By Jim N. Taylor, Special to the Star
I envy those who can express their great disappointment referring to the condition of their wounded or pained heart or soul. I know that my heart is only a biological pump, and it is not established that we have a spirit or soul separate from our consciousness, memories and reasoning abilities. I feel wounded with fear for my country.
Raised in the Great Depression of the 1930s and WWII, I have seen what socialism does to countries. Russia and the failed Soviet Union’s Karl Marx communism started with Lenin professing “Democratic Socialism” and then killing millions of its own to establish socialism in its worst form, communism.
In Italy, Mussolini’s Fascist Socialism partnered with Germany’s Hitler in Nazism’s Nationalist Socialism to attack most of Europe and almost succeed in conquering the world in WWII. Post war Britain and France tried Democratic Socialism.
Closer to home we have Cuba’s Castro, who could not make socialism a success even on an island prison with the help of water and sharks to keep citizens from escaping. Venezuela’s Chavez, now Maduro, who is looking for a way to personally escape from failed socialism.
Recommended reading on any of these tales of woe from socialism’s failures would bore and pain you.
Every version of socialism has already been tried. The imagination fails to contemplate the number of ordinary, unarmed, innocent men, women and children who died starved, tortured, shot or worked to death in slave labor camps in the name of building that bright and beautiful paradise on earth that socialists (communists, fascists and Nazis) had all promised would belong to those they had designated as the righteous and justly deserving class, group or racial tribe.
Democratic Socialism always discovers that even beginning with a democracy, government planning requires imposing commands on everyone that succeed only in making life poor, stagnant and dull for most of society; and even when halted, we’ve ended up with highly regulated economies combined with extensive networks of income redistribution and social safety nets.
Not only does bureaucratic central planning fail in making poor decisions taken away from private citizens, what little discretion left for seeking profits/market-earned incomes is diluted by tax codes which transfer money, goods and services from rightful owners to those deemed more worthy by the ruling politburo than those that would have been selected by a free market.
The collapse of the Soviet Union (1991) defeated socialism and its required brutality, and it should have stayed in its worldwide disrepute, not even within the arena of debate. But all the socialist sympathizers did not disappear; they had simply silently sulked in the corners of higher education.
Socialism, like religion, becomes an unshakable belief, especially to some of victimhood identities. They could neither escape their belief nor the embarrassment of socialism’s 20th century disaster.
But the last 10 years has been giving them a new lease on life. There was the lie about the housing recession (2008-09) being a failure of capitalism when, in reality, it was government interference in the credit market (a hallmark of socialism) that caused financial failures. Congress (Barney Frank, et al) insisted that mortgages be sold to lower income people (who were actually not creditworthy) so that Democrats could be seen as “compassionate.” This interference broke the banks, Bush (W.) was too late (and weak) to stop it; thus recession, bank bailouts, etc.
College professors had already begun indoctrination of innocent young minds which had no memory or firsthand knowledge of what socialism really is; Alexandria O-Cortez became one of these. Bernie Sanders had already been indoctrinated by Russia/USSR.
Now, half our university students are corrupted by socialists. When I think of the blood, young athletes, broken families and treasure lost then defeating what might now terminate our way of life, I feel wounded.
Jim N. Taylor is a Harlingen resident who is regularly published in the Valley Morning Star
