Thoughts from Sarah Hoyt:
Few people have read The Black Book of Communism – which should be taught in our schools, in every grade, in grade-appropriate chunks – but our highs chools boast Howard Zin’s People’s History which is the Soviet view of America; Young Hegelians clubs and hipsters decked in Che Guevara.
The “Well educated” are in fact indoctrinated, taught communist propaganda and syllogisms until they’re UNABLE to think. We now have an administration composed of people like this, who are unable to connect to reality. They might be our first Marxist administration, but they suffer from third generation blight, not having come to their opinions from their own mind, but having been browbeaten into them. They are the good kids, trapped in an illusion from which they can’t break out.
But the d*mned ineradicable fact about communism and its cousin “state capitalism” and the hellish hybrid they’re trying out here is that it doesn’t work. IT NEVER WORKS. It doesn’t work even when instituted by very bright psychopaths. It works even less when instituted by people so indoctrinated they can’t SEE reality.
And it will crash here – hard or soft, with a bang or a whimper. It will crash and it might drag the rest of the world with us into the endless night.
Perhaps liberty will re-arise amidst the wreckage, but I hope we don’t have to get that far.
We had our niece living with us for a little over a year, starting just after she GRADUATED from HS. I was talking to my younger son one day, he’s an ex-Marine who did a tour in Iraq, and the topic was a decoration for Cold War Veterans.
Speaking to me, my niece says, “Cold War? You’re NOT old enough for that! Wait?! Isn’t that another name for when we fought with Europe over ‘something’ ?”
Before I could completely dissect her statements and correct them, I saw the glaze go over the eyes, and knew she was done….and sadly, I’ve had similar conversations with people twice her age about the Cold War.
I don’t think that it carries the weight of any ‘hot’ war, nor would I put myself in the league with veterans who have actually taken fire. But the Cold War is almost forgotten as a concept. I know on two different occasions I was watching video of the Berlin Wall coming down on some show, and the 30somethings in the room, tried to tell ME, that the Wall coming down didn’t end “…didn’t come at the end of any kind of war”.
I found it REALLY odd that all three of them used that exact turn of phrase, “…didn’t come at the end of any kind of war”. I’ll admit I’m overly sensitive to group think phrasing. But that’s BECAUSE I hear Talking Points type stuff like “gravitas” and “trumped up scandals” all, too, often and I have for 30 years!
I think Liberty, and Freedom, rising from any ashes won’t be easy. Too many people are too addicted to Federal $$$$. And I do NOT mean poor people in the PJ’s. I think there are too many people doing that certainly. BUT, and their butts are gettin’ bigger everyday, there are damned near as many rich people / rich corporations / 501C’s / Unions getting tax breaks, deferments, waivers, subsidies, etc, etc, etc who are also not going to be happy to be FREE to starve.
However, and unfortunately, I think it WILL take something creating some actual ashes, from which we will have to arise.
The Black Book of Communism is propaganda in itself. It describes the famines in the USSR and Maoist China as purely a matter of communist style government when in reality similar death tolls happened in prior famines in the same places back when there was no communism in place.
Taking China as an example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines_in_China
There were 2 other large famines in the XIXth century during the Qing era.
Sure they did bogus agricultural practices like lysenkoism and the thousand pests campaign. But none of these caused the severe historically long drought which would have killed Chinese production regardless.
As for political stupidity causing famines, it is not exclusive to communist governments or need I remember you of the Irish Famine? The Irish starving at the same time they were exporting food to Great Britain. A great success of laissez -faire no doubt.
Gosh, Godzilla has written some stupid stuff here, but seeing the Irish Famine as an example of laissez-faire has got to take the biscuit. The British Crown practiced laissez-faire in Ireland? In other words, the Brits left the Irish alone? If only.
The land in Ireland happened to be owned by England living tenants. They used their land to maximize profit in a free market selling the crop to those which could pay more, What did you propose? Nationalization of the land? Redistribution to the peasants? Let me hear your libertarian solution to the famine problem then.
