Tuesday Open Comments

Immigrants know better.

This article is from 2019, but no less true today.

In his foreword to the fiftieth-anniversary edition of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, Jordan Peterson asks us to reflect on this indisputable reality:

No political experiment has ever been tried so widely, with so many disparate people, in so many different countries (with such different histories) and failed so absolutely and so catastrophically. Is it mere ignorance (albeit of the most inexcusable kind) that allows today’s Marxists to flaunt their continued allegiance—to present it as compassion and care? Or is it, instead, envy of the successful, in near-infinite proportions? Or something akin to hatred for mankind itself? How much proof do we need? Why do we still avert our eyes from the truth?

In sum, socialism has failed empirically and morally. So, why are so many young Americans, enjoying political freedom, stable institutions, and economic opportunities envied and desired by so many other people across the world, willing to sell their birthright for a failed, regressive ideology?

/snip

Writing in the Harvard Crimson, Romanian student Laura Nicolae lambasts her peers for strutting around on campus in Che Guevara T-shirts and romanticizing communism:

Roughly 100 million people died at the hands of the ideology my parents escaped. They cannot tell their story. We owe it to them to recognize that this ideology is not a fad, and their deaths are not a joke.

Communism cannot be separated from oppression; in fact, it depends upon it. In a communist society, the collective is supreme. Personal autonomy is nonexistent. Human beings are simply cogs in a machine tasked with producing utopia: they have no value of their own.

In USA Today, Venezuelan student Daniel Di Martino recalls living under and fleeing Chavez/Maduro’s socialist regime and warns his adopted country not to embrace the failed statist policies that destroyed his homeland:

I watched what was once one of the richest countries in Latin America gradually fall apart under the weight of big government.

I didn’t need to look at statistics to see this but rather at my own family. When Chavez took office in 1999, my parents were earning several thousand dollars a month between the two of them. By 2016, due to inflation, they earned less than $2 a day. If my parents hadn’t fled the country for Spain in 2017, they’d now be earning less than $1 a day, the international definition of extreme poverty. Even now, the inflation rate in Venezuela is expected to reach 10 million percent this year.

Venezuela has become a country where a woeful number of children suffer from malnutrition, and where working two full-time jobs will pay for only 6 pounds of chicken a month.

Socialism Causes Destruction

I’ve heard plenty of horrific stories from my parents, who grew up in Maoist China, with regular food shortages and deprived of other basic needs we take for granted today. Censorship and ideological conformity were rigidly enforced in an environment that has been described as an “Auschwitz of the mind.” My mother’s grandfather and uncle were killed during the Cultural Revolution, for the crime of being privileged landlords. Red Guard thugs beat them to death with shovels and dumped their bodies in a nearby river—a favorite disposal site, which was used so frequently that the waters flowed red with blood.

Such ghastly accounts were common during that era. Communism produced destruction and death on an unprecedented scale in the world’s oldest civilization. The Red Guards destroyed more Chinese treasures and artifacts in one decade than the European imperialists and Japanese invaders combined. Millions perished. Tens of millions more were persecuted, exiled, imprisoned, beaten, or tortured (often in horrifically creative and sadistic ways). It was only after Mao’s death, once the chaos from the Cultural Revolution had subsided, that Deng Xiaoping’s reforms gradually (and still incompletely) opened up one of the most repressive regimes of the 20th century.

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I think that professors promoting this sick ideology should be forced to allow people like the above survivors to speak to their classes.  Nothing like real life to intrude on utopian dreams of the ignorant.