Posted on 01/30/2020 7:08:46 AM PST by Heartlander
How is it that a communist, for all practical purposes, is winning in the Iowa caucuses at present? If there is anything that history shows repeatedly, it is that socialism, including its more violent form, communism, is an utter failure by every criterion imaginable.
And yet, as of this writing, Bernie Sanders, Democratic presidential candidate and an out-of-the-closet socialist, is leading in Iowa.
As The New York Times notes: “Senator Bernie Sanders has opened up a lead in Iowa just over a week before the Democratic caucuses, consolidating support from liberals and benefiting from divisions among more moderate presidential candidates who are clustered behind him, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll of likely caucusgoers.”
Bernie Sanders is what you could call a limousine liberal or a sofa socialist. One writer uses the phrase, “champagne socialist.”
That writer is Dr. Paul Kengor, a professor of history and political science at Grove City College, and a best-selling author. Many of his books focus on communism. After the Soviet Union imploded in the early 1990s, they eventually released their formerly-classified documents.
Kengor took the time to study those documents and has produced books from those studies. One of those books, Dupes, shows how liberals in the West, including America, fell for the Communists’ lies.
Recently, I interviewed Kengor (again) on my radio show to discuss an article he wrote in the American Spectator, called “Bernie’s Billionaires.” He notes that Fidel Castro was one of Sanders’ models.
Bernie Sanders famously spent his honeymoon in Russia — during the heyday of the Soviet Union. Bernie claims that we have no need for billionaires. He says, “Billionaires should not exist.”
Kengor told me, if you see a bumper sticker declaring “No Billionaires,” it comes from the Bernie Sanders for President campaign.
In his article on Bernie and billionaires, Kengor wrote of one of Bernie’s heroes, “[Fidel] Castro, for the record, was much more than a millionaire. In 2006, Forbes magazine estimated his net worth at $900 million and rising. … And yet, all Cuban workers — from doctors to teachers, baseball players, dentists, farmers, janitors — subsisted at a mandated ‘living wage’ of $1,200 per year, while the Castro brothers and a close-knit band of apparatchiks literally owned the island.”
And Kengor adds, “Yes, American progressives and Occupy Wall Street maniacs, if you want to see a society of true 1-percenters, with an income gap that would make you cry into your Starbucks cup, go to a Marxist country. There, 99 percent of the masses make the same poverty wage, while 1 percent confiscate wealth and property. But hey, at least the serfs have ‘free’ education and health care! That’s the ridiculous retort of the American Left, including Bernie Sanders.”
Kengor notes that Sanders is no pauper — owning at least $2 million dollars worth of real estate in a Vermont beachfront home on the Champlain Islands (which Kengor calls “Bernie’s dacha on the Black Sea”) a colonial home in Burlington, Vermont and a half-million dollar row house in D.C.: “Stumping for socialism seems a pretty lucrative deal.”
And yet, many in our society like his type of message (and that of Elizabeth Warren). A Harris Poll last year found that among young people born after 1980:
Yipes.
Some people argue the Bible teaches socialism. It does not. It teaches charity, which is voluntary (not coercive). Socialism is a form of theft — theft by the government. Socialism stokes the flames of envy and covetousness. Socialism violates at least two of the Ten Commandments: Thou shalt not steal and Thou shalt not covet.
Gary Bauer, the head of American Values, told me in an interview for Christian television that it gets back to our education system. “The majority of students that are saying that socialism is a good thing, have not been educated in any way, shape or form about what socialism is. And the reverse of that coin is they don’t know what free markets and free enterprise are. They think that it’s exploitative — that it causes poverty. When, in fact, all over the world and throughout history, if young people were just being taught reality, they would know that socialism never works.”
Historians Eugene Genovese and his wife Elizabeth Fox-Genovese once published the Marxist Perspectives magazine, but then became disillusioned by Communism. They told National Review (2/24/1997) after the Soviet Union went kaput: “When it all collapsed, the question was, after seventy years, what do we have to show for it? … tens of millions of corpses.”
