4 in 10 Americans Want Socialism

“The trouble with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money” – Margaret Thatcher

Nikita Khrushchev in 1963

Photo: Wikipedia

I don’t put much value in polls. They can be often skewed by the composition of those polled and the honesty with which they answer questions, however, I paid attention to a Gallup poll which claimed that 4 in 10 Americans want socialism, the precursor to communism. If this poll is correct, then Khrushchev’s “conquest without war” would have come to pass decades after his death.

Those asked about their views on socialism, generally have no ability to explain it, or why they desire it; they just think it’s a good idea and they want “free stuff.” Such advocates of socialism have never opened a history book on socialism, nor have they studied the basic Principles of Economics.

They hate capitalism while enjoying the freedom to say so without fear of being sent to a gulag, and owning goods produced by the very capitalism they loathe. To say that they are uninformed fools and tools of the few who are designing the one-party state (Democrat Socialist), is an understatement.

None of the advocates of socialism understand that the European socialist welfare they admire, is supported by high taxes and strong capitalist corporations with shareholders and investors, who pay taxes to the state in order to support such lavish welfare.

In 1903 Lenin founded what was to become eventually the Communist Party with a group of “close knit dedicated professional revolutionaries” who would blindly follow without question the decisions of the leaders. It is important to focus on the word professional, indicating people who were well-trained in political activism, community organizing, and manipulation of the masses. Their goal was to establish “the one-party state” better known as the Party.

The Party allowed “democratic centralism,” meaning that discussion was permitted within certain parameters, until a decision was reached. Once the decision was “adopted,” all minions had to follow it faithfully. The Party was illegal as they were aiming to overthrow the Czarist regime, an act which eventually came to pass.

In 1905 the Party had 8,500 members and a few months before the October 1917 Revolution only 23,000. By 1961, statistics indicate that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had 8,708,000 members, about four percent of the population. (Conquest Without War, Pocket Books, Inc., 1961)

Membership was limited to those who wished to join. “Only workers, peasants, and intelligentsia who are enlightened, active, and devoted to communism are admitted.” They had to understand communism and be “its active soldiers,” supporting its ideas as Karl Marx had envisioned.

One representative (deputy) per 300,000 Russians was chosen to be in the Soviet of the Union, one of the two houses of the Supreme Soviet. These representatives were nominated by the Party, trade unions, cooperatives, youth and cultural organizations, all under the boot of the Party’s control. An electoral commission could reject any candidate without giving a reason. The unopposed candidates always received 99 percent of the votes.

In the long line of communist leaders of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev is less known today than Stalin, his contemporary who is responsible for the death of millions. I’m not sure how many victims Khrushchev left behind during his tenure as supreme leader.

During Khrushchev’s formative years, the socialist propaganda was intended for the working class, quite a “minority in overwhelmingly rural Russia.”

The socialist propaganda in today’s America is aimed at affluent college indoctrinated Millennials who decry their “whiteness and white privilege” which happened at the expense of other races. How that suddenly occurred in the 21^st century in one of the most tolerant and law-abiding countries in the world where discrimination of any sort is punishable by law, is unclear and irrational.

The “Party schools” in the Soviet Union were indoctrination centers for the Communist Party membership. It was a privilege to be admitted to such schools, not the phony variety “white privilege” Democrat Socialists in America suddenly claim. Soviet privilege consisted of living in substandard conditions in crowded, unheated dormitories with little food, setting the standard for future modest living conditions under communist dictatorships around the world.

The curricula were composed of interminable meetings during which daily life was deconstructed into Marxist terms and the students’ behavior and attitude toward the “class struggle” was carefully monitored and dissected. They were taught how to better control “the lives of others” through carefully scripted guidelines of mental and physical oppression, depriving the population at large of any choice and of their freedom.

After the Russian Revolution of 1917 and Lenin’s death in 1924, a contagion spread across Europe - Russian communists stirred upheavals in Germany, and in other capitalist nations.

