QUESTION: Is Socialism The ‘Unluckiest Movement In History’ Or Does It Simply Spawn Monsters?
While yet another Socialist experiment implodes, people are once again asking ‘why’?
It’s a short, but powerful summary of the latest collapse of Socialist reengineering:
Today in Venezuela, soldiers are brutalizing protesters in the streets. Opposition leaders are murdered. The press is muzzled. And people are desperately hungry—but not the party bosses, strangely enough. — National Review
‘Desperately hungry’ isn’t just a meaningless phrase being thrown around, either. They’ve taken to eating stray animals, and their average weight has dropped somewhere approaching twenty pounds.
You could ask the Ukrainians all about that. They had to invent a word to describe it: Holodomor
— man-made famine.
They’re all the kinds of horror that keep preppers up at night. And it’s not just Venezuela. We’ve seen this film before. Many of their legacies so brutally memorable that a single name is enough to identify them.
Names like Lenin, Pol Pot, Mao, Ho Chi Mihn, Guevera, Stalin, Castro.
They were by no means the only monsters of their kind, just the more notorious of members of their ideological family.
But WHY does socialism breed such monsters?
Margaret Thatcher — the Iron Lady, boiled it down to one simple sentence: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”
Here’s a typical Socialist flow chart, from initial implementation to collapse.
When socialist policies produced their inevitable economic consequences, the first reaction would be to try to pass laws against the realization of those economic consequences. We saw a good deal of that in Venezuela, for instance with the imposition of currency controls when excessive social-welfare spending produced hyperinflation.
But those efforts are of course doomed to failure as well, which leads to outright political repression, scapegoating, and violence. In Venezuela, strongman Hugo Chávez, who was adored by American Democrats ranging from the Reverend Jesse Jackson to former representative Chakka Fattah and any number of Hollywood progressives, undertook to silence opposition media by insisting that they were simply fronts for moneyed elites working to undermine the work of democracy. (It will not escape your notice that our own progressives are making precisely the same argument in the matter of Citizens United, a First Amendment case considering the question of whether the government could prohibit the showing of a film critical of Hillary Rodham Clinton.) His protégé, Nicolás Maduro, has continued in the same vein.
Socialism is either the unluckiest political movement in the history of political movements, one that just happens to keep intersecting with the careers of monsters, or there is something about socialism itself that throws up monsters. There is nothing wrong with Venezuelans, and nothing unusual about them: [read the excellent article in full at National Review
That violence, of course, spins off into a violent uprising and overthrow of one bad government for ANY other option, even if it’s a worthless one.
None of the policies listed above are really so different from what we see here. Bill Nye would love to see ‘science deniers’ (people who disagree with his take on Climate change) thrown into prison.
Awkwardly, this would now include a growing number of Scientists who don’t carry water for the Climate activists.
We can look at places like Detroit, Baltimore, and Chicago, where local policies have been Democrat for generations. Formerly-thriving cities have slumped into urban decay, unemployment, broken families, and crime.
How curiously unlucky they were, and inexplicable it was when someone like New York’s mayor Juliani came in with new, Conservative policies and turned the city completely around.
Just unlucky? Or does Socialism NEED cutthroat leaders to implement what is — at the very core — a ruthless and bloody ideology?