"Struggles Come in All Shapes, Sizes, and Colors" Facebook Post Opinion written by Mimi Johnson

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2019

As the world continues to crumble in a downward spiral of fire, hatred, division, and utter insanity, I decided to get off of the newsfeed and pay attention to other aspects on my FB profile. To start, I have 700 friends, the vast majority of which I know personally, have shared meals, stories, hardships, happiness, sadness, and many other emotions, and a small percentage I’ve never met, but in an ideal world, would love to meet.
As I started down my list, each name brought back memories of sometime from the distant or not so distant past, reflecting on the fun times and sharing similar battle scars of life. I vividly remember specific conversations that changed my life or impacted me in a positive way, and also impacting lives for the better. Most who meet me know that I try to be a kind, loving person to everyone until you give me reason not to be.
When I was growing up in Mississippi, I had a hard time finding where I belonged. Despite being white, my sister and I had major identity problems because we were raised by two Romanian women, my mother and grandmother, whose values and culture did not align with Mississippi’s cultural expectations. My mom was always so proud to be an American citizen, and wanted to adapt, having left such a horrible and miserable life in Romania, and as the years went by, she became more and more Americanized, shedding some old world habits, but never forgetting her beginnings.
It was almost like living a double life; at home everything was Romanian, and at school or work I was just an American. I have always been extremely proud to be half Romanian, a badge I wear proudly, but the southern culture didn’t see it the same way. I think my sister understood this and decided that she wanted to be just a MS southerner with no ties to any other place, and I desperately wanted people to see that I was a proud half Romanian young woman.
Struggles come in all shapes, sizes, and colors. The cruelty and “isms” of the world are endless. The world handed me a dose of reality at a very young age and I didn’t like how it tasted. The name calling, the shaming, the ostracizing, etc. Watching my mother, despite being Caucasian, being treated with utter irreverence at her job, not invited to events because she’s an “immigrant,” not allowed into social organizations for the same reason, the stares in public when we would start speaking in our language because my grandmother couldn’t speak English, the way people would look at us as if we were aliens, the way we dressed, the food we ate, the list could go on. In the midst of all of these things, I never wavered in wanting to be different. I always marched to the beat of my own drum and eventually, after many years, grew a thick skin. These horrible experiences molded me into who I became as a young adult.
I made it my life’s mission to defend the bullied, to treat everyone I met with kindness, to stand beside friends who are being mistreated, to be the example and hope that others would follow suit. To this day, when I see bullies, I see red and immediately launch into “mama bear” mode. To look at people and situations objectively, never making a quick assumption without all the facts.
Why am I sharing this with you today? I do so to show my solidarity with you. Yes, you that haven’t taken the time to read this, the mistreated, the sad, the angry; I understand what it’s like, I don’t agree with it, but I won’t jump on political bandwagons. Changing my profile picture doesn’t do a thing to change people’s hearts, but leading by example my entire life is the way I have emboldened change. It’s the way that I can truly make a difference in everyone’s lives. I live this solidarity every day, not just for a fleeting moment on FB. My silence doesn’t speak volumes, my actions do. Trust actions and not momentary grand gestures of the disingenuous. Take a look at your friends list and walk down memory lane. It may change your heart and mind today, you may gain a different perspective on things, or it may renew a neglected friendship.

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Competition and Meritocracy Still the Key for Success

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2016

Competition for survival and success are inscribed in our DNA. We are born to compete. Humans who put forth more effort are more likely to succeed. Others are satisfied with less, act accordingly, become followers, and complain bitterly about the eventual outcome and their station in life.

Even animals in the wild compete for survival; some develop special skills that allow them to rule over an area or a pride, and other animals of the same species recognize and yield to their superiority.

But in the human world government, with input from the vaunted halls of academia, has passed laws, imposing societal ascendency based on skin color, ethnicity, and a certain socio-economic background, not necessarily on meritocracy.

“Meritocracy is a political philosophy holding that power should be vested in individuals almost exclusively based on ability and talent. Advancement in such a system is based on performance measured through examination and/or demonstrated achievement in the field where it is implemented.” (Wikipedia’s definition)

Merriam-Webster defines meritocracy as “a system in which the talented are chosen and moved ahead on the basis of their achievement” and “leadership selected on the basis of intellectual criteria.” But liberals demand vociferously that “diversity” and non-Caucasians must be chosen over scholarly meritocracy in all fields of endeavor.