The Soviet leadership offered a new brand of “socialism for a new class.” Stalin launched the slogan “socialism in one country,” a socialism that would not turn out to be the promised egalitarian society, but a society in which the Communist Party members would be the sole beneficiaries.

Subservient communist functionaries became the apparatchiki, the bulldozing machine of control through fear, snitching on neighbors and relatives, jail, repressions, and purges. Even the Marxist Trotsky was beaten and exiled as a “left winger,” and the “right wingers” were labeled “petty bourgeois” by Stalinists.

Apparatchiki forced peasants to give up their land, equipment, and animals into collective farms (kolkhozes). If apparatchiki wavered, they were swiftly eliminated as “untrustworthy elements.”

Apparatchiki also watched one another. “Socialist vigilance required the uncovering of deviations and deviationists, the unmasking of the class enemy who might have wormed his way into the Party.”

When the Ukrainian peasants were not delivering enough grain in 1927 and 1928 to feed the urban population, Stalin sent the Party apparatchiki and the secret police on a requisition drive, “liquidating” with machine guns the “kulaks,” peasants they saw as enemies because they were “unwilling to satisfy the demands of the Party agitators.” Peasants resisting collectivization were not just attacked as “kulaks” but as “enemies of the people.”

Stalin “decreed the liquidation of the kulaks as a class,” and peasants, who could hire workers and owned their farms and agricultural equipment, existed no more.

After “squashing the enemy” of the Party, the “socialist construction” expanded by building up Stalin’s “cult of personality.” The purges that followed eliminated people and confiscated their property which was later distributed to loyal party members for their personal use. The Communist Party was infallible, so scapegoats were found for every failure of the system.

When Stalin died in 1953, a period of “de-Stalinization” began. Khrushchev promised a “great leap forward” for his proletariat who would outproduce the U.S. in per capita meat, milk, and butter and “to make Soviet toilers wealthier than the capitalist slaves.”

Not at any time did the Soviet proletariat live better or wealthier than the “capitalist slaves.” To this day, the Russian overall standard of living is lower than the American standard of living even though the cost of living in Russia is cheaper. The average monthly disposable salary is five times higher in the U.S. https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Russia/United-States/Cost-of-living

By the end of the 1960s Khrushchev “stopped the terror of the secret police, emptied the concentration camps, gave his people enough to eat, new apartment housing, and promised détente and peace.”  He even wore a very bourgeois sable-lined winter coat. (Conquest Without War, pp. 39-41)

In his lifetime, Khrushchev failed “to see the communist flag fly all over the whole world” as he so zealously desired, but progress is made in the 21^st century U.S.A. through domestic communist activists, anti-American politicians, and the MSM.

Communism, conceived as a world philosophy and a world movement, “Proletarians of all lands, unite” (The Communist Manifesto), declaring that social class, not nationality, not race, is the important link between humans, has killed 100 million innocents in its quest to conquer the whole world.

Krushchev believed in the “inevitable triumph” of socialism because, he said, “Capitalism is a worn-out old mare while socialism is new, young, and full of teeming energy.”

Having experienced and endured a tough life and severe hardships under the socialism he spoke of, I can honestly say that I would choose capitalism any day over socialism. Nobody will be able to “bury capitalism” as he so enthusiastically desired. Humans are born entrepreneurs.

If the Soviet version of world-wide socialism were to triumph, it logically follows that large countries like Russia, China, or both, with plenty of experience in socialism, would become the world power.

I should also mention that Lenin taught followers in his lifetime that war was inevitable if “imperialism” existed.

An interesting question begs asking, if the socialist proletariat, prompted by the elites of the Communist Party, does conquer the whole world, what are they going to do with it?

                                                                                                                 

                                                                                                                

Thomas Jefferson's Monticello

The hilltop estate of Monticello is not easy to reach. The current owners allow foot traffic but most visitors prefer buses. When clouds cover the sky, access is denied for fear of lightning strikes. The lush vegetation and old majestic trees seclude the manor, making it invisible from the bottom of the mountain.

