"The times they are changin'"

"In the end we win, they lose. Because reality persists, past all the propaganda."

Sarah Hoyt writes in her blog,

People are rising up. All over the world. In Iran, they’re rebelling against the mullahcracy. In Hong Kong those poor kids lasted much longer than we expected, and the media could not keep them quiet. In France the Yellow Jackets go on despite media blackout. In Holland and Germany (Germany!) the farmers are taking to the streets with their tractors. And yes, in the US the Tea Party though reviled, lied about and infiltrated arguably started it all, and arguably had the greatest influence in growing the sullen resistance of the people.

...However I’m going to tell you right now and right here that this does not apply in Europe. Sure, they took to the net like a duck to water for all the things we initially took to the net for: recipes, mommy blogs, pictures of grandkids and, of course porn.

What they don’t have is political blogs, alternate news blogs, places where heretical views are spoken or any of that.

...Anyway — they have the unrest, even without the blogs — and you know what’s weird? Outright unbelievable for those of us who grew up in the seventies: No communists.

...Look, through black-lives-matters and the pussy hatted spectacles, and now with antifa, you don’t even have to dig very deep, or very far to see beneath the surface the money flowing in, from chartered buses to identically printed signs, to– It’s Soros all the way down. Which is like turtles, only malevolent, soaked in the sins of the 20th century, and either trying to avenge himself on the world for the Holocaust that stole his childhood, or seeking redemption for the things he did then and continued to do to enrich himself, in all the wrong ways. I don’t know which, and I doubt he does.

But one malevolent man can cause a lot of strife, and he can convince a lot of idiot women that the most important thing in the world is to wear a pussy hat and hit the streets to protest against whatever the hell they’re protesting against today. But it’s also obvious that it’s taking no root: Antifa only acts truly horribly in safe (to them) places like California, Oregon, the lefty East coast and France.

What we aren’t seeing is any kind of vast, clamorous, pro-communist movement, in any of these protests. No, the communists are at the other end of it, in universities and usually in government and bureaucracy, wondering why “can you hear the people rising” is not in their favor, why the world isn’t coming to them to finally crown them as rulers of the world in the bestest system evah.

So what is going on? And this is my heretical thought: the world is returning to normal.

...What if communism really was and remains a theory so stupid that only overeducated intellectuals believe in it unless they’re being pushed, bullied, paid by trained professional agitators to buy into the illusion?

What if the entire idea that communism appeals to the dispossessed, latches on when there is a great inequality, and somehow is part of a dark current in the human mind is completely wrong?

...And yet, the insanity of communism, not that much different, propagated. To wit, it propagated the minute the USSR came into being after WWII. Before that it was a cult of intellectuals and madmen.

In fact, right after the fall of the USSR there were — briefly — glimpses that the whole Communism International Inc was falling apart.

Those disappeared when Putin got power. He probably still had his intelligence contacts, but more importantly, he’s a Russian nationalist. His take over meant the old firm was back in business. As I said, behind the smoke and mirrors, the USSR was Russia, and their “internationalism” was Russian nationalism and supremacy.

...So, why is the world rising now, and rising in a distinctly non-communist way?

Oil.

...Now, it doesn’t mean the dems won’t win and bring the glories of communism here. They have for over a century fine tuned their fraud machine, and motor voter made it impossible, in fact, for us to “true the vote,” even before vote by fraud mail and the “convenience” of voting early (so the left knows how many votes they need to manufacture.) Each of our votes is maybe 1/10th what it should be weighed down by massive amounts of dead and nonexistent people voting.

And yep, they still lose, at least now and then.

Think about it. They control government, education, news, entertainment (at least the traditional venues.) They propagated their narrative everywhere from the courts to your local newspaper.

...And they’re still losing…

Because honestly communism is such a load of fecal matter only those who REALLY want to believe can believe it.

Hark, can you hear the people rising? And they’re not communist at all.

...Whether we stand or fall (and I haven’t given up hope, yet) in ten years it will all be different. If the propaganda and fake insurrection machine manages to take over the US, it might be the final poison pill that kills them.

They ain’t seen nothing like us yet.

In the end we win, they lose. Because reality persists, past all the propaganda.

Be not afraid. Stay chill. Prepare and build. And be ready to rebuild when the smoke lifts and the mirrors are all broken.

Read more here.

Why do so many millennials like socialism and communism?

In PJ Media, Stephen Green tries to figure out why so many millennials like socialism or communism.