Oh and don’t forget the solution needs to be free market capitalist as well.
The sources for the two prior Chinese famines at your wiki link are “page not found” and the July 1917 issue of National Geographic.
I have read some historic Chinese literature and famines were hardly uncommon. Several are mentioned as far back as in the Romance of Three Kingdoms for example. Ever heard of the Yellow Turban Rebellion?
As for Qing China it took me all of 5 seconds to Google this:
http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/special/china_1750_demographic.htm
The idea that things like the 1930s Terror Famine in the USSR were anything like the historical famines you mention is risible, or would be if it weren’t so ignorant. In those famines the government did not go through the landscape and systematically suck every last bit of the grain out of the countryside, pile it up in huge heaps next to train tracks, supposedly for shipment to exporting ports, …and then let it rot by the tracks, …and do this over and over again.
This was not a weather-caused, or even a collectivisation-caused famine. It was a deliberate attempt on Stalin’s part to break the nationalism of portions of the USSR that might challenge the Kremlin, and himself, on anything. I heard a direct witness to these things confirm this. I met an old lady on a park bench by the Willamette River, near Chemeketa, Oregon, in the summer of 1963 . She spoke passable English by then. She was of Ukrainian/Russian descent.
She survived the famine only because she had a son in the NKVD/Interior troops enforcing border security with Poland. His enlistment ended, and he went back to his village to find she was one of the last people still alive there, because all others had starved. He had previously been in the units that had guarded the grain beside the train tracks, and shot people who tried to steal the rotting grain. They watched empty trains rumble past. Some of the other guards had come from units assigned to collect the grain, and they told him they were not allowed to even leave seed grain for the crop next spring. In an agrarian countryside that is simple mass murder.
She survived because he, being a well-fed border guard, was still strong enough to pick her then skinny frame up and carry her to and across the border on his back, using his knowledge gained in guarding that border. They settled among the Ukrainian minority in Eastern Poland until 1938, when he had saved enough to send her to relatives in San Francisco, from which she eventually moved to Chemeketa. He was to follow 5 years later. The next year the Red Army swept across the border, and the NKVD was right behind, with its list of “traitors”. He never had a chance.
To claim that this sort of behavior is anything like the weather and war-caused famines of previous centuries is simple moral cowardice.
I was discussing the Maoist famine.
Now you are talking about the Ukrainian famine. For that one the details are a lot more sketchy. A lot of it is either based on inflated production reports from Gosplan and a lot is simply conveniently dropped records. The bandied around death toll for that one in the Black Book of Communism is most suspect. As for the causes I am sure there was plenty of waste and the forced high speed industrialization and hence priority of shipments to the cities and the army was murderous. What I do doubt is that Stalin did it out of a will for genocide of Ukrainians. He was murderous but that would have been totally out of character. Besides there were simultaneous famines reported elsewhere in the USSR at the same time, including in Orel and Bielorussia, but they were just more limited. I also see a lot of lies being perpetuated. That people were not allowed to sell their produce, and here you claim they left no seed.
http://www.as.wvu.edu/history/Faculty/Tauger/Tauger,%20%27The%201932%20Harvest%20and%20the%20Famine%20of%201933,%20SR%2091.pdf
They did reduce the demanded quotas at least twice in 1932 (page 73). Yet the Soviet central government did loan seeds (page 88).
You were also discussing the USSR famines.
The Black Book of Communism is propaganda in itself. It describes the famines in the USSR and Maoist China as purely a matter of communist style government when in reality similar death tolls happened in prior famines in the same places back when there was no communism in place.
What I do doubt is that Stalin did it out of a will for genocide of Ukrainians. He was murderous but that would have been totally out of character.
OTOH, I don’t see any such incompatibilities with Stalin’s barbarous and brutal character. Murdering a few million Ukrainians via starvation is quite his style.
