Month: February 2020

Father of Pete Buttigieg was Infamous Supporter of Communism: A Professor Who Lauded the Communist Manifesto

On By Geri UngureanIn Buttigieg Closet Socialist3 Comments

EXTREME LEFTIST SOCIALIST UNMASKED

There is a saying:  “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”   I agree with this.

As Barack Obama’s book “Dreams From My Father” expresses this, there is confusion as to the “father” of whom he spoke.  Many of us felt that he was writing about Frank Marshall Davis, who mentored  Obama from an early age.

Davis was a card carrying Communist.

But this article is not about Barack Obama. It is about a contender for the Democratic race for the White House.  His name is Pete Buttigieg. Pete’s father, who died just days after his son threw his hat into the ring, was not only a Communist, but a professor who indoctrinated untold number of young minds; telling them that Capitalism was on its way out. He lauded the “Communist Manifesto” written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engles.

It is said that Pete was very close to his father. When I read that, it spoke to me that the son had admiration for the father and for his political beliefs.

From washingtonexaminer.com

Pete Buttigieg’s father was a Marxist professor who lauded the Communist Manifesto

The father of Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg was a Marxist professor who spoke fondly of the Communist Manifesto and dedicated a significant portion of his academic career to the work of Italian Communist Party founder Antonio Gramsci, an associate of Vladimir Lenin.

Joseph Buttigieg, who died in January at the age of 71, immigrated to the U.S. in the 1970s from Malta and in 1980 joined the University of Notre Dame faculty, where he taught modern European literature and literary theory. He supported an updated version of Marxism that jettisoned some of Marx and Engel’s more doctrinaire theories, though he was undoubtedly Marxist.

He was an adviser to Rethinking Marxism, an academic journal that published articles “that seek to discuss, elaborate, and/or extend Marxian theory,” and a member of the editorial collective of Boundary 2, a journal of postmodern theory, literature, and culture. He spoke at many Rethinking Marxism conferences and other gatherings of prominent Marxists.

In a 2000 paper for Rethinking Marxism critical of the approach of Human Rights Watch, Buttigieg, along with two other authors, refers to “the Marxist project to which we subscribe.”

In 1998, he wrote in an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education about an event in New York City celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Manifesto. He also participated in the event.

“If The Communist Manifesto was meant to liberate the proletariat, the Manifesto itself in recent years needed liberating from Marxism’s narrow post-Cold War orthodoxies and exclusive cadres. It has been freed,” he wrote.

“After a musical interlude, seven people read different portions of the Manifesto. Listening to it read, one could not help but be struck by the poignancy of its prose,” he wrote. The readers “had implicitly warned even us faithful to guard against conferring upon it the status of Scripture, a repository of doctrinal verities.”

“Equity, environmental consciousness, and racial justice are surely some of the ingredients of a healthy Marxism. Indeed, Marxism’s greatest appeal — undiminished by the collapse of Communist edifices — is the imbalances produced by other sociopolitical governing structures,” Buttigieg wrote.

Paul Kengor, a professor at Grove City College and an expert in communism and progressivism, said Buttigieg was among a group of leftist professors who focused on injecting Marxism into the wider culture.

“They’re part of a wider international community of Marxist theorists and academicians with a particular devotion to the writings of the late Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, who died over 80 years ago. Gramsci was all about applying Marxist theory to culture and cultural institutions — what is often referred to as a ‘long march through the institutions,’ such as film, media, and especially education,” Kengor told the Washington Examiner.

Pete Buttigieg, an only child, shared a close relationship with his father. In his memoir Shortest Way Home, Pete called his dad a “man of the left, no easy thing on a campus like Notre Dame’s in the 1980s.”

He wrote that while he did not understand his parents’ political discussions as a young child, “the more I heard these aging professors talk, the more I wanted to learn how to decrypt their sentences, and to grasp the political backstory of the grave concerns that commanded their attention and aroused such fist-pounding dinner debate.”