...My first thought was that these young Americans are merely the victims of a bad education. They probably know nothing of the brutalities of Lenin's secret police, or of the millions of Ukrainians purposely starved to death so that Stalin could have his collectivized farms. Millennials have never been taught that Cambodia's energetic communists killed no less than a quarter of their own people. They might not know about the retributions and "re-education" camps that North Vietnam brought to the South after American forces left. Semi-capitalist China is today a wealthy country, but Millennials know little of the tens of millions of random deaths in Mao's attempt to fully communize the country. They've been taught nothing, at best, about the approximately 100 million deaths attributable directly to communism.

But then I had a second thought.

We're seeing the results of another one of Lenin's quotes: "The press should be not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, but also a collective organizer of the masses." The press, the universities, and even the dominant popular culture have all been co-opted by the progressive left, after a decades-long march through the institutions.

So if you've been taught that your victimhood group has rights superior to your own... If you've been told your whole life that economic progress is killing the planet... If you believe in your heart that needs and wants trump economic reality...

...well, then what's wrong with a little communism? Hell, a lot of communism? They've been taught this; no wonder they believe it. Or as Lenin also said, "Give me your four-year-olds, and in a generation I will build a socialist state."

One misinformed Millennial, one vote... one time.

Read more here.

Another good one from Prager U.

Communism: executions, man-made hunger, deportations, and forced labor

From Wikipedia:

The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression is a 1997 book edited by Stéphane Courtois, who includes contributions by several European academics[note 1] documenting a history of repressions, both political and civilian, by Communist states, including genocides, extrajudicial executions, deportations, and artificial famines.

n the introduction, editor Stéphane Courtois states that "Communist regimes... turned mass crime into a full-blown system of government."[4]:2 According to Courtois, the death toll amounts to 94 million.[4]:4 The breakdown of the number of deaths given by Courtois is as follows:

65 million in the People's Republic of China
20 million in the Soviet Union
2 million in Cambodia
2 million in North Korea
1.7 million in Ethiopia
1.5 million in Afghanistan
1 million in the Eastern Bloc
1 million in Vietnam
150,000 in Latin America
10,000 deaths "resulting from actions of the international Communist movement and Communist parties not in power."[4]:4
Courtois writes that Communist regimes are responsible for a greater number of deaths than any other political ideal or movement, including Nazism. The statistics of victims include deaths through executions, man-made hunger, deportations, and forced labor.

Read more here.
hat tip Kurt Schlichter

NY Times: Gauzy retrospectives about the idealism, sense of purpose, optimism, intellectuality, and downright sexiness of life under Communism.

Excerpts from more thoughts on a century of communism by Robert Tracinski at The Federalist.

...Countries taken over by Communists, from China and Russia to Cuba and Venezuela, were either plunged from relative prosperity into starvation or walled off for decades from the growing prosperity of capitalist countries—often right next door, enjoying all the same benefits of geography and culture. Think of the contrast between East and West Berlin, between Cuba and Chile, between mainland China and Hong Kong, between North and South Korea.

Communist countries have imposed oppressive regimes telling everyone what to read, think, and say. Scientists could be sent to the gulag for teaching unapproved ideas about genetics. Dissidents have been sent to prison camps, tortured, harassed, locked in psychiatric wards, and simply murdered outright. Artists and intellectuals have fled by the hundreds, when they could, seeking asylum in non-Communist countries in search of the freedom to do their work.

...Above all else, the history of Communism is a history of mass-scale horrors: the terror-famine in Ukraine, Stalin’s show trials and gulags, the mass starvation of China’s Great Leap Forward, followed by the anarchic terror of the Cultural Revolution, the Killing Fields of Cambodia—those are just the low points in a list that can go on and on. It is estimated that in the past 100 years, Communist regimes killed as many as 100 million people.

So why won’t the nightmare dream of Communism die? A recent poll shows that a majority of millennials prefer socialism or Communism to capitalism, and we know exactly where they’re getting their woozy, idealized version of these systems. The New York Times, for example, has been celebrating 100 years of Communism—”celebrating” seems the only word for it—with a series of gauzy retrospectives about the idealism, sense of purpose, optimism, intellectuality, and downright sexiness of life under Communism.

...A key to the problem can be seen even in critiques of this Communist hagiography by conservatives, who remind everyone that Communism “doesn’t work.” That seems a funny kind of understatement, like saying that dousing yourself with gasoline and setting yourself on fire “doesn’t work.” It implies some kind of idealistic goal for which the adherents of Communism choose unrealistic means. But the bloody, grinding history of Communism—and most especially the fact that it went on and on and continues even today, many decades after no one can have any illusions—suggests that oppression and murder is the goal.