Monticello’s storied existence was advertised in 1921 as a “dignified country home” overlooking Charlottesville, Virginia. In 1923 the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation purchased the estate from Jefferson Levy for $100,000 in cash and a note of $400,000. http://www.monticello.org/site/house-and-gardens/jefferson-monroe-levy

The winding roads and highways to Charlottesville are flanked by beautifully-manicured farms that appear to grow nothing other than luscious green grass on which riding horses graze lazily. The occasional vineyard bears witness to the rich soil soaked with the blood and sweat of thousands of Americans encamped in Virginia or crisscrossing the land during the Civil and Revolutionary Wars. Several battlefields are clearly marked but far away from the road unless a die-hard amateur historian does not mind stepping in knee-high grasses and muddy ditches.

Thomas Jefferson, the builder of Monticello, was a remarkable Renaissance man with a resume that nobody can match today. The principal author of the Declaration of Independence (1776), first Secretary of State (1790-1793) under President George Washington, second Governor of Virginia (1779-1781), third President of the United States (1801-1809), diplomat (U.S. Minister to France, 1785-1789), Continental Congress delegate representing Virginia, second Vice President (1797-1801) under President John Adams, Thomas Jefferson oversaw the purchase of Louisiana from France (1803) and sent the Lewis and Clark expedition (1804-1806) to explore the new west.

Although President Jefferson signed into law a bill in 1807 that prohibited the importation of slaves into the United States, he owned hundreds of slaves at Monticello, Shadwell, and Poplar Forest. None is more famous than Sally Hemmings (1773-1835) who, at the age of 14, was daughter Mary’s maid and accompanied her to Paris. Sally’s duties were to care for Jefferson’s chamber and wardrobe, his children, and to do light work such as sewing. A newspaper reported in 1802 that Jefferson had a “concubine” named Sally. Based on “documentary, scientific, statistical studies and oral history,” many historians believe that Thomas Jefferson was the father of Sally Hemmings’ children, years after his wife’s death. Sally lived as a free person in Charlottesville after Jefferson’s death.

Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr. (1768-1828), married Jefferson’s daughter Martha. He loved botany and agriculture as much as his father-in-law. He helped Jefferson run the plantation business and the often-mismanaged Shadwell mill.

On the Shadwell side of the Rivanna River, Jefferson had built two mills beginning in 1796, in the transition from farming tobacco to growing wheat. The project took ten years and $20,000 for a canal, a dam, and the two mills. One ground grain for home use and the other one was rented out to millers to grind wheat for the market. The commercial mill had the most modern machines in existence at the time for automated milling. The Rivanna River traversed the plantation and transported agricultural products to market and brought other necessary goods to the plantation.

Jefferson had a life-long friend, Adrienne-Catherine de Noailles, countess of Tesse (1741-1814) and aunt to marquis de Lafayette, with whom he shared his love of botany. They exchanged letters long after he left France. Packages containing magnolias, tulip poplars, mountain laurels, red cedars, sassafras, persimmons, and dogwood were sent to her estate in France. She reciprocated with a golden-rain tree (Koelreuteria paniculata) for Monticello.

Thomas Jefferson thought agriculture to be “the most useful of the occupations of man.” He said in 1787,”Agriculture… is our wisest pursuit, because it will in the end contribute most to real wealth, good morals and happiness.”

Jefferson owned four farms, Shadwell, Lego, Tufton, and the Monticello home farm. Overseers supervised 30-40 enslaved men and women who lived near and worked in the fields, at first cultivating tobacco and then switching to wheat.

Tobacco was the staple of farming in the 18^th century Virginia. It began to shift to wheat towards the end of the century due to soil depletion and changes in European markets.

Wheat cultivation was more difficult than tobacco; it required crop rotation, machinery such as threshers, fertilizers, draft animals, mills, and plowing. The change did not deter Jefferson who was an innovator and enjoyed a challenge.