First used in 1958, meritocracy refers linguistically to the power of merit.  “An anti-meritocratic system would reward the undeserving.” Being undeserving could also be argued about nepotism and about those with seniority who may or may not be more meritorious than others.

A bogus “white privilege” created by academia is blamed for all societal ills and for the inability of certain groups to be in charge exclusively and for some individuals to succeed. In their twisted economic view, the choices that an individual makes in life, the academic and technical preparation for the real world, experience in a certain field, investment in human capital, should not count at all. The only things that must matter are race and gender.

When someone is admitted to college based on family tradition, the amount of money a family donates to an endowment, relatives and close friends, that is not merit, it is nepotism. When someone is admitted based on their race, ethnicity, or their socio-economic background that is affirmative action and quotas. It is certainly not meritocracy.

I personally prefer to be helped by someone who acquired degrees and skills based on their merit. I want to be treated by a doctor who passed exams without correction to his/her scores based on race, who learned his/her trade by being at the top of his/her class, based on merit. I want a real engineer to build our roads and bridges, not a community organizer. I want to fly on a plane built and serviced by someone who studied real math, not Common Core math.

Just because you cannot pass a science, math, or high school chemistry class but excel in community organizing or theater does not mean that everyone else should follow your communist “lead.”

You can’t build a society on Marxist utopian ideology, it has been tried around the world and the 100 million innocents who died as tortured and starved subjects of this tyrannical ideology are turning in their graves right now seeing the Millennials who are yearning for Bernie Sanders’ socialism and Mao’s communism.

You cannot survive with community organizing and gender confusion studies. If you don’t want to starve, others must be responsible adults to produce the food you consume, the lattes you drink, the precision electronic gadgets you use, and the cars you disdain hypocritically. Someone responsible must know how to build your houses to last, your yachts, your planes, your boats, your private jets, your computers, and all the things the duplicitous rich consume while telling us to downsize our lives to shipping containers in order to save the planet.

Some succeed in life based on genetic looks, genetic athleticism, inheritance, ethnicity, or the color of their skin, but others have to work hard to make progress on their own merit and ability.

Ours is not a “white culture of meritocracy,” as a course at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs seeks to change. It is a culture of hard work and success and it so happens that the majority of the population so far in this country has been white. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/may/10/university-of-colorado-colorado-springs-course-see/

As advertised in the proposed course at UC, indicators of “white culture” are “individualism, consumerism, meritocracy as an ideal, superficiality, competition, ambition, productivity, [and] extreme exploitation of labor/resources for profit.”

In this course, in which collectivism and racism are center stage, groups must learn to work together in order to “interrupt white privilege and racism in their immediate environments.” The organizers have created another fascistic venue to express insane and irrational hate against the western civilization that pays everybody’s bills, and against white people.

The socialism that took roots in Germany in the 1930s brainwashed the youth to implement their desires to restrict free speech, gun ownership, and other freedoms that interfered with their ideas of a dictatorship of the oppressed. 

Presently, schools and universities in this country have entrenched political correctness (PC) into our culture, forcing the masses to speak and behave a certain way lest they be marginalized, converting Americans into “idealized citizens,” a mirror of Germany’s “brown shirts.” If challenged on these issues, the PC crowd labels the challengers “fascists” when in reality the PC enforcers are the fascists.

In a column written on February 27, 1982, titled Susan Sontag Provokes Debate on Communism, Sontag is quoted as saying in a February 6 speech at Town Hall, “I would contend that what they illustrate is a truth that we should have understood a very long time ago: that communism is fascism – successful fascism, if you will.”

The same tactic was used during the Russian revolution, during the collapse of Venezuela, and during Pol Pot’s government in Cambodia – the ignorant were incited, the successful were blamed for their failures, and the establishment was driven out and replaced with a dictatorship of the lowest of the low who happened to be communist community organizers in good standing.

Competitors were murdered and a few lucky ones were driven out with their lives.  As a famous talk show host said on his radio program, doctors were made dishwashers, and dishwashers became surgeons. Societies devolved into chaos for many decades and mountains of skulls were built from the people whose opinions diverged from those of the young communist organizers.

How do we change the outlandish psycho-babble created and pushed by liberal college professors around the country, dangerous ideas and rhetoric that promote and incite violence?

The college course accreditation process would be a start. Credentials of insane and tenured college professors must come under scrutiny. Alumni endowments should cease until such time that colleges become again places of free exchange of ideas instead of the radical breeding grounds and nut farms they have become. As one reader said, "liberals are two clicks away from teaching alchemy, astrology, charms, and potions.”