I hope more Americans will learn from history and not fall for the pied pipers of socialism.
Jerry Newcombe, D.Min., is a senior producer and an on-air host for D. James Kennedy Ministries. He has written or co-written 32 books, such as The Unstoppable Jesus Christ, American Amnesia: Is American Paying the Price for Forgetting God?, What If Jesus Had Never Been Born? (with D. James Kennedy) and the bestseller, George Washington’s Sacred Fire (with Peter Lillback). Learn more at www.jerrynewcombe.com and follow him on Twitter @newcombejerry.
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Socialist my ass. Bernie is a full-blown Communist.
He is simply too dishonest to admit it.
Shhhhh!
We WANT Bernie to get the nomination.
I am 80. I have worked since I was 16.
I mostly did accounting/bookkeeping but I even sold auto parts when I needed a job.
I NEVER had a poor man sign the FRONT of my paycheck.
I am pretty sure I didn’t work for any billionaires, but I KNOW I worked for a couple of millionaires.
Feel the heart Bern....
There is no such thing as socialism. There is communism - when means of production are owned by the state, as opposed to capitalism - where they are owned by the individuals. Communist regimes (USSR, China etc.) may allow some individuals to own (temporarily) means of production, but that does not make them “socialist” (less comministic, so to speak...).
When Russians eliminated the Tsars, they did so because they hated those living at the top.
The communists took advantage of the chaos following the overthrow of the Tsars and consolidated power, promising equality, shared prosperity and utopia.
Instead, the lives of the people were worse than under the Tsars. The Russian people lived at their peak during the Tsars and have gone downhill ever since.....all thanks to communism.
We’ve already had one, Obama.
Do I think Bernie will win? No.
All indicators are that Trump will win, and rather handily.
Are we going to get a socialist President in what remains of my lifetime?
Sadly I’m convinced that the answer is yes. Bernie is a symptom and not a cause. We have a large, robust, growing constituency for socialism in this country. He is just their first candidate to come to the precipice.
There will be others. The only thing holding them back right now is that there are too may of us still alive.
A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society.
To this section belong economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organisers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole and corner reformers of every imaginable kind. This form of Socialism has, moreover, been worked out into complete systems.
We may cite Proudhon’s Philosophie de la Misére13 as an example of this form.
The socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat. The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best; and bourgeois socialism develops this comfortable conception into various more or less complete systems.
p.34 Manifesto
Karl hated your BS, Bourgeois Socialist. Uncle Joe would’ve put one in the back of your head and kicked you into a shallow grave old man. Parasitic useless eater to be President? No deal POS.
http://www.slp.org/pdf/marx/comm_man.pdf
While sucking and pumping ever-increasing tuition dollars from parents that could only dearly afford nesteggs representing decades of sweat and toil, our local university has insulated itself from the real world. Foreigners and their dollars (often subsidized by their governments (particularly China)), have made university decision-making impervious to community mores and standards. President Trump's new Secretary of Education has uncovered billions of dollars of foreign influence that have polluted our youth.
They truly are ivory towers.
The son of a friend of mine is an Occupy Wallstreet product. (Socialists hid themselves and their motives behind such cute names. ANTIFA also is a Marxist-Leninist product--duh!) He's so full of himself, convinced of their movement's fairness and beneficence for the common man, when in fact, they each yearn to get in on the ground floor of the Ponzi scheme as an elite.
That, to them, makes Castro's Cuban story attractive.
With that mindset, they can accept Venezuela.
They'd be willing to pay their dues as teachers--ready with the head-sized plastic bags--in Pol Pot II's education camps.
I can hardly believe that I've adopted a Jesse Jackson motto of old: "Stay out da Bushes!" as the Nazi-Crown-Captured Vatican NWO tries to enslave us all.
A socialist is a communist who hasn’t started killing...yet.
Hillary is intending to steal the convention.
Just a day or two ago, the national committee appointed all the committees of the convention, and it was a clean sweep of Hillary supporters.
They did this last time as well, to prevent Sanders from even having a fair chance.
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