The first moral idea is that self-interest is bad and that it is not only good but the very definition of morality itself to sacrifice your own interests to others. That’s why profit and money-making are supposed to be bad. That’s why anything you have that somebody else doesn’t think they have is supposed to be some kind of unconscionable “privilege.” That’s why capitalism has to be expunged, because it’s a whole system built on self-interest.

The second idea, which is the political consequence of the first, is that private interests are bad and need to be subordinated to the collective “public good.” That’s why everything private is bad, from private companies to private schools, and everything “public” is automatically good. That’s why celebrated authors hatch schemes to abolish private education, something only totalitarian regimes have ever done, in order to make sure everybody is “eating out of the same pot.”

The problem with Communism is not that it twisted these ideals or implemented them badly. The crime of Communism is that it took them seriously and implemented them fully, all the way to their logical conclusion. That is what people don’t want to face up to in the history of Communism.

...That leads us to another big lesson of Communism: without individualism, there is no basis for individual rights or any other guarantee of human dignity. The big mistake people make about Communism is to think that it’s just about collectivizing property. It’s actually about collectivizing people. Communist countries impose oppressive systems of censorship and interfere deeply with the personal lives of their subjects precisely because they take seriously this idea of the subordination of the individual to the collective good. They apply it to everything, including the very thoughts in your head, which they also treat as public property.

...If Communism represents the full implementation of a commonly accepted view of morality, we can understand the compulsion to make excuses for it, to claim it’s never really been tried, to forget its disasters and atrocities, to allow only a gauzy airbrushed version of its history, and to desperately wish that if we just tried it one more time and really did it right, we would finally reach the promised paradise.

We’ve done that for a full century, and even longer. After all, Communism was tried on a small scale, in voluntary utopian communities, for more than a century before it failed upward and took over entire countries. It’s time to start grasping the moral lessons before we’re forced to live once more through the nightmare of chasing the Communist dream.

Read more here.

In honor of Fidel

h/t Bookworm

"Deconstructionist sleight of hand"

Bookworm continues to educate us about fascism, with a post at American Interest. She even provides a nifty graph:

Given that conservative Republicans, including the majority of Trump supporters, are on the liberty side of the spectrum, far from the world’s most brutal tyrants, what gave rise to the glaringly false syllogism that “Republicans are right-wing fascists and Hitler was a right-win fascist, so all Republicans are Hitler”? You can blame it on a nasty little historic and linguistic trick American communists pulled, which was to make “fascism” synonymous with the political “right.” Once having done that, they could claim that American conservatives, being “right wing,” are therefore fascist. This is pure disinformation.

...Savvy readers will have noticed that fascism sounds remarkably like communism: It’s all about concentrating all power in the state, leaving the individual entirely subordinate to the state. The primary difference between the two ideologies is that in communism the government nationalizes private property, whereas in fascism the government does not nationalize it but nevertheless completely controls — as is the case, for example, with Obamacare, which saw the government establish the rules for the private insurance market and mandate that Americans buy the product.

Without exception, two bad things happen in totalitarian governments: (1) the government ceases to see it citizens as individuals and views them only as widgets who exist to aggrandize the state; and (2) the people who control statist governments fall prey to grandiose delusions and paranoia. Hitler and Stalin went after their own people. Hitler got the negative headlines only because he explosively sought control over Europe, without anticipating Churchill’s refusal to surrender or America’s ferocity when roused. Had Hitler been more discreet, as Stalin was in the Ukraine or in the gulags (or as Mao was in China), Hitler’s fascist, genocidal state could have lasted for decades more.

After the war, Hitler’s grandiosity ensured that “fascism” was a dirty word. American communists needed to move fast to erase Russia’s pact with Hitler and to disguise that “fascism” and “communism” are variations on a theme. Using America’s media and higher education systems, America’s communists associated the word “fascist” with “right wing.” This allowed them to affix the “fascist” label to those who cherish individual liberty, tying them to Hitler, the ultimate madman. It didn’t matter that the new label was deconstructionist sleight of hand. The only thing that mattered was that it stick, along with all the ugly associations surrounding it.

...One more thing: Obama said that the biggest disappointment of his presidency was his failure to grab more guns from American hands. Statists always grab guns because their regimes are fundamentally hostile to the citizens they control, making it impossible for those citizens to defend themselves against tyrannical government. Trump’s promise to protect the Second Amendment is the antithesis of a statist, especially a “fascist,” regime.

Read more here.

Who are you going to boycott?

