Posted on 12/09/2018 10:15:52 AM PST by Impala64ssa
A recent Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation survey found that 51 percent of American millennials would rather live in a socialist or communist country than in a capitalist country. Only 42 percent prefer the latter (http://tinyurl.com/ybsejy3f). Twenty-five percent of millennials who know who Vladimir Lenin was view him favorably. Lenin was the first premier of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Half of millennials have never heard of Communist Mao Zedong, who ruled China from 1949 to 1959 and was responsible for the deaths of 45 million Chinese people.
The number of people who died at the hands of Josef Stalin may be as high as 62 million. However, almost one-third of millennials think former President George W. Bush is responsible for more killings than Stalin (http://tinyurl.com/yb43dlhm). By the way, Adolf Hitler, head of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, was responsible for the deaths of about 20 million people. The Nazis come in as a poor third in terms of history’s most prolific mass murderers. According to professor Rudolph Rummel’s research, the 20th century, mankind’s most brutal century, saw 262 million people’s lives destroyed at the hands of their own governments (http://tinyurl.com/lu8z8ab).
Young people who weren’t alive during World War II and its Cold War aftermath might be forgiven for not knowing the horrors of socialism. Some of their beliefs represent their having been indoctrinated by their K-12 teachers and college professors. There was such leftist hate for former President George W. Bush that it’s not out of the question that those 32 percent of millennials were taught by their teachers and professors that Bush murdered more people than Stalin.
America’s communists, socialists and Marxists have little knowledge of socialist history. Bradley Birzer, a professor of history at Hillsdale College, explains this in an article for The American Conservative titled “Socialists and Fascists Have Always Been Kissing Cousins.” Joseph Goebbels wrote in 1925, “It would be better for us to end our existence under Bolshevism than to endure slavery under capitalism.” This Nazi sentiment might be shared by Sen. Bernie Sanders and his comrade Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Goebbels added, “I think it is terrible that we and the Communists are bashing in each other’s heads” (http://tinyurl.com/yd4lqxvs).
When the tragedies of socialist regimes — such as those in Venezuela, the USSR, China, Cuba and many others — are pointed out to America’s leftists, they hold up Sweden as their socialist role model. But they are absolutely wrong about Sweden. Johan Norberg points this out in his documentary “Sweden: Lessons for America?” Americans might be surprised to learn that Sweden’s experiment with socialism was a relatively brief flirtation, lasting about 20 years and ending in disillusionment and reform (http://tinyurl.com/lvdwzhr). Reason magazine reports: “Sweden began rolling back government in the early 1990s, recapturing the entrepreneurial spirit that made it a wealthy country to begin with. High taxation and a generous array of government benefits are still around. But now it’s also a nation of school vouchers, free trade, open immigration, light business regulation, and no minimum wage laws.” School vouchers, light business regulation and no minimum wage laws are practices deeply offensive to America’s leftists.
Our young people are not the first Americans to admire tyrants and cutthroats. W.E.B. Du Bois, writing in the National Guardian in 1953, said, “Stalin was a great man; few other men of the 20th century approach his stature.” Walter Duranty called Stalin “the greatest living statesman” and “a quiet, unobtrusive man.” There was even leftist admiration for Hitler and fellow fascist Benito Mussolini. When Hitler came to power in January 1933, George Bernard Shaw described him as “a very remarkable man, a very able man.” President Franklin Roosevelt called Mussolini “admirable,” and he was “deeply impressed by what he (had) accomplished.” In 1972, John Kenneth Galbraith visited Communist China and praised Mao and the Chinese economic system. His Harvard University colleague John K. Fairbank believed that America could learn much from the Cultural Revolution, saying, “Americans may find in China’s collective life today an ingredient of personal moral concern for one’s neighbor that has a lesson for us all.”
Are Americans who admire the world’s most brutal regimes miseducated or stupid? Or do they have some kind of devious agenda?
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They are freeloading maggots who want to sit on their ass and do nothing for their entire life. Real POS.
Spot on! BTTT
It is the educators, parents and teachers themselves, and the public who have failed. We do not teach the evil of it, and therefore the kids hear the goody-goody crap fro their sympathetic educators K-BA/BS degree.
I think too many haven’t been taught how to make choices or that there are those. Today there’s a real “collectivism” push where everybody should be on the same page......which ties in well with the International Push for “Universalism’ and that of being a “World Citizen”.
