“We Are Serving the Working People”

It appears that America’s youth are turning collectivist and the ranks are swelling by the day with help from the accommodating indoctrinators called educators and Howard Zinn’s textbooks bastardizing history and Common Core standards of lower education now nine years old and covering most of America’s schools. Academics has taken a back seat to progressive activism 101.

Old progressives, simmering and stewing for the decades, and their young converts are working feverishly to squelch Individual freedom, private property, and limited government. They used to be the tenets of our society but now, the generations attached at the hip to their blue light electronic devices, provided by free market capitalism, have decided that socialism suits them better. Social Democrats, as they call themselves now, have promised so many phony pie in the sky freebies that they cannot resist the urge to fundamentally transform their parents’ America which is now passé.

They want economic justice, a harmonious society with no strife, prosperity for all, a society in which nobody has to work if they don’t want to. Somehow, in this socialist utopia, everyone has a perfect work ethic and is absolutely altruistic and generous to a fault, giving their time, wealth, success, and money to be spread evenly among the non-producers who just want to chill in their parents’ basements and smoke free marijuana provided by the benevolent state.

In this utopia they learned from their teachers in school, there is no misery, no repression, no materialism, no jails, no death of liberty, just kumbaya equality and free drugs. Except those at the top will be in charge and “serving the working people” just like the politicians of today who are serving the electorate, especially the illegal electorate from terrorist countries inimical to us.

If you ask millennials what kind of society they want to inhabit, according to a 2016 Gallup poll, 44% want to live under socialism. They have no idea what socialism is, cannot define it correctly, but they describe themselves as socialists.

Do they understand that socialism suppresses individuality, forces collectivism, causes mass starvation, imprisons people with divergent ideas in labor camps, herds them off their properties into high rise cinder block apartments, nationalizes all industries, and confiscates all private property and wealth?

To millennials, oppressive regimes, mass starvation, people kept in nation-prisons with borders made of barbed-wire fence are just stories in a textbook nobody believes. Have they had to fear any such oppressive regimes in their lifetimes? To them, it is just old people fearmongering, they call it the “new McCarthyism.”

Their mantra is, let’s just go and embrace more illegals and Muslims in order to show that we are good little socialists and then plaster car bumpers with the meaningless “coexist” stickers when everyone knows how well that is playing out in Africa and the Middle East between Christians and Muslims.

Young generations of Americans want free education, free healthcare, free daycare, free housing, daddy government-guaranteed jobs, everything that the Democrat Party includes in their socialist platform of the openly socialist candidates like Bernie Sanders.

Millennials know-it-alls want what Scandinavian and other European countries have. They have seen in travel brochures that everyone seems happy, have a lot of free time, work much less than Americans, and drugs are free and legal. They don’t understand that these countries allow private property, they had a capitalist foundation, were economically wealthy before they adopted generous welfare for all, and now their governments are socialist in nature. The government does not own the means of production and they are not totalitarian regimes. But their socialist leanings, tolerance, and failed multiculturalism have created unsustainable societies which are now grappling with serious issues of existentialism, threatened by the alien and inimical cultures they’ve invited in and that are now taking over parts of their countries.

The white-washing of socialism cannot be ignored. Venezuela’s situation is slapping millennials in the face if they care to look. Redistribution of wealth and government ownership of the means of production have failed miserably in the Soviet Union and all its communist satellites.

Centralized-government controlled by the Communist Party has not worked because the economic model is not feasible. Look at the latest victims, the population of Venezuela who kept voting socialism until it destroyed their lives. A formerly prosperous nation with huge oil reserves, Venezuelans have chronic shortages of water, toilet paper, diapers, electricity, medicines, food, and other basic staples. It is so bad that people eat garbage and animals from the zoo.

These young Americans have never heard the term “goner” (Dokhodyaga), a hard labor camp slang for a Soviet prisoner “who was so exhausted by work and wasted by disease that he had little time left to live.” Their standard form of address in the labor camp was, “How are you serving?” and the expected answer was, “I serve the working people.” They had copied it from the from of address between officers and men in the Soviet Army. (Alexander Solzhenitsyn, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Frederick A. Praeger Publisher, 1963)

As Robert B. Charles said, “Today, Laos, North Vietnam (former), Cuba, Afghanistan, Benin, Cambodia, North Korea, Somalia, and South Yemen remain the most impoverished countries in the world, war-torn, repressive, reflexively imprisoning political critics. Venezuela is a basket case. China’s re-education camps, currently holding millions of Chinese (for religious convictions) are a hallmark of socialism, and of atheist China.” (AMAC magazine, vol. 13, issue 1, p. 41)

The rebranding of “old socialism” as “Democratic socialism” is just an attempt by politicians like Bernie Sanders to browbeat new and young converts to socialism, the same redistributionism of private property and enslavement to the totalitarian state. If we accept it, it will lead to America’s collapse. I should know, I escaped such a failed totalitarian state. The population is still struggling today to rebuild their lives and overcome decades of forced conformity, oppression, and miserable equality.