Personally I am proud of who I am, of my merit, and of what I have achieved through very hard work. Although there were many variables that I had to address along the way, such as the absence of luck, no college tradition in my family, blue collar background, gender discrimination, economic destitution at times, I am proud to be white.

I cannot change and do not wish to change the melanin content of my skin any more than a black person can change their skin color. Our parents and God have created us this way.  But the color of our skin should not define who we are or who we can become. This country has so many opportunities to succeed, all we have to do is apply ourselves and work hard to be the best we can be. I and many others like me are proof of that opportunity.

People must remember that we are not genetically altruistic and humans thrive on competition not collectivism. Society progresses when individuals with unique talents and efforts are promoted based on merit, not on entitlements, quotas, and inferior skills.

If we want society to devolve to the lowest common denominator, then by all means we must continue the destruction of the freedom of speech through political correctness (PC) invented and dictated by tenured professors with a self-loathing complex and now imposed by society-at-large as the norm.

Highly adept at deception and disinformation, communist agitators use specific language and divisive means to promote their utopian agenda. The novice and the naïve are easily swayed by socialist rhetoric and empty promises. It is perplexing to see how droves of young white people hang onto every word uttered by their socialist guru, Bernie Sanders, a white man from the whitest state in the Union who got himself elected to Congress and mesmerizes them with the promised Western European socialism as the only hope for minorities in this country.

Revisionist History, Fascism, and Holocaust Survivor Eva

Eva Moses Kor, Holocaust Survivor
Photo: Screen capture

As the socialist teachers in the halls of academia around the country continue the indoctrination of American children into the utopian society of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Ceausescu, Castro, the rocket man of North Korea, and other dictators around the world, the Che Guevara t-shirt wearing young Americans have made their way into West Point and Main Street USA, protesting as paid mobs of racist BLM anarchists, fascist ANTI-FA anarchists, and other seasoned communist agitators.

Newspapers of note and the main stream media continue to rehabilitate communism and paint it in a positive light, spinning its non-existent egalitarian and social justice qualities, while hiding communism’s death toll of 100 million people.

Somehow Americans find communism benign even though millions of victims of communism were tortured and killed in labor camps and in prisons. ANTI-FA thugs pretend to be fighting against fascists yet employ fascist tactics in trying to snuff out anybody’s freedom of speech that contradicts their narrative.

When history is revised to suit the divisive agenda of those driving the narrative, it is easy to see how a few generations removed from the actual events forget or are simply never taught what truly happened. That is why videos made with the survivors of the Holocaust and of the communist jails and labor camps are important in documenting history.

Eva Moses Kor is one of the survivors of the incredibly cruel, painful, and inhuman twin “experiments” which Dr. Joseph Mengele, nicknamed the Angel of Death, conducted in the Auschwitz concentration camp.  These “experiments” were supposed to discover “how to increase the birthrate of a master Aryan race.” https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=youtube+video+of+Eva+Kor&view=detail&mid=1C17F3B4891D4597EE3F1C17F3B4891D4597EE3F&FORM=VIRE

Eva and her twin sister Miriam, born in 1934, were taken with their family away from a small Transylvanian village in Romania in 1944 and shipped by cattle cars to Auschwitz. Her father, mother, and two older sisters were immediately sent to the gas chambers.

But the twins Miriam and Eva were selected for experimentation, exposed to injections with substances that gravely altered their health and almost killed Eva. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays they were kept naked in a room and measured in every possible way. On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, they were taken to a lab, where blood was drawn from the left arm, while a “minimum of five injections were given into the right arm.”

Eva came down with a serious fever, shivering in the melting August heat, with painfully swollen legs and arms, and huge red blotches all over her body; she could no longer walk and was not expected to live. After her fever broke, she was taken to the hospital in another barrack, where “people looked more dead than alive.” Mengele pronounced that she had two more weeks to live.

But Eva survived by the Grace of God, crawling on the floor to a water faucet at the other end of the barrack, falling in and out of consciousness. Once her fever was completely gone, Eva was reunited with a sullen Miriam, who, while “staring into space,” refused to talk about what happened and, according to Eva, they did not discuss it until 1985. The Soviet Army freed Eva and Miriam on January 12, 1945.

Miriam finally told her sister Eva that she had been under 24-hour Nazi watch while Eva was on the threshold of death. The Nazi doctors continued to inject Miriam with various substances which stunted the growth of her kidneys to that of a ten-year old child. This revelation was discovered during her second pregnancy in 1963. During her first pregnancy in Israel, Miriam was racked with kidney infections “that did not respond to any antibiotics,” Eva remembered.  By Miriam’s third pregnancy, her kidneys started to fail and they died in 1987. Eva donated her left kidney to her sister.  Eventually Miriam developed “cancerous polyps in the bladder” and died on June 6, 1993. The twins never found out what they had been injected with in Dr. Mengele’s labs.