All of that boils down to an easy ‘control’ of populations.
Better yet, every American must spend a compulsory two years in Cuba, Venezuela, or North Korea at age 20. The problem would solve itself very quickly.
I spent 7 months working in a communist country (China) in 1976-1977. I was 25 years old. I had always been conservative, but that really opened my eyes to the reality of different political systems.
I also worked several months in Chile about three years after Allende shot himself and Pinochet had taken over. In 1975, when inflation still raged and a world recession triggered a depression in Chile, General Pinochet turned to the “Chicago Boys”; he appointed several of them to powerful positions in the government. The “Chicago Boys” were Latin American economists who studied or identified with the libertarian economic theories then taught at the University of Chicago, even though some of them earned degrees at Harvard or MIT. They advocated widespread deregulation, privatization, and other free market policies for closely controlled economies. The Chicago Boys rose to prominence as leaders of the early reforms initiated in Chile during General Augusto Pinochet’s rule.
I saw the rapid rise of the middle class and the economic boom unleashed by the market reforms in Chile.
These two ex-pat jobs did more to cement my opinions about political systems and economics than any school courses I took. It was amazing being at the center of the two big politico-economic upheavals in the world.
Evil.
Drew is right. The Baby Boomers indulgence of the 80s and 90s led to this. Reagan and Clinton had some failed ECONOMIC policies
Both. If they weren’t stupid, the miseducation wouldn’t succeed.
Recall that the "socialist" side of the Wall also had a concrete anti-tank ditch to prevent cars ramming thru, a 50 meter gravel death strip, guard dogs, and a 10 foot electrified and alarmed fence with machine gun equipped watch towers, flood lit at all times. This was all before you could touch their side of the wall.
If THAT won't cut down on tagging, nothing will.
OK, the Tao. So it sounds like that’s what you meant by “spontaneous order”. It’s really the same thing as Mother Nature, the natural order of things.
And to pour too much energy into propping up businesses that should fail is a very unnatural thing to do. Better to let it die so a new seedling of a new business can tap into those resources.
I’ve often thought that the millenials who seem to care so much for a “sustainable environment” should like the idea of a sustainable society and sustainable economy.
I agree that design and planning is counterproductive.
I find the writings of Nassim Taleb (Black Swan, Anti-Fragility, Skin in the Game) to be very compelling.
It isn’t stupidity - it is deliberate mis-education.
If someone hears about the horrors of Communism like the gulags of Communist Russia, it is only in college, not before. But they’ve heard how Communism and social justice is fair, moral, good, kind, takes care of everyone, etc for years before that.
For example, they’ll have heard for six years how Soviet women were more likely to be engineers than modern American women, how China is so much better at civic planning - but they don’t hear about the forced abortions or re-education camps of Urgyurs today.
Thus they’ve only heard the good and praises for it, but never the bad. So they can’t help but think it IS good ... by design, by the liberal authoritarians who want to implement such a system here and intentionally never criticize the ideology they admire.
The only person I knew actually ran between some tanks and was rescued by an American as soon as she crossed the line.
BOTH, yo!
Can’t we just give everyone who believes that a one-way ticket to Venezuela?
It appears it’s time for this generation to learn these lessons the hard way; by living in a socialistic squalor.
Of course they may be stuck with that lifestyle for life unless they could find a country where they still have capitalism.
I have an idea. Make every Millennial who believes in communism/socialism to live in a country like Venezuela for at least 2 years. If they come back still believing poverty is the way to go; let them stay poor and stupid.
It's a given that they were miseducated. The real choice is threefold:
- they're gnorant/stupid
- they're liars
- they're both
knew several people - one somehow got lucky as I recall and made it over in the early days of the wall, other guy was smuggled out in the trunk of a car at Brandenburg gate, another had real but fake papers from the CIA, and so on. So many years ago all this fades in and out of my too porous memory and so many dead I’d rather not remember the sights the smells the sounds and so forth.
At first glance, I misread the title. Are Americans Who Admire Socialism and Communism Miseducated or Stupid?
I thought it said ‘medicated’ or stupid?
In their heart of hearts, they’re also mass murderers.
No commiescum regime has been installed without mass murder. For commiescum, that’s a feature, not a bug.
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