Thomas Jefferson was determined to have an American wine production and struggled over many years to plant and replant imported and native vines. He started two vineyards on the south-facing slope below the garden terrace in order to have a Monticello wine. In 1807 he planted 287 rooted vines of 24 of the European table grapes (Vitis vinifera). His incursion into viticulture is evidenced by his desire to have an American winemaking industry. “I am making a collection of vines for wine and for the table.” (1786)

To succeed, Jefferson brought Philip Mazzei (1730-1816), an Italian merchant and horticulturist, and laborers to Virginia in 1773 to help with the cultivation of grapes, olives, and other Mediterranean fruits. The venture failed and Mazzei returned to Europe after a stint in the Revolutionary War effort. They remained lifelong friends.

The daily fresh vegetables came not just from the Monticello’s experimental gardens. Jefferson, but especially the women in his household, his wife, daughter, and granddaughters, often paid cash to slaves for “garden produce, poultry, and eggs” raised by slaves on their own time. Monticello account books show that “Enslaved gardeners sold cucumbers, potatoes, melons, cabbages, simlins (patty-pan squash), apples, tomatoes, and salad greens.” Slaves used underground pits to store hardy produce which they later sold to the main house.

The longest overseer at Monticello was Edmund Bacon (1785-1866) who was responsible for leveling of the beautiful garden terrace, bursting with vegetables, delicate flowers, and aromatic spices. “No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden.” (Thomas Jefferson, 1811)

Through his 82^nd year, Jefferson attempted to grow plants from around the world. He stayed in touch with botanists, nurserymen, and fellow gardeners, farmers in Virginia and abroad. “The greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add a useful plant to its culture.”

Wormley Hughes (1781-1858) was the trusted gardener who planted seeds, bulbs, and trees. He cared for both the flower and vegetable gardens. Martha Jefferson Randolph freed him upon her father’s death but his wife and eight children were sold at the 1827 dispersal sale.

Even though Jefferson applied the latest knowledge and technology to all his ideas and business efforts, allowing slaves to acquire a variety of skills, to have a self-sufficient farm, the plantation was never profitable. He accumulated so much debt throughout his life that the family was forced to sell the land, the house, the household contents, and the enslaved families upon his death.

The 5,000 acres Monticello plantation, covering the big house on top of the little mountain to Mulberry Row and other outlaying farms, necessitated the labor of enslaved field workers, craftsmen, domestics, free overseers, and members of the Jefferson family who had specific daily duties.

Jefferson supplied food, clothing, blankets, and occasional cash payments to enslaved tradesmen. Enslaved people purchased other belongings from local merchants with earnings from growing and selling garden produce, craft items, cash from additional tasks, and gratuities from visitors. 

When he married Martha Wayles Skelton (1748-1782), she brought with her wealth, slaves, and possessions. She was in charge of all domestic activities at Monticello. During her marriage to Jefferson, she gave birth to six children, but only two survived to adulthood. Thomas Jefferson described their marriage as “ten years of unchequered happiness.”

One of Martha’s most valued house help was Elizabeth (Betty) Hemings (1735-1807) who came to Monticello after the death of Martha’s father, John Wayles. Wayles was thought to be the father of one of Betty’s six children. The daughter of an English sea captain and an enslaved African woman, Hemings was the head of the largest enslaved family at Monticello. Hemings’ 70 descendants lived in bondage at Monticello as servants and craftsmen.

Jefferson inherited 3,000 acres at Shadwell from his father Peter, a surveyor, county justice, and member of the Virginia House of Burgesses. Shadwell was located across the Rivanna River from Monticello, the mountain in the sky. Growing up at Shadwell afforded Thomas Jefferson an educated childhood surrounded by wealth, books, scientific and drafting instruments, time for curiosity and exploration, travel, and contact with the elite society of those times. His mother, Jane Randolph Jefferson was the daughter of one of Virginia’s most prominent families.

During his five year diplomatic mission to France (1784-1789), Jefferson paid careful attention to technology, commerce, agriculture, and the arts. “I am constantly roving about, to see what I have never seen before and shall never see again.” He would take a month long “botanizing excursion” in 1791 through New England with James Madison and other trips with his 12 year old daughter Martha to visit the northeastern communities that he would be representing in France.

