So you want to be a communist

By Donald Hank

Many conservative pundits today are trying desperately to warn their fellow Americans that Barack Obama has been linked to various far-left organizations, seems to have been reared by a convinced communist, and has ties to the far-left organization ACORN and with leftist terrorists like William Ayers.

Most of these pundits seem to be going on the assumption that, like us older Americans, people today have a basic knowledge of what communism (or socialism, the first step toward communism) actually is, at least enough to fear it.

But, in view of the enormous resurgence of the Left in America, I am not so sure the word "communism" raises so many eyebrows today.

Therefore, it is probably necessary to remind the reader what a communist state looks like from the inside.

I spent a summer in the USSR in the early 70s studying Russian under the auspices of the Council on International Educational Exchange, and a little later, about 4 months in Poland traveling on my own, and here are some things I observed:

1-There was not enough housing in the USSR, so several families typically lived in a single apartment. That was a permanent condition that lasted throughout the life of the Soviet Union.

The reason for this is complex but basically, it was because there is no incentive to build houses in a planned economy (planned by the State). There were no enterprising home builders or contractors to aggressively enter the market and meet the crying need for housing. The State banned private enterprise so there could not be any contractors operating on their own. The State doesn't "feel the pain" of the people. The free market does. Our American free market is constantly alert to any demand for any commodity, including homes and food.

2-For the same reason there was not enough food. I went to the best-stocked "supermarket" in Moscow, for example, which was there in part as a showcase for foreigners to convince them there was enough food. It looked something like a box store in an American inner city, but much more stark and poorly stocked. First of all, even that market had no meat to speak of, and the lines were really long. Typically people had to wait about an hour to buy a loaf of bread. Again, no private enterprise to satisfy the demand. When the State is in charge, people go hungry. I felt so sorry for the Muscovites who had to go there every day after work and stand in that long line to pay for the items they were lucky enough to find.

3-Medicine was free, but people were dirt poor from paying for it.

In Krakau, I lived for a week in a Polish family, a father and his son and daughter. The daughter was a young doctor. Her salary? The equivalent (in zlotys) of $30 a month. And that was not enough to live on. How did she survive? I asked her and she laughed: "I sell excuses to people who don't want to work." Her brother confirmed this.

That was almost everyone. Why work in a communist country? No one gets any more than anyone else. That's what happens when you "spread the wealth around" as Obama told Joe "the Plumber" Wurzburger he would do.

On the collective farms (kolkhoz's), there was farm equipment that rusted in the fields because no one had any incentive to work. You got exactly the same income if you worked or if you didn't. And if you did, you risked incurring the wrath of those who didn't. So you didn't. And there were shortages of everything.

So was it a classless society, as it was touted to be and as Marx had said a communist society would be?

Let me give you a story.

At the end of our study tour, we foreign students were travelling on a train from Moscow to Tallin (in Estonia). A few of us were assigned to a car shared with our Russian teacher, a lady in her late 20s. We were having a good time. I was playing the guitar and we were singing folk songs in both Russian and English. The teacher was enjoying it tremendously and it was obviously a highlight in her otherwise drab life. This was gratifying to witness and be part of.

But a few minutes after we started, one of our guides (guides were reputed to be in fact KGB agents) came to our car and called me over to him. He said there was a very special person in the last car, who was a communist party agent. I said I was busy entertaining our teacher. He smiled condescendingly and said "she is only a teacher. This man is a party member. It is not easy to meet an actual party member and that is a great honor."

I didn't see why that was an honor, and it also occurred to me that this was supposed to be a classless society, so how could this man be more important than the lady who sacrificed so much, working for a paltry salary to teach foreign students Russian.

It struck me then that there was no such thing as a classless society and there never would or could be. In a dictatorship, those who work hard to support the leaders will be awarded more prestige, and the rest will be out of luck.

This experience drove something home to me that every member of a free society ought to know if we are to remain free. Every school should teach it, and yet none do. And that is that the only classless society is a free society based on the American model.

We have so little time to decide whether we are to continue to exist as a free society or not, so please think over what I have said above.

As for socialism, Europeans have foolishly turned over many of their rights to the State, not only to their individual countries but to their all-powerful European Union.

They did so for a variety of reasons, but in part because many of them did not understand some basic civics and because they thought that the idea of free market capitalism is inextricably linked to Christianity, which they had been taught is the most dangerous ideology in all of world history. Their "intellectuals" base this mostly on their experiences with the Thirty Years War, an event that cost many lives and is attributed to religious differences (although there were many other factors). Many are also convinced that Darwinism makes religion obsolete — a premise that is mightily challenged today, as attested by the film Expelled — and therefore, mankind may just as well look to a brave new world (or New World Order) to help usher in a "peaceful" new age.

But what they ignore to their peril is that communism has cost over 100 million innocent lives, not even counting those who died in wars related to that ideology (see the book The Black Book of Communism by Stéfane Courtois et al.), and this number eclipses the casualties of all prior wars.

Finally, for those who think that socialism is a harmless variant of leftist ideology, please note that the upshot of socialism is the impoverishment of the masses, as illustrated by my Polish doctor friend who was reduced to selling doctor's excuses to workers in order to survive.

My German friends all assure me that in Germany today, for example, even a professional family, say, a man who is a doctor and living with his college professor wife, have to make a decision: Either 1) have children or 2) buy a home. They generally cannot afford both! It is no surprise then that the population is declining, has fallen below replacement levels and the shortfall must be made up by importing millions of people from elsewhere, mostly Africa and mostly Muslims. There is no secret that a Christian culture is being replaced by a Muslim culture complete with Sharia law. There is now a plan to import another 50 million. Is this not suicide for Europe?

If you agree that this is suicide for Europe, then please note that a vote for Barack Obama is a vote for the suicide of America.

Once the socialists take power, they do not relinquish it. They soon control the media, the education system and even the church. They control your mind. You can vote them in under a free democratic system.

But you can never vote them out. And never is a long, long time for you and your children's children to live without freedom.

© Donald Hank