Bookworm writes,

...There’s only one thing you need to remember about political systems, which is that there are only two kinds: Those that vest more power in the state (statists) and those that vest less power in the state (individualists). Every political system, no matter the name given, falls along that continuum:

...On the far left side, you’ll find Caesar, Henry VIII, Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Pol Pot, Kim Jong-Un, Castro, Mao, etc. Slight to the left of center, you’ll find Western Europe and, just a teeny bit to the right of Europe, you’ll find Obama’s America. Every one of the people, continents, or nations I’ve named lives somewhere on the totalitarian side of the political continuum.

On the further right side of the continuum, you’ll find America’s Founding Fathers and the Constitution. Trump supporters revere the men and the document. They dream of a nation that stops short of anarchy but that allows individuals maximum liberty. They want a smaller government that, simply by virtue of its limited size, has limited control over each individual’s ability to make his own choices and live his life as he sees fit. In other words, Trump supporters are on the opposite side of the continuum from totalitarianism.

...the terms “right wing” and “left wing” are meaningless and should be obsolete. They refer to France, back in 1789, when Louis XVI’s supporters in the National Assembly sat on the president’s right and the revolutionaries to his left. We are not in France in 1789. Moreover, that archaic division ignores the fact that both the left and the right in France were totalitarian in nature. Both wanted complete control; they just had different visions about the nature of that control.

At this point, savvy readers will have noticed that fascism sounds remarkably like communism: It’s all about the state, not about the individual. The difference between the two ideologies is that in communism the government nationalizes private property, whereas in fascism the government does not nationalize it, but nevertheless completely controls it.

For ordinary citizens, the difference between communism and fascism is like the difference between wearing ugly stainless steel handcuffs and stainless steel handcuffs with some sparkly rhinestones. The citizens are still wearing handcuffs because the state is still calling the shots. It’s just that in the fascist state, at least before the state really gets the bit in its teeth, there’s an illusion that things are nicer. A cartoon about the difference between communism and Bernie’s beloved “democratic socialism” (i.e., non-nationalist fascism) makes the point:



Communists and fascists hated each other in the 1920s through 1940s not because they were diametrically opposed ideologies, but because they were similar ideologies fighting for the same slice of pie. Both are statist belief systems that reject individual liberties. When they’re not fighting each other for power, they’re inclined to support each other, as was the case with Hitler and Stalin, right up until Hitler decided he wanted Stalin’s territory too. Likewise, in Spain, there was a bloody civil war not because communism and fascism are natural enemies, but because they were jealous rivals both seeking the throne.

History has shown that, on the hardcore statist side (whether communist, fascist, social democrat, theocratic, etc.) two bad things invariably merge: (1) the all-powerful governments are unable to view their citizens as individuals with hopes, dreams, loves, hates, and souls and (2) the individuals controlling these totalitarian governments are prey to grandiose delusions and paranoia. Hitler and Stalin both went after their own people vigorously. The only reason Hitler got the headlines is that he tried to bring all of Europe under his control. Had he been more discreet, as Stalin was in the Ukraine or in the gulags (or as Mao was in his closed kingdom), Hitler’s fascist, genocidal state could have still been going well into the 1980s.

After World War II, American communists needed to distinguish statist communism, which they supported, from statist fascism, which they never liked and which Hitler’s megalomania and race hatred had turned into a dirty word to everyone. What better way to do that than to attach to conservatives, those who cherish individual liberty, the “fascist” label, a label closely associated with Hitler, the ultimate madman? It didn’t matter that the label was completely inapposite. The only thing that mattered was that it stick, along with all the ugly associations surrounding it.

...Shrinking government power is the antithesis of fascism.

If you managed to arrive at any other answer, a lump of coal to you: You are a statist (certainly a Progressive and possibly a neo-fascist), and you are profoundly ignorant. At a guess, you probably graduated from an American college or university within the last 25-30 years.

That college degree may also mean that you occupy a decision-making role in one of the 159 companies listed below. As of today, these companies have stepped forward to boycott liberty-loving Americans on the ignorant, spurious ground that those same Americans who voted for the small-government candidate are fascists who need to be driven out of the American marketplace (click on image to enlarge):



Don’t just glance at that list and forget about it. To preserve American liberty, we need to teach a lesson to ignorant companies that believe they’re fighting for freedom by aligning with totalitarian statists who want to destroy those Americans who revere the Constitution (the most liberty-oriented document ever written) and who desire small government and individual liberty.

