my grandmother was Russian, she hated Communists and so do I
“my grandmother was Russian, she hated Communists and so do I”
WRT my family, my grandfather’s father was a very comfortable man, because he worked very hard since he was a teenager in the 1880s to build up a water delivery business (which ultimately employed about 50 people and had dozens of large carts and draft horses - roughly equivalent to dozens of trucks today in terms of cost), and to build 14 houses with his own efforts to rent out. Well, the Communists came and took everything. But that wasn’t enough - 15 years later, this broke and broken 74-year-old man was deemed to be such a terrible threat to Stalin’s rule that he was dragged off to prison, and beaten so badly that he died shortly after being released (just like Otto Warmbier was a couple of months ago). Meanwhile, the rest of the family, except for my grandfather and one of his brothers, got to live in a gigantic open-air prison for 75 years.
Despite all of that, my family was reasonably lucky - most survived, and many of my father’s cousins got out starting after the USSR fell. 60 million or more we’re not so fortunate...and that is just in Russia. It was nothing less than the greatest evil to have ever afflicted Mankind.
So you can see why I despise Communism, Socialism (which is just Communism without purges and gulags) and those who advocate for them so much. I never lose an opportunity to tell the advocates these twin evils what they can do with themselves, and remind them that while they may someday gain power here, it most certainly won’t be for free (and that I either know where they live, or can find out easily enough).