Poverty Induced by Socialism Is Hard to Shake

Empty meat market     Photo: Octavian Paul Draja

To say that poverty induced by socialist dictatorships is hard to shake would be an understatement. Ask Cubans and now Venezuelans what is like to live in the workers’ paradise that Fidel forced upon his people while he stashed away billions he has stolen with his cronies.

The socialist dictator Hugo Chavez left behind billions in personal bank accounts while Venezuelans struggle to survive under his socialist successor Maduro, who mismanaged the economy just as badly. One of the nations with the richest oil supplies cannot feed its people and provide basic goods that Americans take for granted, bread, milk, butter, diapers, detergent, just to name a few, and must spend hours each day in endless lines to find what they need if they are lucky.

Most people are confused about poverty and each person and economists define it differently. People, who desire socialism and are voting for either Bernie the borderline Marxist or Hillary the Socialist, complain endlessly how unjust and rigged the system is, how the Man keeps them down and there is no equality and social justice. Nobody seems to have any idea about personal responsibility and work ethic.

When compared to most countries in the world, American “poverty” is a bonanza from heaven paid for by government largesse with taxpayers’ money. This government largesse will eventually come to an end when it runs out of other people’s money and it can no longer print trillions once hyperinflation sets in.

According to many Romanians, including hundreds of thousands of poor gypsies who refuse to integrate into normal society and change their lives, Romanians are the citizens impoverished by the communist party and their Securitate successors after the revolution of 1989 when communism ended officially on paper.  Twenty-seven years later, not much has changed for most rural populations.

The online news expunere.com reported that fifty percent of Romanians are very poor and 54 percent of rural inhabitants do not have an occupation.  Most children raised in rural areas have one family member working or the family depends entirely on social welfare.  According to this source, 72 percent of rural families cannot provide their five-year olds a minimum acceptable diet, resulting in malnutrition and disease - 225,000 children go to bed hungry.

To make matters worse, 37 percent of people fifteen years and older are functionally illiterate – they either cannot read or cannot write correctly. In the rural area, 20 percent of children have only an eighth grade education. Citing Eurostat, the overall school dropout rate in 2014 was 18 percent. Unemployment in rural areas among young people, 18-24 years old, was 22 percent. http://www.expunere.com/jumatate-din-populatia-romanieie-este-afectata-de-saracie-in-mediul rural-54-din-localnici-nu-au-ocupatie.html

The standard of living, while vastly improved for people in most large cities, remained the same in the suburbs and rural areas where no significant progress in terms of infrastructure has been made. People live and die trudging through deep ruts in the mud of mostly unpaved roads, carrying water from the village well because nobody has running water or sewer pipes. Outhouses dot the landscape.

In a comment to the poverty news, Silvia Cristescu stated  that “all corrupt individuals who fall under the investigation of the National Directorate of Anti-Corruption (Directia Nationala Anticoruptie or DNA) were members of the former Romanian Communist Party and their heirs. All who defrauded the country, she said, are pro-Russian communists and their children. 

The more than four million Romanian citizens she believes, who left the country for greener pastures of economic opportunity and freedom, understood perfectly who robbed the country blind.  A large percentage of this diaspora voted anti-Ponta, anti-PSD (Social Democrat Party), and anti-socialism. “The enemy of the country is socialism, Marxist atheism of KGB origins,” said Cristescu.

In her view, those who sold the national forests, the land, the factories, and other items in the patrimony of the country, were the same individuals who rejected serious foreign investors under the pretext that they were not “selling the country” but sold everything they could in secret. After all, they knew all the ropes and judges, and, without accountability and fear of the law, pocketed the money, enriching themselves beyond belief.

When honest Romanians tried to replace these former Securitate members who were running for office or incumbents, their votes were stolen by those who were bribed to vote favorably or, not unlike here, mysterious boxes were discovered with hundreds of thousands of votes for the presidential candidate the people did not want.

The Russian KGB influence was so strong in Romania that overturning the disaster of socialism is still a daily battle that takes place today. Socialism will eventually die with the older people who grew up under the mentality of socialist dependency.

However, young people who have no experience, no historical knowledge or recollection of how bad it was under a socialist dictatorship, are lured today into the promise and blind belief that socialism is egalitarian and socially just, the same leitmotif running through the strident and eager-for-their-own-demise collegiate voting crowd, the very ignorant millennials.

Some Romanians take comfort in the fact that Christian America is on their side, that there is now a strategically placed American military base around Constanta, and that socialism will collapse in Romania. Unfortunately, there are many NGOs at work on the ground in Romania that interfere in its politics with loads of cash and grants that are hard to resist, given the stressed economic situation there.