For me, no more Kellogg’s cereal, no more Cost Plus runs, no more jaunts up to Napa or Sonoma County generally, no more Bob’s Red Mill grains, no more Grammarly (my grammar’s better anyway), no cheap New Egg electronics (my computer still has some life in it), the San Diego Zoo is closed (I’ve seen it enough anyway), and no skiing in Squaw or Alpine (not even to watch the kids). I’m done with that part of corporate America that has insulted me and insisted it no longer needs me. Well, let’s just see who needs whom.

When communism began to fall, so did mass killings

Who is more likely to be a fascist, Hillary or Trump?

Bookworm leads a discussion on how the essence of fascism and communism is statism.

...So now that you’ve gotten a handle on the only two types of government that actually exist — more state control or less state control — let’s zero in on “fascism.” It started in Italy, so a good beginning is Mussolini’s classic description of fascism: “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” Boom! Statism writ large.

Except that, if it’s statism writ large, why did the communists, who are obviously statists, hate it? Progressive/Democrat academia and politicians say that this hatred arose because communism is a warm, cuddly, sharing kind of statism, while fascism is a mean, nasty, right-wing Republican kind of statism. Not even close and definitely no cigar.

Both communism and fascism are statist belief systems that reject individual liberties. American conservatives (many of whom identify with the Republican party), being all about the Bill of Rights, small government, and individual liberty, aren’t playing in the communist and fascist sandbox. Heck, they’re not even in the same playground.

Communism, the “purest” form of socialism, says that there should be no private ownership. Everything should be owned by the people for the benefit of the people.

...If you dig just a little way down into the Trump agenda, you find out that when he talks about “making America great again” he’s mostly talking about enforcing laws and policies already on the books. Was Clinton a fascist when he signed into effect some of those laws? Is the history of America right up until Obama fascist because we actually had laws, most of which Obama ignores? The answers, naturally, are no. There’s nothing fascist about enforcing our immigration laws, our national security laws, and our criminal laws, or about elevating the constitution as the primary document from which American law flows. We’re not charting new territory here. We’re returning America to its natural mostly-free state.

Doesn’t that sound all nice and equal? It’s not. The only way to achieve “everything owned by the people for the benefit of the people” is to place ownership in the government as the people’s representatives. However, once you’ve placed everything in government hands, you’ve created a government class.

Government classes with total power are scary. Everything that is bad in individuals — greed, carelessness, stupidity, corruption, nepotism, bullying — is magnified beyond all imagination when it’s concentrated in a single all-powerful government.

...concentrating power in government, contrary to people’s expectations, never leads to a golden age of wealth, morals, and generosity. Instead, it invariably leads to economic and moral collapse, as we’ve seen in Europe, and too often leads to despotism (e.g., Soviet Union, China, North Korea, Cuba, and on and on).

Okay, that’s communism. But what about fascism? It’s communism’s opposite, right? Wrong. Very, very wrong.

Just as with communism, fascism is predicated on complete state control. To repeat Mussolini, “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” The difference is that the state does not nationalize industry. Instead, it leaves ownership in private hands, while vesting control in the state. Fascism gives the illusion of capitalism because individuals still “own” and “run” the companies, but in fact, the government and these individuals are in cahoots for both control and profit. What’s missing entirely is a free market. It’s all in the state and for the state.

For ordinary citizens, the difference between communism and fascism is like the difference between wearing ugly stainless steel handcuffs and stainless steel handcuffs with some sparkly rhinestones. The citizens are still wearing handcuffs because the state is still calling the shots. It’s just that in the fascist state, at least before the state really gets the bit in its teeth, there’s an illusion that things are nicer.

In other words, communism and fascism are just different flavors of statism. Moreover, when they’re not fighting for power, they’re inclined to support each other, as was the case with Hitler and Stalin, right up until Hitler decided he wanted Stalin’s territory too. Likewise, in Spain, there was a civil war not because communism and fascism are natural enemies, but because they were jealous rivals both seeking the throne.

Given all this, how did American conservatives, the people who oppose statism and believe in individual liberty, end up being tarred constantly as fascists? Well, look to the Leftist takeover of Hollywood, academia, and media.

After World War II, the American Left needed to elevate communism’s s status and, Leftists hoped, give the Soviet Union the upper hand in the Cold War. What better way to do that than to attach to conservatives, those who cherish individual liberty, the “fascist” label, a label closely associated with Hitler, the ultimate madman? It didn’t matter that the label was completely inapposite. The only thing that mattered was that it stick, along with all the ugly associations surrounding it.

Trump is also promising to get the government out of American businesses, another policy that is the opposite of fascism. Remember, fascism is all about a government/industry partnership to further state control. It’s communism with cash. So Trump’s promise to decrease regulations and lower taxes to weaken government’s ability to interfere with private citizens is a step towards freedom, rather than its opposite.

