the Democrat Party rule.

The Bolshevik activists of the Soviet Union, Germany, England, and America of the 20^th century had fanned across the world to indoctrinate poor farmers, factory workers, and all the useful idiots they found into the wonders and freedoms of the promised land of socialism. The Communist Party was going to give them anything free they desired. When the activists were met with pointed questions and resistance by the populace, those farmers and workers were beaten up and disappeared. It was indoctrination by force and by the promise of murderous violence.

Once the Communist Party was successful in eliminating several monarchies, the socialist republics that replaced those monarchies began to build walls, prisons, and gulags (forced labor camps) to keep their populations in, restricting most of their freedoms.

Sadly today, the new generations of indoctrinated Americans have not been taught about the major failures of Marxist economics and the murder of 100 million innocents at the altar of communism.

Vladimir Bukovsky wrote about the absurd theories of Marx and about his predictions that never came true. The numbers of the “proletariat” actually decreased significantly in the developed capitalist countries. Their living standards have increased and not fallen. Marx was wrong about “super-monopolization.”  Small producers have grown and still do. The “market economy” improved the “means of production.” Socialism destroyed their centralized economies. And who are the “proletarians” of today? Marx wrote about “the crises of over-production every ten years.” It never happened because supply and demand controlled that possibility.

The reality is that the socialist regime and their central planning under the guidance of the Communist Party have never been successful at anything except oppressing the masses, paying them the lowest wages possible, and making their lives a continuous misery for most of the twentieth century. They never supplied enough goods to keep their citizens well fed, happy, warm in winter, with a plentiful supply of water, medications, and other necessities for a decent life. The only ones who lived well were the Communist Party members, their apparatchiks, their informers, the standing army, and the security police.

Despite the constant semantics and euphemisms rebranding communism in a positive light by the Democrat Party and the left, we do not have a proletariat in America, nor workers, we have employees. And we are not a democracy; we are a Constitutional Republic. If we are smart enough, we can keep it, but if we keep following the Democrat Party’s direction, we might all be “Democratic Socialists,” whatever that means.

Final note from RevealedEye: 

"Accepting Socialism is basically admitting you can't compete in the real world. You are saying, 'I'm willing to give up my liberty, my religion, and my dreams as long as the state will take care of me.' Accepting Socialism is accepting failure."

 

Sunset Over an Empire

As the sun is setting, it is casting long shadows of objects on the white sandy beach. I never get tired of watching its beauty reflected on the ocean whipped endlessly by the currents. If the weather cooperates, we have a good chance of experiencing again the sunset’s beauty across the sky.

The churning ocean, the shimmering lakes and rivers, the land, the deep gorges, the forests, and the mountains, will be bathed in the last hues of intense orange, pink, and purple before darkness falls.

But the sunset of our ‘empire’ we call a constitutional republic is hard to watch. Its demise is painful, sad, and depressing because it is self-destructive and purposeful, aided by the ignorance and laziness of we the people.

Many from the left seem eager and willing to replace capitalism with communism. The answer to the obvious question of why is simple. Because they have no historical background or actual knowledge that would help them understand the evils of communism. Teachers, Hollywood, and the press have lied to them about communism, directly, or by omission.

One public school teacher in Arlington, Virginia, told her class that “communism is people continuously giving gifts to each other.” Tell that to the millions living under communism who received the gift of a bullet for not bending their knee quick enough to the theft by the communist rulers.

One American commented that her “grandfather received the gift of ‘beatings’ every night for months until he was forced to give up his farm to the lazy people in the village.”

E. Merkel wrote, “Americans frequently quote parts of the New Testament and say that it supports Socialism/Communism. Which of course betrays the fact that they have no understanding of Christianity or Christian principles. With the original first century Christians, giving was completely voluntary, out of the goodness of their hearts and knowledge of the ‘gift’ they had been given. Socialism/Communism completely removes the ‘voluntary’ aspect.”

Few Americans understand what communism is. Although they are told by those who survived the communist regime and fled it, Americans turn a blind eye and deaf ear. The most basic questions they should ask themselves is, if communism is so great, why were millions of communist subjects killed by the Communist Party, and why so many escaped and fled to this country if communism was so great?