Pete wrote that his dad was supportive when he came out as gay. He and his husband bought a house in South Bend around the corner from his parents, which gave the couple “a good support network despite our work and travel schedules” when they decided to get a dog.

The elder Buttigieg was best known as one of the world’s leading scholars of Gramsci.

Gramsci thought cultural change was critical to dismantling capitalism. Nevertheless, although critical of certain aspects of Bolshevism, Gramsci endorsed Vladimir Lenin’s “maximalist” politics and identified within the Leninist faction of the Italian communists. He went to Moscow in 1922 as the official representative of the Italian Communist Party and returned home to lead the resistance against Italy’s Prime Minister Benito Mussolini, on the orders of Lenin, while his new wife and children stayed in the USSR.

Those efforts landed Gramsci in an Italian prison, where he lived much of his brief life, which ended in 1937 at the age of 46. Yet his time behind bars was also some of his most prolific, leading to a collection of essays called the Prison Notebooks. Buttigieg completed the authoritative English translation of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, and his articles on Gramsci have been translated into five languages.

Buttigieg was a founding member and president of the International Gramsci Society, an organization that aims to “facilitate communication and the exchange of information among the very large number of individuals from all over the world who are interested in Antonio Gramsci’s life and work and in the presence of his thought in contemporary culture.”

In 2013, Buttigieg spoke at a $500,000 outdoor New York City art installation honoring Gramsci.

Buttigieg died just days after Mayor Pete announced his 2020 presidential exploratory committee.

Lis Smith, communications adviser for Buttigieg’s presidential exploratory committee, declined to comment on how his father influenced his political beliefs or on Pete Buttigieg’s thoughts on Marxist thinkers such as Gramsci.

Pete Buttigieg said in an MSNBC interview on March 20 that he considers himself a capitalist but that the system needs changes.

“The biggest problem with capitalism right now is the way it’s become intertwined with power and is eroding our democracy,” Buttigieg said, noting the influence of big businesses in government.

A self-described progressive, Buttigieg has called to abolish the Electoral College system, supports a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, and thinks that climate change is a national security threat.

In another MSNBC interview in February, Buttigieg said that socialism “is a word in American politics that has basically lost all meaning” and “has been used as a kill switch to stop an idea from being talked about.”

After his son won his mayoral election in 2011, Joseph Buttigieg told the Notre Dame student newspaper that he never expected him to run for office.“I know Peter has been interested in politics for a long time,” Buttigieg said. “At home we always discussed government affairs, but never in that way … I’m very pleased because he’s doing something he genuinely likes.”  Source

So Pete’s father told the Notre Dame student paper:  “At home we always discussed government affairs, but never in that way…..”  What exactly did that mean? Was his father attempting to distance his Marxist ideology from his son?  In other words, is this the way Communists act before one of them runs? Bernie Sanders certainly has not hidden from the people his platform. He is very open about his Socialism.

Looks like Pete holds his cards closer to his vest………..

Pete Buttigieg’s High School Essay on his idol:  Bernie Sanders

From washingtonexaminer.com

Buttigieg high school essay praised Sanders as courageous for calling himself ‘Socialist’

Pete Buttigieg, in an award-winning high school essay he wrote in 2000, praised Bernie Sanders as courageous for describing himself as a “Socialist.”

The essay, which received the Profile in Courage Essay Contest award from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Museum and Library, criticized candidates who abandoned their ideals to appeal to a larger number of voters. The 37-year-old presidential candidate singled out Sanders as an example of political “courage.”

Read Buttigieg’s High School Essay on Idol – Bernie Sanders

“Sanders’ courage is evident in the first word he uses to describe himself: ‘Socialist,’” wrote Buttigieg. “In a country where Communism is still the dirtiest of ideological dirty words, in a climate where even liberalism is considered radical, and Socialism is immediately and perhaps willfully confused with Communism, a politician dares to call himself a socialist? He does indeed.

