Tragically, we face today burgeoning support for socialism, largely because the U.S. socialist-inspired public schools have intentionally avoided teaching the system’s evil ways and disastrous results everywhere on earth it’s ever been attempted. As red flags go, they don’t come much bigger. Or redder.
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I have a long-time family friend, who should know better. He’s a lifelong business journalist who even for a while wrote for the conservative Wall Street Journal. Nevertheless, my buddy insists “socialism” is quite different from communism, and that in fact many socialist countries, such as in Scandinavia, are quite happy with the “benefits” of socialism.
He may be right that many people are happy in Sweden, whose major political party is the Swedish Social Democratic Party. But the happy faces in Sweden and its Scandinavian neighbors can be explained by the fact that many people find pleasure in receiving benefits paid for by other people. As U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher so coyly noted in 1976 before she became prime minister, “The problem with socialism is that eventually they run out of other people’s money.”
The difference between those happy-faced socialists and actual communists is just a matter of degree. As those benefitting from seizing other people’s wealth and income taste the fruits of their government-enabled theft, their appetite only grows for more. When was the last time you heard a socialist demanding less of other people’s money?
As Karl Marx, the unemployed German who came up with the idea of communism, spelled out in detail in his Das Kapital, Communist Manifesto, and other writings, socialism is not a goal. It is an essential step toward the goal.
That means even those enjoying short-term benefits by living off the sweat of others, in fact are nudging their nations closer and closer to the communist goal, whether they realize it or not. Today’s socialist is tomorrow’s communist; that’s the plan. Don’t think otherwise.
Vladimir I. Lenin, who in 1917 established the planet’s first socialist state in Russia, said the international movement to bring communism to all nations is aided and abetted by what even his followers apocryphally called “useful idiots.” That describes people who don’t see beyond their immediate conditions and don’t realize the path they trod is intended to take them to communist Utopia.
Advocates for socialism excuse the failure of Russia’s 70-year experiment with socialism by claiming it failed only because it wasn’t done right. Or done enough.
The lesson they claim to have learned is that if we just do it right, the more of it we do, the better will be the outcome.
Again, this excuse plays well among people who enjoy living off wages earned by other people. The late American economist Walter E. Williams wrote that legalizing theft doesn’t make it right. It just makes it legal.
Thatcher no doubt agreed with Williams when he wrote, “I keep what I earn and you keep what you earn. Do you disagree? Well then tell me how much of what I earn belongs to you — and why?”
Whatever their motive, today’s advocates for socialism, wittingly or unwittingly, lead directly to what Lenin and Marx said is necessary to achieve communist utopia.
Find me a socialist who wants less socialism. Find an advocate for socializing anything for the government to pay for and you will find an advocate for more. It’s habit-forming. Maybe someone else can find an exception, but in the history of governments that have adopted socialist tactics, I’ve found that they always grow. Never shrink. At least until they go broke.
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Only when governments teeter on the brink of bankruptcy do they entertain suggestions that perhaps they should scale back their socialism. Many are reluctant to trim the socialist sails even when it’s apparent that they have become fiscally untenable. Examples include communist China, Great Britain, and any number of impoverished third world states.
If economic reality isn’t enough to dissuade our current gaggle of socialist wannabes, perhaps they should turn their attention to the brute force, often brutal force, that socialist governments inevitably resort to.
It’s not likely that most of today’s useful idiots even consider Nazi Germany to have been socialist. They seem to have missed the Second World War. How they did that is probably no mystery, even though it was in all the newspapers. But honest portrayals are increasingly rare in America’s socialist-endorsing public school system.
The National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nazis) was as socialistic as Joseph Stalin’s Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Same economic scheme of taking money that belongs to someone else to give to people it doesn’t belong to – after the state takes its entirely arbitrary cut. Same authoritarian thuggery. Germany’s flavor of socialism was national. Russia’s had worldwide ambitions.
It should be obvious from the outside that socialist nations must resort to force or the threat of force to raise the money they want, which may include giving the masses some degree of economic improvement. But tragically, many in socialist nations don’t realize what that force looks like until the government begins to apply it in earnest to take their wealth and ensure their compliance with the glut of myriad rules and regulations inherent in controlling large populations’ every economic move.
But even Stalin couldn’t steal enough from the Russian breadbasket of Ukraine to feed Moscow’s favored residents and other preferred populations. As he stole ever more, he killed or sent to Siberia anyone who resisted. The Holodomor, a catastrophic famine, resulted in from 3 million to 11 million deaths from 1932-1933. Most knowledgeable claims estimate about 4 million Ukrainians starved to death, including families cannibalizing their dead kin. The USSR’s secret police, the NKVD, recorded cases of cannibalization, which was a crime. But Western researchers found that the government had covered up the actual numbers. Again, that’s standard operating procedure for authoritarian governments who don’t share the ugliest sides of their socialist enforcements.
If socialism has one unifying trait it is that governments practicing it must resort to such authoritarian diktats to enforce what most people recognize as the unjust redistribution of private wealth.
It’s also instructive that in every socialist society, the people in charge always live much higher on the hog than do the masses. As British author George Orwell, who was a disillusioned wanna-be socialist, noted in his book Animal Farm, “All animals are equal,” in the eyes of the government, “but some animals are more equal than others.”
Our nation’s current most popular socialist, Bernie Sanders, tsenator from Vermont, garnered headlines by calling for outlawing millionaires and billionaires. Since becoming a millionaire, however, Sanders has modified his demand and now insists that only billionaires be eliminated. On his $174,000 annual Senate salary, Sanders’ net worth is $3 million, according to Celebrity Net Worth. He owns two houses with a combined value of about $1 million, according to Yahoo! Finance, and a third home he sold in 2021 for $422,000, $40,000 less than he paid for it 14 years earlier.
If all this doesn’t discourage chasing socialist utopia (which happens to be communism), consider this: In the 20th century, communist countries which claimed to practice communism-lite, a.k.a., socialism, killed more than 100 million of their own people.
Those weren’t people killed fighting foreign wars. Those were citizens of their own countries who opposed the socialism imposed on them. You could look it up in the Black Book on Communism, which documents the horrific history of socialist and communist China, Germany, Russia and all the rest.
Mark Landsbaum is a Christian retired journalist, former investigative reporter, editorial writer, and columnist. He is also a husband, father, grandfather, and Dodgers fan. He can be reached at [email protected].
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