By John Eidson | September 1, 2018
On
plantations of the Old South, bodies were enslaved, but minds were free. The
opposite is true today, but that is rapidly changing.
– John Edison
Chicago Unchained: Black Activists Slam Democrat
Plantation
Published October 27, 2014
CREATED DURING THE OBAMA PRESIDENCY
Democrats cannot win without overwhelming support from
the black electorate. Even though every Democrat-run city in America is marred
by residential areas that more resemble bombed-out war zones than normal
communities, most black people still vote for Democrats.
By smearing Republicans as racists, Democrats have
maintained a seemingly unbreakable lock on the black vote. But that lock is now
being picked, big-time—a recent Rasmussen survey found that African-American
support for President Trump has soared since the election, from 8% to 36%.
In increasing numbers, chronically-poor black voters are
realizing that loyalty to Democrats has been rewarded only with more policies
that perpetuate crime, poverty and hopelessness. Nowhere is that more evident
than in the sentiments expressed in a YouTube titled “Voices of the
Ex-Offender.”
Produced in 2014, when Barack Obama was president, the
video shows four struggling black men who finally awakened to the reality that
Democrats are 100% responsible for the deplorable conditions that have plagued
urban communities for the last half-century.
Black joblessness is at an all-time low under President
Trump, and if the sentiments of these four ex-offenders are widely viewed by
black voters, Democrats will pay a steep price for having condemned generations
of decent black people to entire lifetimes marked by poverty and despair.
__________________
A Crime Against Humanity
By Scott
McKay
Given all the suffering it has caused, is
socialism a hate crime?
As is his custom, Piereson makes a solid case.
His isn’t
a complex argument — Piereson simply totals up the corpses thanks to the
world’s chief practitioners of socialist governance in the 20thcentury,
and concludes that anything which leads to the deaths of more than 110 million
souls has to be a hate crime by the definition afforded us by the modern
gatekeepers of the term.
After all, the evidence for its malignant effects is
obvious to anyone with sufficient curiosity to look at the historical record.
The socialist movement has been responsible for the murder, imprisonment, and
torture of many millions, and perhaps hundreds of millions, of innocent people
during its heyday in the twentieth century. That history of murder and tyranny
continues on a smaller scale today in the handful of countries living under the
misfortune of socialism — for example, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, and (more
recently) Venezuela.
How do socialists escape the indictment that, in view of
the historical record, they are purveyors of tyranny and mass murder?
Many deny
that Stalin, Mao, and the others were true socialists and, indeed, that
socialism has never really been tried — a manifest absurdity.
Senator Sanders
and others claim that they are for something called “democratic socialism,” a
popular and peaceful version of the doctrine, but that’s what Lenin, Mao, and
Castro said until they seized power and immediately began to sing a different
tune.
Democracy and diversity are what they say when out of power; tyranny and authoritarianism are what they practice once in power. That is the tried-and-true technique of all socialist movements.
And a bit more…
The question is often asked: why does the same thing
happen over and over in socialist regimes? Socialist plans and policies —
five-year plans repeated again and again, collectivization of agriculture,
nationalization of industry, the concentration of power into the hands of a few
— lead inevitably to economic collapse, repression, large-scale killing, and
democide.
It has happened according to script wherever socialism has been
tried. Socialism always and everywhere begins with humanistic promises and ends
in barbarism.
F. A. Hayek answered this question as long ago as 1944,
when he published The Road to Serfdom, his classic critique of
socialism. At that time, the socialist experiment was still in its early
stages, with just two examples from which to draw lessons: the communist regime
in Russia and Hitler’s Nazi regime in Germany.
The brutal history of socialism
was yet fully to play out in the post-war era, but the lessons Hayek drew from
Stalin and Hitler would turn out to apply perfectly to Mao, Castro, the Kim
dynasty, and all of the socialist tyrants who came later.
In socialist movements, as Hayek pointed out, there is a
tendency for the most brutal and unscrupulous people to rise to the top because
they are the types who are willing to take the necessary steps to seize power
and who prize the kind of absolute power that socialism promises.
Lenin,
Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot — these were not the kinds of people one might
have encountered in faculty lounges or middle-class town meetings. They were
blackguards and thugs one and all, thuggishness being the key attribute for
rising to the top in a movement in which power went to those willing to
experiment with the most extreme measures.
