Posted on 11/27/2016 3:34:29 AM PST by Rummyfan
Neill Blomkamp’s 2013 science-fiction film Elysium, starring Matt Damon and Jodie Foster, takes place in Los Angeles, circa 2154. The wealthy have moved into an orbiting luxury satellite—the Elysium of the title—while the wretched majority of humans remain in squalor on Earth. The film works passably as an allegory for its director’s native South Africa, where racial apartheid was enforced for nearly 50 years, but it’s a rather cartoonish vision of the American future. Some critics panned the film for pushing a socialist message. Elysium’s dystopian world, however, is a near-perfect metaphor for an actually existing socialist nation just 90 miles from Florida.
I’ve always wanted to visit Cuba—not because I’m nostalgic for a botched utopian fantasy but because I wanted to experience Communism firsthand. When I finally got my chance several months ago, I was startled to discover how much the Cuban reality lines up with Blomkamp’s dystopia. In Cuba, as in Elysium, a small group of economic and political elites live in a rarefied world high above the impoverished masses. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, authors of The Communist Manifesto, would be appalled by the misery endured by Cuba’s ordinary citizens and shocked by the relatively luxurious lifestyles of those who keep the poor down by force.
(Excerpt) Read more at city-journal.org ...
Cuba a progressive elites utopia, should be the headlines
I wish I could make $20m staring in a Marxist movie.
The irony drips there!! :)
Starring!!!
But if they’d pay me for staring, I’d take it :)
I sometimes wonder about sentiments like that. Didn't Engels essentially continue to live off the family fortune? I know that there was a joke about the Trotskys making the revolutions but the Bronsteins paying the bills. 'Vows of poverty' seem pretty rare in socialist circles.
Mr. niteowl77
The article is excellent writing. The information revealing.
This is what should be in the NYTs. The article shows the depth of what how we are and have been systematically lied to and propagandized for decades.
Thanks for posting. We had Cuban friends when we lived in NM in 1972-1986. They visited Cuba to help his father. It was bad then, but not this bad.
This makes me even more angry at the O_tard.
I think that's the appeal of socialism, and the main reason that so many leftists in America want it.
It is not enough to have personal wealth. It means little when there is a large middle class that isn't wealthy, yet lives comfortably. How can you bask in your wealth, in your obvious superiority, when the little people live almost as well as you? But when those little people are kept oppressed, when they can barely survive day to day because of extreme poverty--*that* is when the fruits of wealth taste very sweet. Your superiority is evident by the fact that you have opulent wealth while the masses are writhing in the mud. You have endless opportunity to show your generosity towards the unfortunate by throwing them a bread crust here, a penny candy there. You can spend whole days pondering how much you care about the unwashed rabble and exulting yourself for working so hard to make sure every person is equal and that there are no income disparities.
Indeed, socialism is good, for the elites at the top.
Funny and sad at the same time.
Stolen from a Star Trek TOS episode, “The Cloud Minders”
Excellent comment. You’re on a roll today!
Was the entire emotional range Elijah Wood exhibited in all three of the "Lord of the Rings" movies. Likewise Brian Cranston in "Breaking Bad", to a lesser extent. You, too, could be a movie star.
No, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels knew exactly what they were doing the same as today’s lib pols because they were already using their bilge to live off others without working a real job.
One more time: The primary beneficiary of a socialist program/policy is the socialist politician.
Cuba is missing a great opportunity in not recruiting all those Hollywood leftists who promised to leave the US if Trump were elected. Certainly they would just love to live in this socialist utopia. Why Cuba probably has the lowest carbon footprint on the planet with few cars, no air conditioning and limited electricity and thus is doing more to save the planet from climate change than any ther country except North Korea. According to Michael Moore, Cuban health care is better than in the US and of course free. Never mind those few Cuban malcontents who are willing to tie themselves to inner tubes and hope to cross 90 miles of open ocean to escape this paradise.
“Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, authors of The Communist Manifesto, would be appalled by the misery endured by Cuba’s ordinary citizens and shocked by the relatively luxurious lifestyles of those who keep the poor down by force.”
In theory yes, in practice no.
The theories that they promoted were simply lies, used to trick more people into supporting their attempts to grab power.
Marx was a revolutionary first. He only started cooking up his now famous theories after he was expelled from Germany for plotting a takeover. He just wanted a story (narrative is the current trendy term) to peddle as propaganda, to incite revolution and gin up more support for his takeover.
The genius of Marx, his main innovation, was to make it seem moral to take other peoples’ stuff.
Historically, it was common to recruit mercenaries, pirates or coup plotters with a share of the spoils as incentive. But moral reprobates willing to sell their souls for silver were usually a minority in Christian societies. So he developed a bunch of doubletalk, that made it seem morally justified in some intellectually tortured way.
Communism never made economic sense. Marx’s “Das Capital”, which supposedly makes the economic case, is purposefully dense and difficult to read, but the the main objective points and data he used to support his argument in that book have since been shown to have been deliberate fraud. Pure sophistry.
It has always been just a sweet sounding lie, used to gain power - absolute power, for its own sake.
Cuba is two societies - one that foreigners and the Communist elite live in and one that the vast majority of Cubans live in. They are really worlds apart and foreigners seldom see the real Cuba and if they did they would be shocked at the extent of its misery and deprivation.
No one has ever convincingly explained why the regime’s touted achievements required a totalitarian state to keep every one down. And even those achievements are a lie since no one can dream of having a better life. The Communist regime’s monomaniacal insistence on absolute equality at all costs has prevented Cuba from advancing socially and materially.
Its not a place any one would want to live even for a short period of the time. And even the Communist regime’s leftist Western fellow travelers certainly don’t want to live there. Communism loses much of its appeal when there is no real freedom.
Let’s keep that in mind as the world mourns Fidel Castro in spite of the enormous suffering he inflicted on his own people and the devastation his regime wreaked upon the country. Even Cambodia’s Pol Pot did not seek to preserve his country as a living museum of man’s inhumanity to man. This is Cuba today in the aftermath of Castro.
The world’s indifference to Cuba’s fate is as much an indictment of it for failing to look beyond the Communist regime’s propaganda and doing real reporting to bring about needed change. Cubans, unlike East Germans, don’t have a free Cuba to compare their country to and the Communist regime has systemically deprived them of every means to rise up against it and overthrow it. A impoverished and brainwashed people are hardly in a position to know freedom.
At least where the US is concerned, we don’t have to legitimate this wretched state of affairs. We can reinstate the embargo and terminate our newly minted relations with the Communist regime. We should persuade our allies to cut off the hard dollar trade that keeps the country barely afloat. The Communist regime will only disappear when even the elite realize their fantasy of living better than every one else can no longer help them to justify the oppression of the rest of their fellow countrymen.
In a word, we didn’t compromise with apartheid in South Africa. And the last thing America should do is make the chains of Cuban slavery more manageable for the slave masters who run the island. Our policy should be to insist the Communist elite give up their absolute power to run their country like a gulag. We should insist on human freedom and democracy and this is the natural right of nearly every people on earth. Only then will Cuba’s long national Communist nightmare finally be over.
+10
Interesting article...I think I’d rather vacation in Detroit than in Cuba...
Most importantly, the wealthy need a lower class to provide a pool of employees to do all their work. Many low-skill jobs today in my area had been jobs for high school and college students 30 years ago; now they are staffed by adults, who naturally need higher wages (hence the $15/hour movement). I know those wages are impractical, but ignoring that lower class put Otoken in office twice. Hillary lost because those same people realized she would do nothing for them...
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