Another Trump promise is to respect the Second Amendment, keeping guns in the hands of private citizens. Remember: The single biggest barrier to total state control is an armed citizenry.

...Even if Trump isn’t a despot in the making, are his supporters fanatics who would like him to be a despot? Doubtful. I think what most Trump supporters hope Trump means when he talks about “fixing things,” is that he’ll take our sclerotic government and say “You’re fired” to corrupt, redundant, useless, or lazy bureaucrats who suck at the government teat but provide no benefit for America’s citizens. What we imagine him doing is taking broken institutions and either destroying them (bye-bye, abusive EPA), cleaning house (IRS, you’re next), or returning them to their original mission (the military is not a social justice experiment). GOP politicians, despite their invariable promises to “clean up” government, seem incapable of making the tough calls necessary to purge or fix what’s broken in the existing system. Trump’s history and rhetoric make it seem possible that he’s finally the one with the courage to make those hard choices and tame the federal beast.

Go here to read why Bookworm believes it is Hillary, rather than Trump, who is the likely fascist.

Why does communism get a pass that fascism never does?

Dr. Mackubin Thomas Owens writes at Dissident,

It is a fact that communism has killed far more people than fascism—in the Soviet Union, Communist China, Vietnam, Cambodia, North Korea, and Cuba. And yet, although we are never hesitant (rightly!) to describe fascism and Nazism as evil, we often refuse to do likewise with regard to communist regimes. The exception was Ronald Reagan when he described the Soviet Union as the “evil empire,” but I well remember the almost universal horror that greeted his pronouncement.

What explains this phenomenon? Why does communism get a pass that fascism never does? What accounts for the popularity of socialism among young people, who have flocked to the banner of Bernie Sanders during the primaries?

Read more here.

Everything old is new again but closer to home

Commenter Anonosaurus Wrecks writes at Ace of Spades,

I sympathized with the Germans of the 20s because it seemed their alternatives were communism or Nazism. Now everything old is new again but closer to home.

Central planning versus market competition

Thomas Sowell writes at National Review,

The fundamental problem of the political Left seems to be that the real world does not fit their preconceptions. Therefore they see the real world as what is wrong, and what needs to be changed, since apparently their preconceptions cannot be wrong.

A never-ending source of grievances for the Left is the fact that some groups are “over-represented” in desirable occupations, institutions, and income brackets, while other groups are “under-represented.”

From all the indignation and outrage about this expressed on the left, you might think that it was impossible that different groups are simply better at different things.

Yet runners from Kenya continue to win a disproportionate share of marathons in the United States, and children whose parents or grandparents came from India have won most of the American spelling bees in the past 15 years. And has anyone failed to notice that the leading professional basketball players have for years been black, in a country where most of the population is white?

...Whole books could be filled with the unequal behavior or performances of people, or the unequal geographic settings in which whole races, nations, and civilizations have developed. Yet the preconceptions of the political Left march on undaunted, loudly proclaiming sinister reasons why outcomes are not equal within nations or between nations.

All this moral melodrama has served as a background for the political agenda of the Left, which has claimed to be able to lift the poor out of poverty, and in general make the world a better place. This claim has been made for centuries and in countries around the world. And it has failed for centuries in countries around the world.

Some of the most sweeping and spectacular rhetoric of the Left occurred in 18th-century France, where the very concept of the Left originated in the fact that people with certain views sat on the left side of the National Assembly.

The French Revolution was their chance to show what they could do when they got the power they sought. In contrast to what they promised — “liberty, equality, fraternity” — what they actually produced were food shortages, mob violence, and dictatorial powers that included arbitrary executions, extending even to their own leaders, such as Robespierre, who died under the guillotine.

In the 20th century, the most sweeping vision of the Left — Communism — spread over vast regions of the world and encompassed well over a billion human beings. Of these, millions died of starvation in the Soviet Union under Stalin and tens of millions in China under Mao.

Milder versions of socialism, with central planning of national economies, took root in India and in various European democracies.

If the preconceptions of the Left were correct, central planning by educated elites who had vast amounts of statistical data at their fingertips and expertise readily available, and were backed by the power of government, should have been more successful than market economies where millions of individuals pursued their own individual interests willy-nilly.

But, by the end of the 20th century, even socialist and communist governments began abandoning central planning and allowing more market competition. Yet this quiet capitulation to inescapable realities did not end the noisy claims of the Left.

In the United States, those claims and policies have reached new heights, epitomized by government takeovers of whole sectors of the economy and unprecedented intrusions into the lives of Americans, of which Obamacare has been only the most obvious example.