Jefferson studied classical architecture for inspiration to build and remodel his Monticello home. Each room is an example of the five orders of symmetry as written by Andrea Palladio (1508-1580). Andrea Palladio published his treatise on the history of architecture, I Quattro Libri dell’Architettura (The Four Books of Architecture), in 1570, with beautiful illustrations of the Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and Composite styles, including his own versions of Italian country homes and estates. Jefferson studied them and used them as inspiration for Monticello.

“…It may be said that Mr. Jefferson is the first American who has consulted the Fine Arts to know how he should shelter himself from the weather.” (Francois-Jean de Beauvoir, Marquis de Chastellux, 1782)

Jefferson rented a townhouse in Paris, the Hotel de Langeac, with a main floor for entertainment and separate private spaces for his family’s bedrooms. Infatuated with the elegance of Parisian homes, he built Monticello in that style, adding Palladio’s Corinthian order. Chastelleux noted that the ground floor at Monticello was “chiefly a large and lofty salon,” decorated entirely in the antique style.

Monticello was initially a six-room home with a parlor, dining room, and chamber on the main floor and a study and two bedrooms on the second. In 1775 Jefferson changed the plan, adding “bow” rooms to the north and south and an octagonal bay to the parlor. Ever the innovator and inventor, Jefferson designed a roof that would improve “water shedding.” Benjamin Henry, an architect, credited Jefferson with the innovation called the “zigzag” roof.

Jefferson became the architect and builder of his home. He made the drawings, the detailed list of materials, the quantities needed, and hired 69 brick makers, brick masons, carpenters, joiners, painters, blacksmiths, and other skilled craftsmen. Nine months of the year he served his country and then he tended to his labor of love, his beloved Monticello.

Many letters record the construction process entrusted to James Dinsmore, the principal joiner, an Irishman from Philadelphia whom he hired in 1798. Dinsmore taught his trade to enslaved joiner John Hemmings who created much of Monticello’s fine woodwork. Dinsmore and John Neilson (1805-1809) worked on James Madison’s Montpelier and the University of Virginia after Monticello was completed in 1809.

John Hemmings (1776-1833), the son of Elizabeth (Betty) Hemings, became such an accomplished craftsman, he replaced Dinsmore as head joiner and trained other slaves. Hemmings “could make anything that was wanted in woodwork,” fine furniture, a landau carriage, and much of the interior woodwork at Poplar Forest. John Hemmings was freed in Jefferson’s will and received all the tools of his shop but he continued to “live and work for Jefferson’s family for several more years at Monticello with his wife, Priscilla.”

Monticello was hard labor for many people, including the enslaved workers who harvested raw materials from the surrounding plantation and fashioned them into building materials. “They dug red clay for making bricks and quarried limestone to make lime for mortar and plaster. They also felled trees, oak, pine, tulip poplar, black locust, cherry, beech, and walnut, that were hewn and sawn into lumber for framing and woodwork.” The names of the workers, freed or enslaved, were found in documents, letters, and account books.

We will never know the true cost in planning, preparing, time, money, materials, hard labor, sweat and tears that built Monticello, a witness to our past. We are grateful that this important piece of history still exists today to teach valuable lessons in perseverance, dedication, love of the land, botany, agriculture, viticulture, American ingenuity and entrepreneurship, success, failure, bondage, and of human foibles.

Source: Visit to the Monticello Plantation and Museum

Cultural Equivalency

        
“Deluded, you blindly followed the call of a false doctrine.” (Milton Meyer)

I have never seen an entire nation so eager to give away and destroy their country and their American exceptionalism in exchange for the progressives’ cultural Marxism promoted in American textbooks and taught by academia’s promise of equality. It is all right for the masses to be equally poor and miserable in the failed communist societal model, so long as the elites are exempted from this equality nonsense.

“If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen…,” said our president to a fawning crowd in Virginia.

