I will expose the socialist utopia not as an illusion but rather as a racket… socialism is the ideology of thieves and tyrants.
A Gallup survey from 2019 has 51 percent of U.S. adults saying socialism would be a bad thing for the country, but a respectable 43 percent say it would be a good thing. Not since World War II have the socialist socialist numbers been so high. Indeed, according to Gallup, surveys from the post-World War II era recorded only 15 percent of Americans saying they wished to see the country “go more in the direction of socialism.” The two groups most receptive to socialism? Young people and Democrats…And young people are joined in their socialist afflatus by Democrats, well over 50 percent of whom, according to Gallup, have a positive view of socialism.
Eugene Debs, who started the Socialist Party with a couple of other guys in 1901, is the founder of American socialism. Ocasio-Cortez probably hasn’t heard of him, although the name might remind her of one of her superfans named Deb. Sanders knows Debs well.
The socialists wish to answer to nobody. They are driven, as Nietzsche pointed out more than a century ago, by a nasty, vengeful “will to power.”
Their behavior is hardly an eradication of selfishness; rather, it is a manifestation of it.
They conceal their crookedness behind a mask of virtue, and they appeal to crooked people by giving them reasons to steal from others. Thievery masked in this way can thrive for a while, but thievery unmasked cannot. Once the socialist morality play is exposed as a theft scheme, as I’ll do in this book, they are done. We need to reaffirm capitalism, not back away from it. Capitalism is what has brought us to where we are, and it’s only just getting started.
The importation of socialism to America requires the art of historical forgetting.
This is a class of people that has no idea how to create wealth. Pretty much the only thing they know how to create is words.
Resentful of those who can do these things, the socialists proclaim them “selfish” and “greedy” and imply that such vices are responsible for their notable prosperity and success. What the socialist class is good at, however, is creating envy and entitlement… the very labels that they apply to the entrepreneurs – namely greed and selfishness – would more accurately apply to them.
The socialist mantra is, “We don’t care if it hasn’t worked. We will figure out a way to make it work.”
American socialism deserves its own name, and the name I propose is “identity socialism.”
Socialism has made everyday existence a living hell nearly everywhere it has been tried, all over the world.
Socialism is an utterly discredited system of ideas, like slavery, and it was discredited in a much shorter period.
Socialism, which dates back to 1917, when Lenin founded the world’s first socialist state, has had a much shorter shelf life. It too collapsed across the world because the people who lived under it considered it to be a form of slavery.
In the case of socialism, however, we have two perfect test cases: North and South Korea, and East and West Germany. The perfection of these examples comes from the fact that in each case we are dealing with the same people, same background, background, same culture, merely two rival economic systems. North Korea was socialist; South Korea, capitalist. East Germany was socialist; West Germany, capitalist. When the results came in, they were decisive. At reunification, the per capita gross domestic product in socialist East Germany was just about one-third that of the capitalist West Germany, with other measures of economic performance displaying a similar chasm. Even the poorest part of West Germany, Schleswig-Holstein, was two and a half times as wealthy as the richest East German region, Saxony. Even now, the eastern part of Germany gets nearly 15 percent of its gross domestic product in net transfers from the western part of Germany.
The change came in the late 1970s, when China, under Deng Xiaoping, abandoned the socialism of Mao for its own brand of capitalism. In doing so, the Chinese inaugurated a new experiment in social organization: call it totalitarian capitalism.
In full-scale socialist countries, the government owns or controls all major sectors of the economy, not only defense and infrastructure but also food and finance and even recreation.
…in England, the government nationalized the healthcare sector in the 1940s and now operates it directly by managing hospitals, paying doctors, and deciding what services to provide and who should get them.
The roots of American prosperity and of American self-invention could scarcely be more important, yet oddly enough they are completely ignored in the curriculums and classrooms of American schools and in the media.
The truth is that no ethnic group – not even the groups that Zinn invokes – cares very much about any other ethnic group.
The founders, let’s recall, were not career politicians or mere “men of letters.” They were scientists, inventors, entrepreneurs and builders – in other words, practical men of varied talents…Through the founding, I believe, the founders sought to perpetuate Renaissance men like themselves.
During the Wilson years, the progressives made some key changes to establish the power of the centralized state. They introduced the graduated or “progressive” income tax. This required a constitutional amendment. Previously the U.S. government raised most of its revenue through customs duties and excise taxes on tobacco and alcohol. Later the progressives added corporate and inheritance taxes. Now the mechanism to fund the centralized state was in place. Progressives also created the Federal Reserve Board to regulate money, banking and credit, and the Federal Trade Commission to oversee industry. By themselves these agencies did not amount to much, but they were the beginning of the administrative state, a kind of “fourth branch of government.” In his second term, Wilson also recognized the Bolshevik regime in the Soviet Union just days after the czar abdicated.
Contemporary socialism is no longer rooted in class, and moreover, its oldest allies – working-class white males—are now its villains and enemies.
Socialism, a system for raising up the working class, has now largely abandoned the working class… The typical socialist today is not a union guy who wants higher wages; it is a transsexual ecofeminist who marches in Antifa and Black Lives Matter rallies and throws cement blocks at her political opponents.
Basically Lenin argued that the working class was never going to revolt; they might join trade unions, but that was about it. In Lenin’s diagnosis, workers could develop “trade union consciousness” but not “revolutionary consciousness.” So then what? In his famous work What Is To Be Done? Lenin insisted that the socialist revolution would not be done by the working working class; it would have to be done for them. In other words, a professional class of activists and fighters would be required to serve as a revolutionary vanguard.
Marcuse believed, the university could produce a new type of culture, and that culture would then metastasize into the larger society to infect the media, the movies, even the lifestyle of the titans of the capitalist class itself.
He foresaw a society society in which billionaires would support socialist schemes that take away a part of their wealth in exchange for social recognition conferred by cultural institutions dominated by the socialists. Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Mark Zuckerberg are three such billionaires; they don’t seem to mind paying higher taxes if they can now hobnob with comedians, rock stars and Hollywood celebrities. Why only be rich when you can also be rich and cool?
Here is the standard socialist move, to turn the tables and insist that whites, not Muslims, pose the greatest terrorist threat; that legals, not illegals, are the problem; that there’s nothing wrong with creating Somalia-in-America; that Americans, not Somalis, should make the adjustment to this; and that even terrorism represents nothing more than a cry of protest against America’s America’s refusal to include and provide for its foreign newcomers.
The basic idea is to portray whites, males and heterosexuals as evil oppressors, and nonwhites, females and gender benders of all kinds as the most normal, wonderful people in the world. And if you say otherwise, or oppose this view, the left will demonize you as racist, sexist, sexist, heterosexist and a “hater.” Then they will try to destroy your career and your life.
Dinesh D’Souza (Vids)
Dinesh D’Souza (Book)
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