Google ‘Ukrainian Famine”. That was no arbitrarily recurring happenstance. It is insulting to the victims of those policies for you to be so dismissive of their forced suffering.
Have you ever lived in Russia/USSR? If not, shut your cock-holster, before you get cunt-punted. I grew up there. I got the FUCK out of there. Your little bitch ass would really presume to tell me how good communism is for me? FUCK YOU. You are not worthy of a more civilized argument, you pathetic rancid chunk of an inbred pig’s afterbirth.
That is the most impressive stream of invective I have ever seen.
Can we get more of her?
Pure poetry.
I hope so! Nat just got back from deployment to the Sandbox (Army officer), and was a bit offline from the blogs while she was overseas.
Her grandfather was a very highly decorated Soviet bomber pilot, as I recall, which saved her family on more than one occasion. And yes, she did look awfully cute in her Komsomol uniform, even though you could tell she would try to murder her Soviet teachers at the first opportunity (but failed).
Her case handler liked to take her to dinner when she was in DC, probably because if a college hippy showed up, the restaurant turned more deadly and violent than any field operation from the old days, and failing that, she could just drink everybody under the table.
And for an engineer, she’s really good with verbs. ^_^
Godzilla,
are you trying to say, that the Potato Famine / deaths from starvation from land owners taking food from people who were all but enslaved, under a class driven society, was an example of laissez-faire government or practices!? And it was English landowners not ‘the Irish’ who exported the food.
OR, do I have a tumor and I just misread what you wrote?
As to China, the famines and deaths were as much caused by drought, as by inefficiency and corruption in the gov’t in pre-Communist China. But just like the Irish Famine, it wasn’t just corruption or inefficiency under the Chi-Coms it was done on purpose, by people who didn’t CARE if anyone died, so long as those in charge were well fed and happy.
Given the topic, I’m not sure why you keyed in on famine.
There’s plenty of other parc that the Communists get wrong. The very fact that the RussoComs found it best to produce PLENTY of vodka, but not bread, noodles, crackers or just FLOUR was always quite telling to me. That they thought a semi-drunk but half hungry population was a preferable way to use grains [some of which they HAD to buy from US because they couldn’t produce enough on their own] says a lot about what THEY COULD achieve under their system.
Building an impressive subway system, fitted with world class art as a show piece of Communist Power and Influence, while many people lived in gov’t housing sans daily heat in Moscow winters, again, the wrong way to go with the funds.
You talked about famines, but you left out outright murder, punishment and mayhem perpetrated on the general populace. ‘zilla, we may NOT have the best system, but I don’t know of any broad sweeping situation where a Democratically aligned and operated gov’t ever had killing fields, re-education camps, gulags, or purges of anyone who ‘thought outside the gov’t approved box’.
The gulags existed in Tsarist times and the Communists did not invent the Oprichniks either. The problem is a lot of people confuse historical tendency with communist motive. You can blame the communists for not ending such condemnable practices but the fact is they had no root cause in communism per se. How about present USA incarceration rates? They are scarcely better than the ones in the Soviet Union. Plus the US still has not abolished the death penalty, nor the use of torture, and then you talk to me about Stalin and Mao who had to fight civil wars and foreign invasion of technologically better equipped foes? Seriously.
Wow! An actual dyed-red-with-the-blood-of-capitalist-oppressors Commie. I thought you lot were all pretending to be ‘environmentalists’ these days.
Communism is a murderous ideology because that’s all it can ever be when it goes completely against human nature; the productive will never volunteer to be slaves to the unproductive. Pretty soon it has to lock up or kill everyone who disagrees, or they will simply set up a free market among themselves.
Yes communism does not work very well as an economic system. Which top down hierarchy, blind at the problem solving scale, does?
Since when was I under the pretense to be a mainstream environmentalist? If you had followed my posts you would know I am in favor of nuclear power expansion, tar sands and oil shale drilling. I also think anthropogenic global warming is bunk.