“Communism indoctrinates children to make up false accusations against their parents and neighbors; the culprits are disappeared but the snitches are assured the favors of the communist police state. Communism destroys beautiful art, buildings, and statuary they label bourgeois. They destroy beauty because not everyone and everything else is beautiful. They have misery, starvation, and murder in gulags. After the Bolsheviks’ initial promises never panned out, people realized that they sold their souls to the communist devils for lies.”

Under the communist regime, people were isolated, worn out, hungry, and deprived of their ability to resist. Remember the isolation from loved ones, from church, from social gatherings, social distancing, solitary confinement, and forced isolations during Covid-19? We were forced to comply or else be arrested, just like they forced us to comply with the communist party rule.

Because people were paid so extraordinarily little, they could not afford to travel far and certainly not abroad. They thus restricted our movement to a small radius of the place where we were born and lived. Village people were not allowed to move to the city without the explicit approval of the Communist Party.

Information was censored, meetings and gatherings were forbidden, media was dominated by the state rule 24/7. No other views were allowed. Again, this is remarkably like the 2020 Covid-19 lockdowns and how the police state managed the population and curtailed its freedoms. I could go to the swimming pool at the gym, but I had to wear a mask.

We were worn out by tension and fear under communism and by the inability to find enough food or any food at all, medicines, medical care, and by having to stand in interminable lines for basic food items like bread, milk, sugar, flour, and cooking oil.

Remember the contradictory “advice” and constant fear drilled into Americans from the White House platform of Dr. Fauci about Covid-19? You had to stay home, not permitted to socialize, or exercise even outdoors in large parks.

They closed National Parks, state parks, and even regional parks. They closed clean and safe building facilities and brought out port-o-potties in a huge state park nearby. When parks were allowed to reopen eventually, people were wearing masks alone in the woods; that is what abject fear had reduced them to – automatons who did things that made no logical sense.

The Communist Party cultivated an environment of fear and despair, not unlike the Covid-19 lockdowns and the accompanying irrational fears created by carefully crafted public announcements and artificial decrees that violated people’s rights and freedoms. The futility to resist eventually dominated everybody’s behavior. They knew who was in charge, the police state, and they had guns and lots of jails.

Even though demands were illogical and contradictory, people were habituated to following orders or else they were refused basic needs. Why the arbitrary six feet between people and all the other arbitrary and ridiculous dictates? If people disobeyed, they were refused entry into grocery stores, restaurants, public places like parks, pharmacies, etc. Similar scenarios happened under communist rule. People had to obey, or they had their freedoms taken away for good and their families never saw them again.

Why did the communists allow snitches and their own echelons of apparatchiks to shop for better and more food than the rest? To show everyone who was in charge and to create and maintain an army of faithful foot soldiers.

Why were entire economies shut down then only a few businesses were allowed to reopen at a reduced capacity? The virus recognized those to be safe and stayed away?

Surveillance was developed around the world, money created from nothing to pay people to stay home and “be happy,” medical care and hospitals became torture places instead of deliverers of care; to this day, people do not trust them and doctors because they refused care when people needed it.

Why shame people and ostracize them when they were non-compliant? It is a tactic that the communists used a lot. Fear and a sense of helplessness and dependence heightened to unbelievable levels. Depression, despair, divorces, and suicides increased.

Trivial demands split society and families, i.e., family members had to stand apart and wear masks to dinner in their own homes, random limits on the number of people allowed to be in a group, even in their own homes, the use of sanitizers endlessly during the day and on all objects people touched.

The habit of compliance drilled into people’s minds is evident today when some people are still wearing masks, still injecting themselves with Covid-19 vaccine boosters, and still sanitizing their hands with chemicals instead of washing them.

People have become so irrational and woke that, even when presented with factual and logical evidence to the contrary of what they believe, they reject those facts and stick with their irrational beliefs.

Yuri Bezmenov said in a 1984 interview about the four stages of ideological subversion, that when human beings reject reality in front of their eyes, the brainwashing is complete. FULL INTERVIEW with Yuri Bezmenov: The Four Stages of Ideological Subversion (1984) (youtube.com)

When that happens to many Americans, the sun will set on the most successful constitutional republic in the history of the world, and the ‘empire’ will rest at the bottom of the dustbin of history and darkness will fall enduringly.