A Nazi doctor from Auschwitz named Munch appeared in a 1992 documentary and Eva searched for him. She invited Dr. Munch to Boston but he declined. Instead, she traveled in August 1993 to Dr. Munch’s home in Germany.  Questions swirled, “You were in Auschwitz, did you ever go inside the gas chamber? Did you ever walk by a gas chamber? Do you know how the gas chamber operated?” He answered, “This is a nightmare that I live with every single day of my life” and described “the operation of the gas chamber.”

She wanted him to sign an affidavit that the gas chambers existed, that they were operational, and how people were gassed.  Munch was the gas chamber doctor who looked through a peephole while the people were being asphyxiated. When there was no more movement in the mass of humanity, he knew everybody was dead; he signed one death certificate each time with the number of people inside – no names, no identifies, just a body count.

Eva asked Dr. Munch to sign the document at the ruins of Auschwitz on the 50^th anniversary of liberation from the death camp and he agreed. “I will have an original document signed by a Nazi.  And, if I ever met a revisionist who said the Holocaust didn’t happen, I could take that document and shove it in their face,” Eva said.

“As a victim of over 50 years, I never thought that I had any power in my life,” Eva continued. In a letter to Dr. Munch, which took her four months to write, she actually forgave Dr. Munch in a document signed in 1995. She was immediately denounced by other Holocaust survivors for doing so. Eva explained that it was a form of healing for her; she no longer wanted to be Mengele’s guinea pig of 50 years prior.

Eva wrote down twenty nastiest words she could find in the English dictionary and then, as if she was speaking to Dr. Mengele himself, she said, “In spite of that, I forgive you.” She felt absolved that she, “the little guinea pig of 50 years, even had the power over the Angel of Death of Auschwitz.”

Eva described how Munch showed up with his son, daughter, and granddaughter, and Eva took her son and daughter to the signing of the documents. “I read my declaration of amnesty which is a very good little document and I signed it. Dr. Munch signed his document. I felt free, free from Auschwitz, free from Mengele.”

What was the point of Eva’s forgiveness? “It is an act of self-healing, of self-liberation, self-empowerment. All victims, all hurt, feel hopeless, fell helpless, and feel powerless.” She acknowledged that what happened was so horrible and tragic that it could not be undone, “but we can change how we relate to it.”

We must never forget what happened to Eva, Miriam, six million victims of the Nazi Holocaust who did not survive, and 100 million victims of communism who also perished at the hands of those elites who thought them inferior and disposable.

We should not discount and ignore the acts of fascistic violence of BLM, ANTIFA, and other groups who want to stifle the freedom of speech of those they disagree with and denigrate to the point of hate, otherwise history will repeat itself.

Cultural Marxism and the Red International Women's Day

Photo: Wikipedia

Global civic demonstrations as practiced by young and compass-less anarchist hordes has become the latest expression of cultural Marxism, an “unseen plague which corrupted America” and now threatens the rest of the western world, including small, formerly communist countries that allegedly overcame Soviet satellite status.  

To understand why I use the term “allegedly,” you must understand the nostalgia of older generations, for the good ole simple days of communism, the longing for the days when they were dependent on the meager rations doled out to them monthly by the communist party apparatchiks in order to keep them compliant and willing to be subjected to the utopia of “communist freedom,” a form of mental and physical enslavement.

The insidious cultural Marxism has affected the minds of millions, how they think, how they perceive the world around them, life in general, and how humanity evolved.  Academia, liberal textbooks, and books in general, movies, the main stream media, Internet, and television have shaped a new generation of drones who worship at the feet of cultural Marxism.

Karl Marx and the Bolsheviks in Russia tried to unite the proletariat by force under the Soviet banner but countries resisted, they cared more about their nationalism, their borders, about their economic freedom than the Bolshevik’s envy and desire to destroy capitalist success. But Antonio Gramsci’s idea, lesser known to the western world, was to change the western culture, the American and European culture slowly, so that the new generations will be willing and eager to accept Marxism.