I was listening dumbfounded that the President of the most successful country on the planet, built by American entrepreneurship, by Americans who took huge financial risks, mortgaged their homes, worked 18 hour days, spent their lives’ savings to build their American dream, could say such a preposterous lie, belittling the business acumen and accomplishments of millions of hard-working Americans, without being challenged by the adoring audience and the lapdog main stream media. Instead of being laughed out of the room, he was applauded!

America has helped billions in the world with its generosity of food, shelter, money, medical care, construction, advice, exploration, and financial aid without the expectation of repayment in times of trouble, war, occupation, emergency, natural disasters, and pandemic disease.

Our exceptional military has been the “policeman of the world” and got to a troubled zone in no time at all. “The Americans are coming” was music to the ears of those in need of help because they knew salvation was close.

Search which country in the world has most patents, discoveries, technological developments, medical procedures breakthroughs that save millions of lives, and Nobel Prizes, and you will find the United States of America. You will also find that Marxism has killed more people in the world than any armed conflict.

According to educators and writers of Nebraska social studies standards, all “cultures are equivalent.” Has anybody seen lately women being stoned to death in this country if found or suspected of committing adultery? They do in Muslim countries. Do we practice genital mutilation in women? Are seventh century cultures equal to our twenty-first century culture? Do we live by seventh century rules of conduct? Of course, cultures are not equal! Just because liberals are brainwashing our children with ridiculous lies in textbooks, does not make it a fact. Unfortunately, children look up to these “educators” and believe their teachers’ constant misinformation and alteration of our history and introduction of events and discoveries from cultures dear to progressives’ hearts that never took place.

As Joe Dejka reported, “America's Founding Fathers, as well as other historical figures and dates will be restored in proposed new Nebraska social studies standards.” Their absence from an earlier draft, which focused instead on broad concepts and themes, drew criticism from the public and some members of the Nebraska Board of Education when released in April.” (World-Herald News Service, Lincoln, Nebraska, July 11, 2012)

Why would the public even allow that the Founding Fathers and historical figures be taken out of the textbooks in the first place? Because there is no accountability in education, the agenda of the few progressives and the National Education Association trumps the truth and the wishes of parents. The writing is done behind closed doors in a few large states such as Texas and California. The historical truth falls victim to the cultural Marxists’ agenda.

Educators and teachers are people who have never set foot in a communist country and have not experienced firsthand the horrors of living under such a dictatorship. They believed the revolution drivel and romanticized version of Marxism told or taught by their college professors who were also insulated from any experience with totalitarian regimes. They just thought Castro, Che Guevara, Stalin, Mao and other dictators were “cool,” promising equality for all and everything for nothing. They forgot to mention the millions of innocents who were slaughtered because they did not go along with the program and despised the communist ideology.

The draft standards included manmade global warming as a fact, not theory; it advocated for global government, the linchpin of the environmentalists’ UN Agenda 21; the draft standards failed to emphasize American exceptionalism, and diminished the role of the U.S. Constitution and of our Founding Fathers.

These liberal/progressive standards were re-written by 45 Nebraska educators for teachers of history, economics, civics, and geography in 250 school districts in the state. “The draft also encouraged students to “engage in appropriate civic activities” such as advocating for personal rights, the rights of others and influencing government action.”(Joe Dejka)

Board member John Sieler of Omaha complained that the draft standards suggested, “All cultures are equivalent.” He used a news article about an Afghani woman accused of adultery, who was shot to death before a crowd of men, as an example that such deed is not a “cultural equivalent to American beliefs.” He continued, “Standards should talk of capitalism and free enterprise as positive forces.” (World-Herald News Services)

I hope that the new draft will be written with public input instead of behind closed doors. Then again, our own lawmakers have set a precedent for murkiness and lack of transparency, in spite of empty promises of openness to the public - they have written and discussed Obamacare, the 2,700 page healthcare law, behind closed doors.

In spite of obvious massive failures of leadership, high unemployment, transparency, and a disastrous economy, the Obama campaign is not giving up its “hope and change” motto. His supporters are marching over the cliff to communism. We will keep our “hope” for a prosperous capitalist America, while liberals can take their phony “change” and spend it in Cuba.