“Here is someone who has ‘looked into his own soul’ and expressed an ideology, the endorsement of which, in today’s political atmosphere, is analogous to a self-inflicted gunshot wound,” added Buttigieg. “Even though he has lived through a time in which an admitted socialist could not act in a film, let alone hold a Congressional seat, Sanders is not afraid to be candid about his political persuasion.”

The South Bend, Ind., mayor’s essay also suggests that Sanders, then an obscure, radical House member from Vermont, inspired his decision to enter politics. “I commend Bernie Sanders for giving me an answer to those who say American young people see politics as a cesspool of corruption, beyond redemption. I have heard that no sensible young person today would want to give his or her life to public service. I can personally assure you this is untrue,” he wrote.

Buttigieg’s father, Joseph Buttigieg, who passed away in January, was a Marxist professor who praised the Communist Manifesto and was an adviser to the Rethinking Marxism academic journal, the Washington Examiner reported earlier this month.

“If The Communist Manifesto was meant to liberate the proletariat, the Manifesto itself in recent years needed liberating from Marxism’s narrow post-Cold War orthodoxies and exclusive cadres. It has been freed,” wrote Joseph Buttigieg in a 1998 article for the Chronicle of Higher Education.

While Buttigieg has shied away from calling himself a socialist on the campaign trail, he has questioned the fairness of the capitalist system and called for reforms.

Buttigieg, a virtual unknown before he entered the presidential race, has been moving steadily up in early polls. He came in third behind Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders in an Emerson survey this week, edging out better-known candidates such as Sens. Kamala Harris of California and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. source

Brethren, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck……….you know the rest.

Pete Buttigieg is a Socialist.  Is there any doubt about this?  I think not.

And don’t forget that Socialism leaves no room for God. He is a non entity. The State demands the full allegiance of its people and will NOT compete with God. By the way, Socialists are atheists – always.

When the Pharisees attempted (as they often did) to trick Jesus, they asked this:

“And they send unto him certain of the Pharisees and of the Herodians, to catch him in his words. And when they were come, they say unto him, Master, we know that thou art true, and carest for no man: for thou regardest not the person of men, but teachest the way of God in truth: Is it lawful to give tribute to Caesar, or not? Shall we give, or shall we not give?

But he, knowing their hypocrisy, said unto them, Why tempt ye me? bring me a penny, that I may see it.  And they brought it. And he saith unto them, Whose is this image and superscription? And they said unto him, Caesar’s”   And Jesus answering said unto them, Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s. And they marvelled at him” (Mark 12:14-17).

Even in Rome, the Jews were allowed to render unto God that which is God’s, and to Caesar that which was his. 

Not so with Marxist/Socialism. 

How Can I Be Saved? 

Shalom b’Yeshua

MARANATHA!!

 

 

 

 

 

 

What Americans MUST Know About Socialism Part 2

On By Geri UngureanIn Americans Must know about Socialism5 Comments

When Benjamin Franklin addressed the Constitutional Convention, he certainly knew about the heart of man (sinful) and he was skeptical about h0w long our Constitutional Republic would remain intact.

Here is part of his speech:

“In these sentiments, Sir, I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such; because I think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of Government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered, and believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other. I doubt too whether any other Convention we can obtain, may be able to make a better Constitution.”

Would it surprise Franklin that our Republic still stands today?  If he could have foreseen the bitter World Wars 1 & 2, and the powerful force for Freedom and Justice which America did become; I believe that he would have been very pleased.

But I do not believe that Benjamin Franklin would be surprised at all that an ideology such as ‘Socialism’ would be considered during an election year. Karl Marx did not come onto the world stage until the 19th Century, but Franklin was familiar with Totalitarian regimes.

I found this commentary today from Heritage.org

My comments will be bolded

What Americans Must Know About Socialism

 by Lee Edwards, Ph.D.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

  • Socialism is no longer a parlor game for academics but a political alternative taken seriously by millennials.