Read more here.

China's chaos

Ace informs us today,

China's markets lost 5.9% last night, and have lost about one third of all value the past month.

His headline for the story:

Capitalism is a Chaotic System With Frequent Bubbles and Bursts So That's Why We Should Switch to a "Managed Economy" Like China

Something Tom Friedman has said a dozen times, but I wonder if he's saying that now.

China's deliberately-created housing bubble is bursting and who knows what the world fallout will be from this.

Read more here.

How self censorship prevents Radio Liberty and Voice of America from satisfying the spiritual needs of their listenersi

National Review today reprints an essay written in 1982 by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn.

In the 30s — during the most dreadful time of Stalinist terror, when Stalin was exterminating many millions of people — editorials in the United States proclaimed the Soviet Union to be a country of social justice. President Roosevelt extended a helping hand to Stalin, and American businessmen rushed to provide the technological assistance without which Stalin could not have built his industrial base. And at the end of the war, America and Britain made Stalin a gift of all of Eastern Europe. It should have been understood that the Soviet rulers were enemies of their own people. But this was not understood.

...Failing to understand this was the great historical mistake that Roosevelt made in the Thirties and Forties. This mistake cost the Free World half of the globe — perhaps less than half in terms of territory, but more than half in population. And today the greatest danger is that the Free World’s leaders will repeat Roosevelt’s fatal mistake.

In fact, the same mistake has been repeated over and over again through the years. For instance, with Tito. Tito was the murderer, the executioner, of his people. Right after World War II, he shot hundreds of thousands of his fellow citizens. He even shot down American civilian planes near the Austrian border. All this was forgiven (and worse, forgotten), and he has been held up as a great statesman. The same error was repeated again with Cuba. It was proclaimed in the Free World that what had taken place in Cuba was a people’s revolution. The same error was repeated again with North Vietnam. A totalitarian gang there seized the whole country, and American progressives proclaimed that it was a national movement for freedom. In Nicaragua, right under our nose, a totalitarian group of Communists seized power, and the Carter Administration hurried to help them financially.

The fatal historical mistake of liberalism is to see no enemy on the left, to consider that the enemy is always on the right.

...No matter what the Chinese rulers may say when they are looking for favors from the U.S., no Communist government ever cares about the rights, the development of its people. Communist governments are like cancerous tumors: they grow wildly and have two aims only: first, to strengthen their power, and second, to expand their boundaries. Those are the aims of the Chinese government, as they are those of the Soviet government.

...Not to know what is happening in and to your own country is crippling. That is why the Voice of America’s self-imposed limits are so misguided. What does the average Soviet citizen know about, say, Afghanistan? Everything he hears from the government is distorted. And yet the Voice of America, which could fill this gap, has placed limits on its own best sources of information. It refrains from using rich accumulations of material because it believes that it only has the right to broadcast in a way which will not irritate the Communist leaders.

...The greatest spiritual need of our people is to become aware of themselves. If during the past 30 years the Western broadcasts had helped our people remember who they were, helped them to rise spiritually to their feet, the entire world situation would be different. Our recent history has been trampled and distorted beyond recognition; everything we hear is saturated with propaganda. It is hard for Americans to imagine such ignorance. The average Soviet citizen in essence knows nothing: what were the causes of the Revolution; how it occurred, and how the Bolsheviks took it over and instituted totalitarian rule; what people’s movements there were against the Bolsheviks, and how they were suppressed; how our peasantry and our working class were destroyed by terrorist means. We need to know the truth about all this. If such knowledge were given us, we would — both civilian and soldier — become spiritually free of our government.

...Communist power seeks to deprive us of religion; and American radio broadcasts, directed by ideologues who accept the stupid premise that Russian Christianity is “reactionary,” follow the Communists’ lead.

Read more here.
I wonder what Solzhenitsyn would say today. I can't imagine that things have improved since 1982, with the ideologues currently in power in our government and media.

"Cool" Cuban Communism

Have you got your Che Guevara tee shirt yet? Isn't it cool? But wait...Guevara in the name of communism killed lots of people. He said, "We must eliminate all newspapers. We cannot make a revolution with a free press." Although the communist regime in Cuba outlawed labor unions, American teachers wear the cool tee shirt. The ideological fanaticism of men like Guevara is why the people of Cuba have remained poor since the 1959 communist revolution.

Is bankrupt Cuba a beacon of the future, or a museum of the past? No internet access! Michael Moynihan of the Daily Beast discusses it all with John Stossel of Fox News:

Was Karl Marx a closet Christian?