You are also quite wrong about the Soviet Union. While there was a lot of leeway for inefficiency during the post Stalin years during the war communism period people who did not fulfill their quotas were denounced as wreckers and sent to the gulag to do menial labor.
In the US much of the unemployed turn to a life of crime and end up incarcerated regardless. Scarcely better.
In the US much of the unemployed turn to a life of crime and end up incarcerated regardless.
Yeah. It’s not as if unemployment has anything to do with anti-capitalist government policies, taxation, and regulation.
Sure, there have been periodic famines in all cultures from time immemorial, right up until the Industrial Revolution. There have been autocratic kings and emperors. Slavery and torture have likewise been commonplace throughout history. All of that is true. Historically, the normal human condition is oppression of the many by the few.
Nevertheless, it sure sounds like you are an apologist for communism, which institutionalizes and guarantees all of the above. How on Earth do you sleep at night?
It is fairly simple. I never take words at face value. I always try to reach my own conclusions. People did die during the forced industrialization drive, but in Stalin’s own words, We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or they will crush us. And geez was he prophetic or not? Invasion of the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa in 1941.
Stalins methods were brutal. But are you really convinced fewer people would have died at Hitler’s exterminations camps? He was not terribly fond of Slavs you know?
I have my own ideas on the matter. I compare the death toll from the war in China against Japan. Unlike the Soviet Union, China back then did not have a modern mechanized army. The death toll inflicted on the civilian population by the Japanese was horrendous. Had the Soviet Union to fight with a WWI style army I am fairly certain the losses would have been a lot worse.
Stalins methods were brutal. But are you really convinced fewer people would have died at Hitler’s exterminations camps? He was not terribly fond of Slavs you know?
I don’t see much difference between National Socialism and International Socialism.
Yeah. It’s not as if unemployment has anything to do with anti-capitalist government policies, taxation, and regulation.
Let’s talk supply and demand here. If you increase the worker supply by abolishing things like the minimum wage what will happen is that you will have a lot of extra people working at even lower wages (they aren’t worth minimum wage remember?) which will be either at the limit or below the limit of being able to sustain themselves. That is your solution to the problem. If you then remove taxation for things like food stamps then those people will starve. Because it is, in my opinion, as realistic to expect communism to be heaven on earth as to expect private charities to solve the problem of having starving people. I have enough experience working in charities to know they are not all some people proclaim them to be. They fulfill a role in society but they are certainly neither efficient nor effective.
Somebody’s got a lot of time on their hands. Here’s my challenge – run your same “….reach my own conclusions” algorithms on National Socialism and get back to us. It will be interesting, if for nothing else a measure of your intellectual integrity.
You want me to play devil’s advocate for the Nazis? Sure. They eliminated unemployment, built a vast expanse of highways, eliminated deficits and created a miraculous economic recovery. They gave us modern liquid rocket propulsion technology. What you cannot ask me is to subscribe to racial theory even though I suspect eugenics is poised for a renaissance. Nor can you ask me to defend wars of aggression like the Nazis did. I have no belief in racial superiority. Each person is an individual and must be judged solely as that.
I could go on more details about the miraculous economic recovery but that might take a bit of the shine off of it.
“The gulags existed in Tsarist times”
Yes, and Lenin himself declared he was was appalled that they held thousands of prisoners. He then expanded it to hundreds of thousands, and Stalin’s NKVD expanded it to millions.
“then you talk to me about Stalin and Mao who had to fight civil wars and foreign invasion of technologically better equipped foes? Seriously.”
Seriously. Stalin and Mao killed the vast majority of their victims in times when they were freest to act because they were not fighting anyone from outside their borders. In fact, like most sociopaths, they and their Party structures were most deadly when they were least threatened. Their totalitarian ideology of communism, that was willing to suppress *any* industrial freedom in order to secure their power, was what gave them permission to do that. It was the absence of outside pressure that accelerated their rate of killing.