  • “They don’t recognize that much of what they enjoy in life is a result of capitalism and would disappear if socialism were to be implemented.”

  • This is the reality of socialism — a pseudo-religion grounded in pseudo-science and enforced by political tyranny.

Is a specter of socialism haunting America, especially among our millennials? There is disquieting evidence of many young Americans’ sympathy for socialism. Exhibit A: 2.052 million people under the age of 30 voted for democratic socialist Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primaries and caucuses. Exhibit B: Polls find that, not only do a large majority of millennials have a favorable opinion of socialism, a near majority would prefer to live under socialism rather than capitalism. Exhibit C: The no-longer sleeping Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) now boasts 30,000 members, most of them in their twenties and eager to follow the socialist banner.

We’ve come a long way since the 1988 presidential race when George H. W. Bush buried his Democratic challenger Michael Dukakis by labeling him a “liberal.” Socialism is no longer a parlor game for academics but a political alternative taken seriously by millennials who are not put off by the radical DSA platform.

DSA believes in ending the private ownership of industries whose products are viewed as “necessities.” The production of such products, it argues, should not be left to “profiteers.” It also believes that government should “democratize” private businesses — that is, give workers control over them — to the greatest extent possible. “Socialism,” explains a member of DSA’s national steering committee, “is the democratization of all areas of life, including but not limited to the economy.”

What is happening in America, once the apotheosis of capitalism?

The first part of that answer lies in two words, not “Karl Marx,” but “Bernie Sanders.” The senator from Vermont captured the hearts and the votes of many millennials with his call for single payer health care, free public college, campaign finance reform, and racial, economic, and climate justice. The prime target of his animus was the top 1 percent in America who own, it is true, some 40 percent of the nation’s total wealth — as much as the bottom 90 percent. What Bernie rarely pointed out was that the same top 1 percent paid 39.5 percent of the individual income taxes. Sanders had a ready explanation for how to pay for all of the freebies: increase the taxes on the rich and their corporations. In Bernie’s world, there is such a thing as a free lunch because the bill will be paid by those at the top.

According to one CNN analyst, millennials rallied in the many thousands behind Sanders because they are socially liberal — especially on LGBT rights — saddled with mountains of student debt, disillusioned with the status quo, “and eager to break with traditional [political] models.” Bernie provided solutions to all their problems — without detailing the price or conceding the lessening in individual liberty. Such details were swept aside by the revolutionary spirit of the millennials who “felt the Bern.” As one Bernista said, “You can build a powerful political movement with a base of 2 million true believers.”

The second reason for the shift toward socialism was the Great Recession of 2008. It tore a huge hole in the American people’s belief in capitalism as the way to a better life and sent them looking for alternatives. Many of them, especially younger Americans, found it in a “soft socialism” that was part welfare state, part administrative state, part socialist democracy.

And the Left ignores the Truth about the bailouts of 2008. And what is that truth? It is that banks were giving loans to people whom they knew could not pay back the money. They did in the name of political correctness. As always, the Dems were lurking in the shadows.

The most startling poll was the YouGov survey that reported that given a choice, 44 percent of young people between the ages of 16 and 29 would prefer to live in a socialist nation rather than a capitalist country. Another seven percent would choose communism. However, the same poll revealed that only 33 percent of the respondents could correctly define socialism as based on the common ownership of economic and social systems as well as the state control of the means of production. What most millennials mean by “socialism” seems to be a mix of our welfare state and what they perceive to be Swedish democratic socialism. But Sweden and the other Scandinavian countries including Denmark favor the free market and are content with private rather than government ownership of their major industries. However, Danish domestic spending including comprehensive health care has a high price — a top personal income tax of 57 percent.