The Marxist-Communist Party in Germany established in 1923 an institute later known as the Frankfurt School, to overturn the accepted societal standards and replace them with Marxist ideals. When Hitler rose to power, these “scholars” were chased out of Germany and they sought refuge in America, at Columbia University in New York – George Lukas, Antonio Gramsci, Charles Reich, Max Horkheimer, Theodore Adorno, Erich Fromm, and Wilhelm Reich.

So far they’ve been quite successful in destroying Christian morals upon which the west was founded, replacing Christianity with values such as “cultural pessimism, sexual revolution, destruction of marriage and family, feminism, gender identity, transgenderism, bathroom use by biological opposites, and same sex marriage.”

George Soros’ Open Society Foundations and other NGOs, injected the virus of Cultural Marxism into societies around the globe, with large infusions of cash that produced generations of followers at universities, high schools, middle and elementary schools, in the mass media, and Hollywood’s militant actors who fancy themselves the ultimate scholarly authority.  Generations of politicians, actors, lawyers, doctors, teachers, journalists, professors, and other intellectuals have graduated from this school of thought in the last 25 years.

Many advisors to presidents in Europe and the U.S. have been brainwashed as well into the Cultural Marxism school of thought. A very high percentage of my former high school and college students were products of Cultural Marxism and its intolerance for divergent opinions and belief systems.

Europe, by virtue of its location, is more advanced in its acceptance and total embrace of Cultural Marxism but we are not that far behind.

Communists who call themselves progressives today have co-opted language and invented Political Correctness, a form of language censorship, among other things, to indoctrinate the pliable youth into Marxism.  You could say that language matters.

The slogan Forward, used in the past by communists and fascists alike, is a good case in point. Forward to what? The Chinese under Mao went so forward with Marxist exploitation of the masses that they starved their own people to death. The Soviet people starved to death under Stalin, often by design as was the case in Ukraine, other times because the economic five-year central planning of the Communist Party was a disaster.

Hillary’s campaign used the slogan Forward in recent times. Her young and old supporters cheered like the sheep they were. How forward did the Democrat states and cities go? Look at the financial disaster that the state of California is and at the impoverished Detroit and other Democrat-ruled bastions, and you will understand the Democrat’s communist brand of Forward.

Democrats and the virulent left have totally appropriated terminology in political discussions. Ordinary people hear sound bites, over and over, and believe them because most people take their information from the main stream media.

Progressives are now involved in “resistance,” they “resist” through violence a duly-elected President they do not like by calling him “Hitler.” The man has done absolutely nothing to resemble what Hitler did to millions in Europe during WWII and in his concentration camps. Progressives are using “resist” as if they are fighting against injustice or some kind of oppression that does not exist. The term, however, has now spread around the world because the communist left is well-funded by globalists who want to make sure there is a pliant populace in the entire western world. The young people “resist” through street demonstrations paid by the same Soros-sponsored NGOs.

If you want a pause in immigration, for safety reasons, you are immediately labeled by vitriolic lefties and “Islamophobe” or “racist,” no logical discussion is allowed any further.

The words the left loves to throw in people’s faces, “Palestinian,” or “Palestinian state,” were invented by Yasser Arafat; the term stuck even though these people are Arabs, many are nomadic Bedouins, who have never ever had their own state or even a city.

In the leftist jargon, the words “equal opportunity,” actually mean preferential treatment to a group of people they see as having been taken advantage of by the evil capitalists. The fact that many of these people do not deserve the things they get for free is lost to the communist left. “Social justice” means taking from those who worked hard and succeeded, and give it to those who were lazy or failed. In order words, redistribute the middle class wealth according to communist dictates, while the elites get to keep their wealth. Failure is not acceptable to a communist – you must have failed because the system held you back.

Word usage is very important in the communist war against the minds of the ordinary Americans. Leftists are masters in inventing euphemisms or repurposing words in order to pass their global communist agenda. Somehow, by hook or by crook, all of you are going to live under the Democrat’s brand of communism/Islamofascism.

Progressives, a misnomer, as they should be called Regressives, are committing cultural suicide on your behalf and you are agreeing through silence, afraid to speak, pinned between the official corner of free speech zones at universities and Political Correctness at your work.

Cultural Marxism was evident today, on the International Women’s Day, a day sanctioned by the United Nations and celebrated in all current and former communist countries. Women were told to protest their importance today and to stay home from work, not buy anything, and wear red in solidarity with the March 8 communist celebration.

The biggest participants in this protest were teachers who stayed home in droves, resulting in some cases in the closing of schools. Perhaps that spared children from one more day of social justice brainwashing. Now you really know which commies are indoctrinating your children into Cultural Marxism eight hours every day, every school year.