Between 1930 and 1935 Stalin killed about 15 million people, 13 million of them in the Terror Famine alone. Whereas, when he was pressed by the Nazis, his security forces were only killing about 10 million people behind the lines as the Nazis were killing 20 million in the front lines. Pressure slowed him down.
Mao killed far more Chinese than anyone in history. He did most of this *after* all of the Civil War had unified the mainland, and the Korean War had stopped. 30 million alone died in his political attempt to bypass Chen and the bureaucrats in the Great Leap Forward. When told of the scale of deaths, he replied that it was nothing to worry about because, “Chinese will get to fucking and replace them in less than a decade”.
It’s not like this sort of thing wasn’t known, but people like you Godzilla have been passing over it as Capitalist propaganda for 80 years by now. I was speaking to a nice young danish exchange student in my junior high school, and brought up how unneeded the Korean War had been moved on to the wonders of China’s progress. I mentioned the GPCR’s then current political faction battles going on in Canton, that left rafts of bodies floating down the Pearl River past Hong Kong, still entwined in the fence wire they had been wrapped into groups with before being shoved off the piers in Canton. There were pictures, …but she would not look at them, …it was all propaganda. This was late 1966 at the height of the GPCR. All propaganda.
Sure.
You talked about famines, but you left out outright murder, punishment and mayhem perpetrated on the general populace. ‘zilla, we may NOT have the best system, but I don’t know of any broad sweeping situation where a Democratically aligned and operated gov’t ever had killing fields, re-education camps, gulags, or purges of anyone who ‘thought outside the gov’t approved box’.
I generally agree with your assertion that in a democratic regime these events are unlikely. But they are certainly not impossible in particular for minorities. For example during the Anglo-Boer war 27,927 Boers died in British concentration camps. Your own general Sherman also left quite a mark with his scorched earth tactics in your own Civil War. Let us not discuss your specific policies regarding the natives either. Bad things happen even in democracies.
My preferred form of government would be direct democracy under a constitutional system. My preferred economic system is market capitalism. A lot of us think that it is possible to practice direct democracy today under a much larger scale than it was possible during Athenian primacy given modern information technology. The population is also a lot better educated and given enough free time they can consider issues by themselves without pseudo experts making the decisions for them. I see some signs pointing towards this in places like Switzerland or Iceland but it remains to be seen if such systems will develop further or not.
Still the present western systems are perfectly fine all by themselves. The current crisis in my view is a crisis of a lot of things. Of values since religion keeps taking less importance at the same time people get disensensitized from harsh realities. Of disenfranchisement as families get smaller and people live further away. Finally of a lack of belief or even interest in the material betterment and progress of mankind. The fact remains that technical solutions are a lot more efficient than political solutions to the very real problems we face today.
I see the results quite often here in Europe and it may be a bit better in that regard there in the US given that it is a younger nation and the private sector still seems to have the drive to try to go for new things even if profit is a motive. Here in Europe garanteed profit is most often the motive and any sort of leading edge development is most likely developed by a hobbyist in his own time and positively ignored by the investment community as an investment with too high a risk when there are government construction projects or natural monopolies to cater for. Unfortunate but that is life.
No, direct democracies are probably worse than monarchies. In fact, direct democracies lead to basically communist or proto-communist systems. See the French Revolution, Mao’s China, or Stalin’s Russia. Basically what we have been talking about.
All followed the same pattern. A “majority” came to power, proceeded to murder on a vast scale those who didn’t agree with them and also those who did agree with them but not agree enough, followed by collapse into some kind of elite rule and widespread poverty for the masses.
A constitutional republic, such as early America, with guards against the majority will is the only good system there is long term.
James Madison: “A pure democracy can admit no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will be felt by a majority, and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party. Hence it is, that democracies have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths”.
The further America has moved towards democracy and away from republican government (17th Amendment), and the more people who vote who have no cost to them personally for the programs they vote for (16th Amendment), the worse the situation has gotten here.
Which is why I said a constitutional democracy. Not a pure democracy.
