The Communist Genie is Out of the Bottle
Idealism is the hallmark of youth, but the young’uns of today know far less than they think they know – and it is not that they don’t know what they don’t know, they don’t care that they don’t know.
Christina Aguilera might as well have been singing about communism when she sang about the “Genie in a bottle”.
Like XTina, I guess all you need to do to get it out of the bottle is to “rub it the right way”.
And once the genie is out, it ain’t going back in.
I have been thinking about how America went from a largely conservative, free market county where even Democrats (like JFK) understood and openly opposed the evils of communism - to the America of today where the Commie Lite of “democratic socialism” is openly proposed as the way forward for our nation – and not just openly proposed, but loudly espoused by elected officials who were elected because their constituents think eating the rich is a perpetual banquet.
Bastiat’s 1848 definition of government, that it is the “great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else” well describes the envious seduction of communism.
In conjunction with thinking about our changes, I have been thinking that the fall of the Berlin Wall did more to let communism out than it did to let capitalism in.
It is clear we made the same mistakes with China. Western sociopolitical thinkers long assumed opening China would change them once capitalism had a chance - but the result was quite different. They used the capitalist world as a bank to fund the Communist Party's increase in power and resources. Rather than importing capitalism, they exported communism.
Why is it that every time we “win” we lose?
Beating communism back under Reagan and Thatcher appear to have made it worse, not better.
All the way back a decade ago, I wondered if Lady Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were the best thing that ever happened to communism.
I was born in January of 1959 and one of my first memories is of the riderless horse (with the reversed boots in the stirrups) of President John F. Kennedy’s funeral cortege. My aunt was looking after me because my mom was at work, I can remember that black and white TV picture as clear as day.
I remember the news reports of people trying to escape East Berlin and being shot – or accidentally killing themselves while risking all in the attempt to escape the repression of communist East Germany. I remember the Warsaw Pact and images of Soviet tanks rolling into Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the war footing that the US assumed.
That is simply an acknowledgment that I entered elementary school in the shadows of the assassination of a president and the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. I remember the Civil Defense films (there were no videos) and the drills at my schools. I remember getting drilled to remember where the civil defense shelters were in the public buildings in my little town of New Albany, Mississippi.
We were wide awake and well aware of the danger of totalitarian regimes – and those regimes had one unifying factor.
Communism.
It was not the benevolent, munificent communism sold to young skulls filled with mush by today’s fellow travelers and useful idiots (many won’t even understand those terms without clicking on the links), it was a brutal, oppressive communism that destroyed people and families, enslaving and killing hundreds of millions.
The communism of my formative years (and what I believe is the real communism) was antithetical to liberty and freedom and it was practiced by men intent on subjugating populations of entire nations to their will. This leads to those of us who retain memories of those violent and fearful times to conclude that, while it is possible that communism isn’t evil, it provides the perfect delivery system of one party rule that allows narcissistic, self-deluded men to make oppression and evil the new normal.
The end of USSR marked the silencing of the engine of tyrannical global communism. When the Berlin Wall fell via the efforts led by Lady Thatcher and President Reagan, the funding of the satellite communist states in the Warsaw Pact ended – and it wasn’t long before the little tin-pot puppet dictators in these countries started to lose their hold on the people. Without aid from Mother Russia, the evidence was eminently clear that global communism was neither productive nor self-sustaining…and they fell.
Communism was defeated so soundly that it completely disappeared…for a time.
The generations who grew up recognizing communism as the evil it personifies heaved a great sigh of relief, consigned it to the dustbin of history and the immediately adopted the Timothy Leary philosophy – we turned on, tuned in and dropped out.
And therein lays our terrible mistake and why Reagan and Thatcher might have been the best things to ever happen to communism.
They took communism’s evil out of the news and off the front page and we summarily forgot about it.
But radical communists like Howard Zinn, Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn and Kathy Boudin did not. While we gave it up for dead and stopped teaching our kids about its evils, radical communists in academia were laying the groundwork for Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, AOC and the rest of the communist caucus in the House and Senate.
They used our lack of vigilance to teach our children that America was imperialist, filled with racists and intent on perpetual hegemony.
Reagan’s historic “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” speech that started the end of global communism was in 1987, the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the USSR collapsed in 1991. Using my level of awareness at three years-old as a benchmark, that would mean that the roughly 40% of Americans born since 1989 (age 32 or under) have no personal knowledge of any of these seminal events and have learned of communism, the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact from history books – many of which were written by modern communist radicals (now called “progressives”).
What was once universally known as evil is now the default setting for many of our uninformed, ignorant and miseducated citizens.
Back in 2013, Cuban born and naturalized American citizen, Manuel Martinez, testified eloquently in front of the Oregon government on gun control. His testimony is still online – he said:
“You people don’t know what freedom is because you never lost it. You haven’t been tortured. You haven’t seen assassinations; you haven’t seen mothers begging for the life of their son not to be killed because the only reason is they wanted to be free.
Evil, tyranny, oppression and their chosen delivery system, communism, never sleep – they never rest –and neither should we.”
Idealism is the hallmark of youth, but the young’uns of today know far less than they think they know – and it is not that they don’t know what they don’t know, they don’t care that they don’t know.
As John Philpot Curran said (often misattributed to Thomas Jefferson):
“It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance, which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt.”