Has the world forgotten? Have we?

As we march in a seemingly inexorable fashion towards socialism, I have to wonder if people remember what life under a truly socialistic society is like? Younger people don’t because for them the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact are things of the past they probably have barely heard of (especially in a public school). I know I am going to sound really old here, but people under 30 really have never lived with the threat of totalitarianism. Sure we have terrorism, but blowing up buildings is not going to lead to a full scale war or conquest. Growing up as I did in the 80’s, the threat of the Soviets was a very real one. Movies like Red Dawn that depicted a Soviet invasion of America resonated with us. We know now that the Soviets were far less militarily adept than we gave them credit for, but they still had land based nuclear ICBMs, submarines with nuclear missiles and an enormous military that was facing our forces across Europe. It is in vogue now, especially among detractors of Ronald Reagan to pooh pooh the military capability of the Soviets, but I remember vividly the parades through Red Square, column after column of troops, tanks and trucks towing Soviet ICBMs. I went to an elementary school with nuclear fallout shelter signs on the wall, a daily reminder that there was a nation bent on world conquest with nuclear weapons. I still have a book from the 80’s on Soviet military power and overblown a bit or not, the Soviets were a formidable force and the last national power that really came close to rivaling the United States. So I remember all too well what rotten fruits come from the various branches of socialism /communism/ Marxism.

To hear people today, wearing their Che Guevara t-shirts and praising Cuban health care, socialism is the way to go. But outside of the comfy confines of Hollywood and universities full of overindulged college kids, lifelong “grad students” and professors who teach because they are unable to get real jobs, people realize that socialism doesn’t work and hasn’t worked. Ever. Americans do not flee from Miami and take rickety boats to Cuba, not even the slovenly Michael Moore who thinks that Cuba is some sort of paradise but still chooses to live in luxury in New York. Nobody got shot trying to climb the Berlin Wall going from west to east. Taiwan is not threatening to retake mainland Red China by force.

Socialism invariably leads to authoritarian government and history has demonstrated again and again that authoritarian government inevitably leads to totalitarianism. Look at the worst human rights violators of the past century and the present age: Nazi Germany. Stalinist Soviet Russia. Fascist Italy under Mussolini. The Khmer Rouge. Maoist China. Castro’s Cuba. These are not nations led by Jerry Falwell-esque conservative Christians. They are lead universally by totalitarian regimes, every one some version of socialism. Even Nazi Germany fits this bill. What was the full name of the Nazi Party? The National Socialist German Workers' Party. People label conservatives “Nazis” all the time, but Adolf Hitler has a lot more in common with socialists in this country than he does with Rush Limbaugh.

The more responsibility and freedom people abdicate to the government, the more it seeks. It feeds upon itself because it is an unsustainable system. As systems fail, more and more power is consolidated into the government. This causes more systems to fail as the inefficiencies of centralized governmental bureaucracies spawn more instability. Eventually the only thing holding it together is brute force and fear. For all of the talk about being a “Worker’s Paradise”, the only thing keeping Russians in the Soviet Union was the threat of the KGB, Siberian gulags and barbed wire.

The more power shifts away from the people and into the hands of the government, the less free those people become. We have apparently forgotten this in our headlong quest to abdicate as much personal freedom and responsibility as possible into the hands of our benevolent government in the hope that by doing so we can trade freedom for security. That is a false hope as those political prisoners languishing in Castro’s prisons and the women who stood for hours in bread lines in Soviet Russia can attest. Socialism doesn’t improve the financial security of all people, it drags everyone down into the same impoverished state except for the bureaucrats who run everything. Far from an egalitarian society, socialism merely replaces the middle class and the upper class with powerful bureaucrats at the top and a bunch of miserable workers at the bottom. The rich capitalist is replaced by the tin pot dictator government official.

So we find ourselves in America in 2009 facing a precarious situation: we are in a dangerous world with enemies all about seeking to overthrow our nation. We have virtually unimpeded illegal immigration at the same time that we have growing unemployment and instability in the financial markets. In our national commercial institutions, the two of the three main drivers of our economy are in serious trouble, i.e. the auto industry and our financial markets (the agricultural industry is the third). People are afraid, they are losing jobs, cars, houses. I expect a massive wave of bankruptcies, personal and business, in 2009 as job losses mount. There are far too many people looking for a quick fix and far too many power hungry politicians more than willing to give them just that. That is a recipe for protectionism and socialism and eventually totalitarianism.

Once in place, the shackles of totalitarianism are hard to throw off without bloodshed. America stands at a precipice and is in danger of falling. Don’t expect to hear voices of sanity coming out of Washington, D.C. because it is in the hands of people who have an ideology that at its intellectual core is hard to distinguish from Marxism. They may not advocate totalitarianism now but it is the inevitable end result of the policies they do advocate. At some point everyone comes to a point of resistance to authoritarianism and it is at that point that socialism enforces its ideology at the end of a gun barrel. If America falls to socialism, there is not a free nation out there to fight for us, there are no Ronald Reagan’s in China. We must make a stand, here and now, or lose the freedoms that so many men have died for forever.