OK, then I should clarify that I don’t believe such democracies can be constitutionally limited. Unless there are actual competing power bases, there is really nothing to check a 50.1% majority in real life, constitution or no.
It’s worth noting here that there was a rather delusional UK government at the time started with a policy which was called at the time “laissez faire”, which basically meant that the UK government did nothing about the Irish famine for a considerable time (about a year?). I gather the argument was that somehow the landless Irish tenants would be incentivized by a non-existent free market to improve the land that they didn’t own. Then when that failed hard the government deployed a bunch of remarkably ignorant, half hearted public, and brutal welfare measures which made things worse.
I think a crude US analogue would be a president in 1846 suggesting that the slavery issue was solved because, due to the free market, slaves could purchase their freedom. This hubris would ignore that slaves had no such ability or right to do so nor would there ever be a fair price for determining such freedom. Then when that didn’t work out, they would buy a bunch of slaves, paid them wages that weren’t enough to buy food much less freedom, and then employed them in pointless make-work projects.
Now as for the topic itself: Who Won The Cold War?
I put that in the same category as:
Who Won the Egyptian Hititte War
Who Won the Roman Parthian War
The USA did win by default after the USSR collapsed on itself. As usual the world got less safe rather than more safe and the remaining power is now confronted with a new problem. Either it tries to bide for total hegemony much like Great Britain tried in the XIXth century. Or it tries to keep business as usual and most likely implode by itself too. In the case of Rome that took 500 years so it is not like it can happen overnight. However to last those 500 years they needed to restructure their entire society. One obvious change was in military formations from having infantry at the core to a heavier reliance on navy and horses.
There are several things which do concern me from the perspective of the US. What is going to be the new policy in the Pacific Ocean after China gets its Navy to the second island chain? When is the US nuclear stockpile going to get replaced? What is the policy of the US in the Americas particularly in resource rich countries like Venezuela? What is the US high speed telecoms strategy? When is the US policy finally going to stop the stupid corn ethanol subsidies?
“The USA did win by default after the USSR collapsed on itself. As usual the world got less safe rather than more safe”
No.
The real countable and calculable numbers, in spite of the wars in the Congo, indicate that in the 20 years after collapse of the USSR’s communism the actual rate of humans killing humans dropped deeply.
You keep fantasizing about the basic facts, Godzilla.
Why?
In the direct aftermath it got less safe and as the situation developing in the Middle East and most of all the Asia-Pacific shows the possibility for armed conflict keeps increasing faster than when the world was bipolar.
What is most depressing is that Godzilla can link tracts from academics all day long, and few here will have any reason to believe them.
The academic community has been in denial about communism since no later than the 1930s. That’s not any great secret. By the end of the 1970s US Universities had heads of History Departments who had spent the last 5 years before their appointment declaring that the purpose of their departments was to bring their students to be “more insurgent” than ever before.
The little piece linked by Godzilla is typical of that era’s output. It is exculpatory of a sociopathic State apparatus and rulers. The work being done in the Soviet Archives between 1991 and December of 1992 blew such a meliorist view out the window. It is drivel!
Yet, it is the sort of thing being taught in history departments around the world, and will continue to be as long as the State is the biggest money tap that academia feeds from. The idea that there *must* be some justification for the State to take money and feed it to them demands that States that did it most not be utterly discounted. The humanities departments were corrupted far sooner and far more deeply than anything like climate science has ever been.
Hey you were the ones asking for links claiming that Wikipedia did not have the citations needed… I cannot talk from personal experience since I was not around there when the events happened. What I can do is extrapolate based on known experience and historic data. In my view Tauger is basically proposing that Gosplan messed up with their unrealistic estimates of crop yield and that there was a production shortfall of some sort not only in the Ukraine but in other parts of the USSR like Orel, Bielorussia, Kazakhstan as well. Then a special committee revised the food requisition amount downwards twice in that same year in an attempt to adjust to reality. In the end the Central Government loaned 60% more grain to the farmers than what was used for food exports so it wasn’t like they simply left them to die without seed to plant. He does mention the inefficient food transportation network and poor handling of crops as being part causes as well as better food distribution in the cities as those had higher priority in the industrialization plan. In short it was a failure of centralized planning.