Socialist policies, moreover, are always going to fail
because it is impossible for central planners efficiently to allocate capital,
goods, and services across a large economy. Socialism, after all, was always a
political doctrine and never a plausible economic theory.
When there arose
shortages of food or housing or military equipment — when socialist policies
failed — leaders were faced with a choice of admitting failure and abandoning
the socialist path or doubling down on their policies and preserving their
power. It was in their nature to choose the latter course, and thus to press
forward with more extreme measures, which typically involved the identification
of scapegoats and counter-revolutionary elements as causes of failure.
From
here it was but a few steps to the catastrophic outcomes described above: show
trials, terror famines, mass starvation, cultural revolutions, “killing
fields,” and democide.
For my part, I dislike the term “hate crime” — something
is either a crime or it is not, and we shouldn’t trouble ourselves with the
question whether a crime is motivated by hatred. If I’m to be mugged on the
street I couldn’t care less whether my assailant is acting on feelings of
greed, desperation, or ethnic hatred; in any case it’s cost me my valuables and
my peace of mind.
Likewise, socialism is certainly a mugging. It’s
political criminality of the basest sort. Socialism is a political doctrine
prescribing virtue to at least six of the seven deadly sins (pride, greed,
gluttony, envy, wrath, and sloth), and as Piereson notes it attracts all the
worst kinds of people to its banner.
A socialist is a person who believes he or
she can do a better job with your earnings than you can, and is undeterred by
the atrocious and universal failures of that political doctrine.
Press a
socialist on the impracticability of his ideas, and you’ll end up on the wrong
end of wild invective and name-calling. Ask yourself if that’s the personality
type you’d like to be governed by.
On second thought, it isn’t just six of the deadly sins.
You can add, lust to the pile, because upon the abject failure of socialist
economics to produce its promised utopia rather than admit it simply does not
work the academic socialists of 100 years ago resolved to destroy capitalist
societies by use of relentless attacks on their culture.
And when the
post-modern assault on Western civilization reached American shores it was in
the form of sexual liberation.
And for half a century the cultural Marxist
crowd has used lust and sexual license as its primary wedge to gain political
power.
And to what end?
Grinding, inescapable misery, that’s
what. Simply cast an eye to the south, and observe what socialism has wrought
upon Venezuela — once one of Latin America’s wealthiest nations, a land
containing the world’s largest proven oil reserves, and a population which at
one time was among the best-educated in the Spanish-speaking world.
The Maduro
regime, continuing the tyrannical and almost comically tragic mismanagement of
that country begun by Hugo Chavez, has driven Venezuela into the status of a
failed state.
Since 2014 more than 2.4 million Venezuelans have fled their
homeland, causing a refugee crisis even worse than that in Syria.
All of South
America is groaning under the strain of taking in Venezuelans, who are bringing
with them squalid poverty and broken spirits after years of malnutrition and
terror under Chavez and Maduro.
Venezuela is little different than its predecessors. What
is unfolding there is little different than what socialism wrought in Russia,
Germany (yes, the Nazis were socialists; it’s right there in name the Nazis
gave themselves), China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Cuba and the rest.
We’ve simply not seen the final denouement, which is coming soon.
But those who continue perpetrating this criminal
political doctrine refuse to take responsibility for its works.
“But (China,
the USSR, Cuba, Venezuela) isn’t TRUE socialism,” they whine.
As though their
purported success stories in Sweden and Denmark, in which small, homogenous
capitalist countries are breaking under the demographic strain of mass Third
World immigration are somehow truer avatars of socialism than is North Korea.
That the Cold War wasn’t enough to wipe this foul
ideology off the map, that the mass suffering in Venezuela won’t finish
socialism once and for all, that there are supposedly mainstream political
figures in this country continuing their attempts to force it down the throats
of the public, and that there are ignorant (or worse) Americans who actually
prefer it is proof of one sad fact: humans are wicked, and addicted to sin.
Socialism enables sin in a political context, and because it does it will never
go away.
But it can be held at bay.
One step in that endeavor is
to call it what it is: a criminal political doctrine.
And those who advocate
socialism are advocating all of the crimes it carries.