Jillian Becker explains how Communism is inspired by Christianity.

What other ideology claims the moral high ground by justifying its every deed by claiming it to be in the service of the weak, the exploited, the injured, the underdog? Or to put it another way, Justification by Compassion?

What other dogma has it that the plight of the collective matters above all? What other teaches that it is it the duty of the individual to sacrifice himself, his personal wants, talents, aspirations to the greater good of the collective?[6]

In what other ideal society is private property abolished – “so that all will be equal in worldly possessions”? Who decries “privilege”? Who holds equality as the highest ideal?

In the name of what political orthodoxy were totalitarian tyrannies established whose spies ceaselessly sniffed out heretics to be tried, imprisoned, tortured and killed?

Where do we find revered texts predicting a cataclysmic event that will change everything, after which the chosen will live happily ever after in a perfect state, under the rule of an all-powerful government, while the rejected will be excluded, condemned, punished, and destroyed?

The answer is Communism, learnt from the unquestionable authority of Karl Marx.

Marxist Communism insists that the only power must be the Communist Party.

It predicts an inevitable Revolution as its all-transforming Apocalypse. After the Revolution the faithful – those whom the Communist Party spares – will live happily ever after in a perfect Communist state.

While Communism posits no divinities, it declares that something superior to man’s will determines what must inevitably happen – an hypostasis named History.

It rejects the notions of a supernatural authority and a non-material existence. But the rest of Marxist Communism’s essential doctrine is derived from only one source – Christianity. Though neither Marx nor any of his apostles seem to have been aware of it.

Read more here.

The left's preconceptions

Thomas Sowell writes:

If the preconceptions of the Left were correct, central planning by educated elites who had vast amounts of statistical data at their fingertips and expertise readily available, and were backed by the power of government, should have been more successful than market economies where millions of individuals pursued their own individual interests willy-nilly.

But, by the end of the 20th century, even socialist and communist governments began abandoning central planning and allowing more market competition. Yet this quiet capitulation to inescapable realities did not end the noisy claims of the Left.

In the United States, those claims and policies have reached new heights, epitomized by government takeovers of whole sectors of the economy and unprecedented intrusions into the lives of Americans, of which Obamacare has been only the most obvious example.

Please read more here.

Legacy of a leftist child welfare nightmare

Do you know about Romania's history of neglecting children? Meghan Collins Sullivan writes,

The execution of Ceausescu and his wife on Christmas Day 1989 led to the discovery of the country’s most disturbing secret—enough abandoned children to make up a city had been living in squalor for years, packed into unsanitary orphanages without appropriate resources, care, or stimulation.

Under Ceausescu’s deranged despotism, abortion and birth control were outlawed. He demanded that all women bear at least five children in an effort to create a caste of “worker bees” that would labor in the hive of communism. Invasive investigations of women were conducted at workplaces and elsewhere to track their individual progress in making babies. The government pledged to raise the children whose parents were too poor or incapable of caring for them. Some women never wanted the children they had been ordered to conceive in the first place and were happy to offload them. But many thought their babies would have a better life if given up—or that they had the option of collecting them later if they found the means to properly care for them.

The legacy of this nightmare is very much present in Romania today—and is one of the reasons, nearly twenty-five years after the death of Ceausescu and the bizarre and brutal system he created, that so many Romanian children continue to be abandoned while adult survivors struggle to make a life. A lingering social welfare mentality, coupled with lack of progressive approaches to education, a struggling economy, and halfhearted commitment to rule of law, pressurize the situation.

But if institutionalized children are moved into families early enough, some of the ill effects of neglect in these first years of life can be reversible. Children placed in foster care tested higher on IQ tests than those in orphanages, the BEIP study showed. They developed greater attachment to caregivers, exhibited less anxiety and depression, showed improvements in language skills, and had increased brain activity.

Romania had issued a moratorium on international adoption in 2001, finally outlawing it in 2005 under pressure from EU representatives as the country made its bid for entry into the union. Romanian officials at the time said they could not effectively monitor and control the process, as rumors swirled of babies being sold at auction. But adoption inside Romania hasn’t been a success. Annually, between seven hundred and nine hundred children are adopted of the twelve hundred to fourteen hundred considered “adoptable,” a tiny fraction of the orphans within the system.

Mothers have the option of leaving their newborns at the hospital when they go home. They do not have to give up the rights to the child at this point—or ever. And, as the law states, if the parents or relatives don’t renounce their relationship with the child, the child cannot be adopted. Some are eventually moved into foster care, while others remain at the hospital until they are two, when they can be sent to orphanages.

Read more here.