The millennial trend toward an acceptance of socialism is not new. A 2014 poll by Reason-Rupe, a libertarian group, reported that 58 percent of those aged 18 to 24 had a favorable view of socialism. A 2016 Gallup survey found that 55 percent of those 18-29 had a “positive image” of socialism. But 90 percent were favorable to “entrepreneurs” while 78 percent favored “free enterprise.” How can a group be 55 percent socialist and 78 per cent entrepreneurial? Either through cognitive dissonance or plain ignorance. In any case, it is critical for advocates of free enterprise to make the case against socialism because acceptance of socialism by any name places millennials on a slippery slope. Another recession and/or a well-run presidential campaign by a charismatic demagogue could move America farther down the road to serfdom.   (Emphasis added)

Brethren, is it not glaringly obvious that the “millennials” have NO idea about Socialism?  If you have watched the “Man on the street” interviewing young people from Ivy League schools, you have witnessed their ignorance of history – American or World – in the average student. It’s embarrassing. 

A 2016 Harvard poll determined that 33 percent of Americans under 30 wanted socialism. In January 2016, YouGov asked millennials whether they had a favorable or unfavorable opinion of socialism. Eight percent replied “very favorable,” 35 percent “somewhat favorable,” for a total of 43 percent, almost the same percentage as in their 2017 survey.

But would these same millennials choose socialism, if in exchange for “free” education and “free” health care, they would have to give up their personal property, such as their iPhone? Would seven percent of millennials declare their willingness to live under communism if they knew the real costs of communism as practiced in some 40 nations over the past century — the denial of free speech, a free press, and free assembly, the imprisonment and execution of dissidents, no free and open elections, no independent judiciary or rule of law, the dictatorship of the Communist Party in all matters and on all occasions?

The fans of Socialism would only believe that they might have to give up precious possessions in exchange for “Free education” and “Free Healthcare” if they heard it on CNN or MSNBC.  They believe everything they hear from the Leftist Medianites. In a sense, we can say that they are brainwashed.  Couple that with sitting under Marxist/Socialist professors…..It’s like these young people were set up.

For the first time in decades, socialists are taking advantage of the Bernie Sanders phenomenon to organize, raise funds, and field candidates from New York City to Oakland, California. A major instrument is DSA — the Democratic Socialists of America — about which the liberal New Republic asked, “Are the Democratic Socialists for America for Real?”

Yes, I remember the DSA very well. During Barack Obama’s first campaign, I went to the website of the DSA in Chicago (CDSA) and interacted with one of the big wigs. I pretended to be interested in their ideology. I found out that they had propped up Obama when he became a State senator, and they were doing the same for his campaign for the presidency. Barack Obama was honored at dinners at the CDSA.  I had gotten the information I sought.

The most dramatic proof of socialism’s new-found political clout was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s upset victory over veteran Rep. Joseph Crowley of New York, the number four Democrat in the House of Representatives, in the June Democratic primary. Ocasio-Cortez received 57 percent of the vote — to Crowley’s 42 percent — while pledging to back Medicare for all, free college tuition, legalization of marijuana and the elimination of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Anyone with a functioning brains knows that AOC is a political train wreck.

Attractive and articulate, the 28-year-old socialist announced she would support progressive candidates who challenged Democratic incumbents in primaries. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi cautioned Ocasio-Cortez not to oppose liberal Democrats who had a proven record of results. Former Sen. Joe Lieberman, the Democratic Party’s vice presidential nominee in 2000, warned that “the policies Ms. Ocasio-Cortez advocates are so far from the mainstream, her election in November would make it harder for Congress to stop fighting and start fixing problems.” He noted that Republicans were already referring to Ocasio-Cortez as “the new face” of the Democratic Party. But an ideologue like Ocasio-Cortez is unlikely to be ruled by conventional politics.

Attractive, maybe. Articulate?  Are we talking about the same person? I do agree that AOC will not be ruled by establishment Democrats but she will take her orders from Deep State and Soros.

