rudy 14 March 2022

A recent drudgereport headline: Survey: 1 in 3 Millennials see communism as favorable. pointed to a Daily Caller article claiming that about 70% of American millennials plan to vote socialist but have no understanding of what that means, how much real personal power and wealth committed socialists from Stalin and Kim Yung Un to Bernie Sanders and Michelle Obama have accumulated, or what the track record established by world socialism over two hundred years of violence, deceit, and fascist oppression really looks like.

Millennial loyalty to the socialist ideal is real and so is their willingness to act on it, but ask them about the basis for their opinions and what you get is emotional penumbra; not facts, real or imagined. Ask them about Chavez or Castro and you get nothing that even pretends to fact; talk about death camps in Vietnam, Cambodia, China, or Venezuela and they'll equate those horrors with American detention centers for illegals; ask them about the joys of the NHS in England or nationalized health care in Canada and they're certain that it's all completely wonderful -but their immediate response is all emotion: just sound, fury, and angry, defensive whataboutism. Their actual understanding of socialism is akin to a three year old's understanding of family finances: magical, of course, but in ways they can't quite articulate -and what they do say is often naive, mind blowingly stupid in an adult, and utterly uninformed on the facts.

The obvious ignorance is horrific, but it usually hides something much worse: get a chance to probe a bit deeper and you'll find that the defensive over-reaction is often a cover for a deep conflict straight out of Orwell's 1984, because many suspect that the litany of unquestionable truths they're required to believe by educators, media, and the self proclaiming political elite is almost entirely false and will do almost anything, including throwing emotional tantrums and abandoning long term friendships, to avoid having that suspicion confirmed.

Here, for example, are ten simple truths from the history of socialism that everybody who can read and remember knows, but progressives are absolutely required to deny as loudly and vehemently as possible:

  1. Communism and socialism are not different in their goals, only in their road map to power. Communism is the internationalist (bolshevik) version which sees violent revolution as the route to power; democratic socialism the nationalist (menshevik) version which sees legal and electoral subversion as its route to power. Both sell on environmentalism and the empowerment of the masses, but their history is one of environmental and human degradation and the enrichment of an intensely hierarchal, and generally murderous, elite. Thus people like Bernie Sanders are not democrats, they're mensheviks - socialists whose contempt for the voter is exceeded only by their lust for power.
  2. Hitler was not right wing; he was a communist who evolved his national socialist worker's party from the Communist Worker's Party he'd been sent to infiltrate in the aftermath of yet another round of mutual recriminations between the menshevik and bolshevik elements in the KPD (German Communist Party).
  3. "Fascism" isn't a right wing thing, it's simply a word someone in the Mussolini faction within Italy's communist party coined in reference to ancient Rome's rods of justice (fasces) to signify the righteousness of their group's abandonment of international bolshevism in favor of menshevism as the national socialist party's preferred method for gaining power. Today the word "fascist" is often used to denigrate conservatives but it is simply a label for any system that severely punishes dissent from centrally determined norms. Thus the left's control of what Trump refers to as the fake news media is fascist in nature as was the perversion of Title IX prosecutions under Obama.
  4. Neither Hitler's nor Stalin's governments were military dictatorships. After 1934 Hitler replaced almost the entire military leadership with civilians in uniform; Stalin destroyed his professional officer class to install loyalists with very limited military training; Mao (like Castro, Che, Idi Amin, and a host of others) killed nearly every professional officer he met on, or off, the battlefield while promoting only his own loyalists - and this is part of pattern for socialists: from Lenin to Obama they like to pretend to military expertise without having any, and often strut around with a chestfull of unearned medals while purging national forces of those who might question their policies.
  5. Private health care beats public care every time. Prior to 2010, when the Obamacare increases started, a Kaiser Permanente gold plan in California cost about two thirds what a Canadian or British taxpayer paid for "free" healthcare and provided far better services, entirely without waiting lists, and with full legal accountability for major avoidable error. Right now nationalized health care in countries as diverse as Canada and the UK kills and maims tens of thousands through service delay, rationing, lack of quality control, lack of accountability, and the regulatory and social pressure obstacles placed in the way of those who want to either avoid or improve the systems.
  6. Socialism sells itself on environmentalism and reverence for life - the NAZI environmental platform circa 1932 isn't very different from today's green platforms - so green votes red but gets Bitterfeld and the Aral Sea ecological disaster.
  7. Every major socialist dictator, and every attempt to implement socialist ideas at the national level, has been lauded by leftist journals like The Economist but produced economic, environmental, and political failure with an ever shrinking group of winners taking an ever increasing share of national resources for themselves.
  8. 2020's democrat candidates for President of the United States all ran on variations of the core socialist platform with Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and several others earning the direct support of the American Communist Party and the Democratic Socialists for America, while far left authoritarian harridans Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton waited in the wings for the others to falter and the entire democratic party apparatus relied heavily on cash and influence from George Soros - a multi-billionaire in the upper reaches of 1% of the 1%, who brags openly about his NAZI past and invests heavily in democrats running for States Attorney General and Secretary of State positions.
  9. Socialist belief includes no actual objection to slavery with both Marx and Lenin describing slavery as the natural state of the lesser races. Thus all major 20th century socialist dictatorships made slaves of their enemies, socialist governments like China's continue to enforce various forms of slavery today, and neither the Obama administration nor its media echoes saw anything wrong with using American money and diplomatic credit to promote a slaver state (Mauritania) for a role on the UN Human Rights Council.
  10. Today's socialists use the American national guilt over slavery inculcated during the 1960s to sell opposition to conservatives of all kinds. In reality, however, Lyndon Johnson (a democrat) used the phrase "tax eaters" to describe American blacks and was an early supporter of the minimum wage laws now replacing the jim crow laws as a way of reducing both the demand for unskilled labor and the mobility of those supplying it - and his "war on poverty" destroyed black families while working against black economic prospects in America.