When I was still living in America back in the 1990s, I wrote a report on China’s environmental problems for the Library of Congress. In that report I recounted some of the difficulties that led to the famine of the Great Leap Backward. One writer has already mentioned the campaign to kill all the birds, which caused insect populations to skyrocket and eat the crops. Another difficulty was that Mao ordered the peasants to give many of their iron farm implements up so they could could be shoved into the maws of Mao’s backyard steel furncaces, which produced steel that was brittle and useless. Another problem was that when the harvests began to fail provincial Communist parties would take healthy rice plantings from still productive fields and then replant them on the side of rail
lines so when Mao rode by on an inspection tour, he would see nothing but healthy rice paddies. Of course, since the rice plants were usually not properly transplanted, they soon died. Yet another problem was that the Chinese Communist Party lied to the peasants about giving them their own land and then proceeded to herd them into People’s Communes, which naturally put a damper on incentive-based agriculture. China didn’t really begin to produce sizeable food surpluses until the late Deng Xiaoping allowed the peasants a lot more control over what they produced starting in the late 1970s.
As for you Godzilla, there was ANOTHER famine in the Ukraine right after WW2. And that wasn’t due to any clmatic problems.
Overall, Marxism sucks.
Folks,
While it is all well and good to rise up in righteous anger when spokesmen and apologists for communism speak up — don’t stop there.
Realize that Godzilla and his ilk are not only out there, they are widespread. Outside little bubbles remaining here and there of American culture, they are so numerous that they feel very comfortable in their worldview. You cannot change their mind by reasoned argument because you are not pulling the puppet strings. George Orwell who was, after all, all too well acquainted with Communism was not joking when he wrote 1984 — it was a warning and one we have failed to heed.
I don’t have a magic answer but take that anger and do at least ONE THING out in the real world to push back against that tide. Write an article. Convince a friend who is not yet lost to reason. Write your congressman to push back against battles where he might still be wavering, wondering if he can get away with one more erosion of our freedoms without voter anger. Anything. But do SOMETHING — don’t just argue with him here.
Ultimately, the only way we’re going to win is if these people realize that speaking this filth in public energizes their enemies, the American citizenry, enough that IT HURTS THEM. Remember, they do NOT CARE that you disagree with them, because they know they know better than you and that they are better able to decide what you should do with your life. So sure — speak up. But also, ACT.
No better policy for promoting national wealth has been found than protecting the Right of a man to the fruits of his labor. This requires allowing a man to suffer when he fails to produce, and allowing a man to prosper without bound if he produces in abundance. A contract made freely between competant men should, as a rule, be binding. And absent such an agreement a man should have few restrictions beyond not initiating force on his fellow man.
Communism, an antithesis of the above, can not help but produce poverty and death.
As most of us regulars here know, Godzilla is a pretty dyed-in-the-Kool-Aid State-cultists, and there’s little you can do to argue against cultists: the old saying that you can’t reason someone out of what they haven’t been reasoned into. And it’s unlikely any pro-freedom argument or research is going to persuade him of its validity. But in light of his ludicrous statement that the Irish Potato Famine was the result of laissez-faire,* those of you who don’t have your head up Daddy State’s rectum may find this of interest:
http://mises.org/daily/2978
*”Laissez-faire? You mean ‘let alone”? Do you mean to say that idjit gobshite thinks the English were leaving us alone all those centuries? If they had we wouldn’t have needed to drink so much!”–Michael Collins, from the spirit world.
A statist I may be but just don’t ask me to support SLS or AGW since I am plainly against either of those. In those regards (energy and space exploration policy) I am quite in line with the people in here.