An aside:

Furthermore, much of what Americans are taught to believe about slavery isn't true. Thus Americans should be intensely proud of, not ashamed of, their role in largely ending slavery in the civilized world.

Actual slavery in what became the United States was established and enforced under tribal tradition and the laws of England, Spain, Portugal, France, and Holland but the American national Founders were mostly opposed to it, local assemblies in several states were among the first governments anywhere to outlaw slavery, and the constitutional compromises of 1787 anticipated an 1808 end date for legal slavery in the United States. In reality it took another 75 years and a vicious civil war to end it, but that reflects the political power of the English ex-pat establishment in the south (the original power base for today's democratic party -Lincoln was a republican; George Wallace a democrat.) and not the views, aspirations, or ideals of a majority of Americans alive at the time.

Reparations seem likely to become are a big issue in 2021 but paying them may cause some difficulties because the guilty parties from whom the monies must be collected were pre-14th Amendment tribal chiefs in what was or became the United States,  the kings of Europe, and African tribal leaders  - not Americans.

The question, of course, is How? How can people genuinely believe in, and act on the political consequences of, claims and ideas they know to be objectively false? How can socialist ideas now be infecting the United States when even the most casual and uncaring review of 20th century history shows that these ideas have been tried on nearly half the world's population and in cultures as diverse as those of Uganda, China, and Germany but have always led to violence, destruction of the individual, elevation of an ever shrinking elite, and national economic ruin?

The required beliefs are simply false, but the conflicts and insanity are real: progressives don't just deny that twentieth century socialism killed nearly two hundred million people, destroyed the lives of a billion others, and condemned at least two billion more to unnecessary poverty and suffering; their prescription for human success requires us to inflict more death and more suffering on more people.

Mao's long march across China left tens of millions dead or with their lives destroyed behind him, but is as nothing compared to the long march of socialist opinion through our education and legal systems. Thus Obama advisor Rhodes' ability to accurately describe most of the professional journalists the administration dealt with as 27 year olds who literally know nothing, was a consequence of a long term educational failure to stop the infiltration of socialist ideas and the consequent rewriting of history to favor political goals most Americans would never support if they understood what they were.

And, of course, it isn't enough to have a million Winstons revising history: the journalist teachers leading the march need to assert a form of thought control in the media under which messages that confuse or immobilize non progressives get amplified, correct opinion is endlessly repeated, and ultimately almost everybody knows what's really going on but almost nobody has the courage or freedom to say anything about it. Here, for example, are ten theses from today's headlines all progressives are required to share and defend, but which all but the least informed know to be largely false:

  1. Global climate change driven by American resource rapacity and capitalism, will kill billions by the end of the 1970s, 80s, 90s, 2000s, 2015, and, now, 2030.
  2. Orange man bad.
  3. Anonymous and undocumented accusations against Bret Kavanaugh were worth column feet in the New York Times and hours of air time on the major networks, but a well documented expose of Jeffery Epstein involving the Clintons didn't meet journalistic standards for news.
  4. The Obama administration ran scandal free for eight years.
  5. The leadership of the democratic party, from Wilson and FDR to Obama and today's leading presidential contenders isn't both deeply racist and anti-semitic.
  6. The KKK wasn't, and Antifa isn't, supported and approved of by the democratic party.
  7. Tobacco is bad, very bad; but Pot is good, very good - along with street drugs, safe injection sites, and public shelters for the homeless.
  8. Illegals are legal, immigration enforcement illegal, and the undocumented are entitled to every form of tax break and public support possible.
  9. All guns are bad - and military style assault weapons, in particular, are unspeakably evil.
  10. There is very little electoral fraud, and what little there is, is committed by republicans.

Orwell called his book 1984 to mirror the year of writing, 1948, but on present evidence 2048 might have been a better choice - a conceit that puts us near the end of the process but still in a position to rebel against leftist despotism by refusing to go along and choosing, instead, to make America great again.