The same can be said of Democratic Socialists. Over 700 elected delegates from around the country attended DSA’s 2017 national convention in Chicago, the historic site of many political beginnings from the 1860 presidential nomination of Abraham Lincoln to the riotous 1968 Democratic National Convention. Veterans of the organization were “blown away” by the enthusiasm of the younger DSA members whose priority is to win elections that advance socialism. Chicago City Councilman Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, aged 28, is one of DSA’s elected officials. He advised an ecumenical approach for socialist candidates — to run on the Democratic ballot line because it offers access to people who want single-payer healthcare and a $15 minimum wage. As part of its demographic outreach, Bianca Cunningham, the African-American chair of New York City’s DSA labor branch, helped to form a national Afro-socialist caucus.

Until Ocasio-Cortez’s startling win, DSA and its leftist allies concentrated on elections at the state and local levels; they have had success such as the victory of Councilman Khalid Kamau in South Fulton, Georgia. Kshama Sawant of the Socialist Alternative Party won a seat on Seattle’s city council and pushed through an increase in the city’s minimum wage to $15 an hour. Running as a socialist, thirty-four-year old Franklin Bynum was elected a criminal court judge in Houston. In Pittsburgh, eight Democrats sought the endorsement of the local DSA chapter in this year’s primary. Even in Tulsa, Oklahoma, one of the reddest of states, four Democrats ran as democratic socialists. “It’s not a liability to say that anymore,” commented DSA activist Jorge Roman-Romero.

As proof of their expanding influence, socialists point to the radical magazine Jacobin, which has about 1 million page views a month, and the leftist podcast Chapo Trap House, which delights in ridiculing politicians and journalists on the center left. Following the 2016 election, for example, a Chapo co-host compared Hillary Clinton to race car driver Dale Earnhardt, joking that both had crashed because they “couldn’t turn left.” (Earnhardt was killed in a 2001 racing accident.) It was unvarnished commentary but no rougher than the frequent media comments about (or by) Donald Trump. Socialist publications like “n+1” and the “New Inquiry” have attracted younger readers with their unremitting attacks on capitalism.

After Trump’s victory, commentators such as Michael Kazin, editor of the leftist magazine Dissent, thought that the Left would be on the defensive as “when Reagan and George W. Bush were in power.” Instead, there is a renewed interest in the radical left and the possibility that DSA “might be able and will certainly try to take advantage of it.”

What does all this — the Sanders candidacy, the national polls, the political organizations like DSA, the intense media focus — add up to? Are they the makings of a national movement or merely a passing fancy temporarily fueled by young people who will soon get caught up in the next political fad? Let’s judge them by the five essential elements of a successful political movement: charismatic leadership, a national constituency, adequate financing, media proficiency, and a relevant philosophy.

In some ways, the “new” DSA is reminiscent of Young Americans for Freedom in the early 1960s. Then YAF claimed a membership of 20,000, backed Sen. Barry Goldwater and his promise to offer a conservative choice and not a liberal echo, raised money with the help of OAFs (Older Americans for Freedom), convinced the media (led by the New York Times) that YAF was the wave of the future, and hoisted the anti-communist flag high at every rally and meeting. It was the height of the Cold War and America was engaged in a deadly struggle with the forces of evil.

Like DSA, YAF leaders were mostly white, male, well-educated, and from middle-class families. They were young men in a hurry, certain they could change history, and so they did — first, with the presidential nomination of conservative Goldwater in 1964, and later the election of conservative Ronald Reagan as president in 1980. Bill Buckley was YAF’s luminous hero, the St. Paul of the conservative movement who went where no conservative had gone before — into the belly of the liberal beast, Harvard.

As for DSA, it has a national constituency, principled if aging leaders like Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, fund-raising potential, strong media interest, and a philosophy attractive to Americans tired of sliding down the economic ladder and wondering what happened to the American Dream. Before dismissing the Democratic Socialists of America — and its compatriots — as idealistic and naïve, it should be remembered that the Tea Party had only 60,000 members in 2010 but won 47 seats in the House of Representatives that fall.

On the road to socialism, DSA and its fellow socialists will seek to convert industries like health care into public utilities; regulate coal mines out of existence; subsidize sectors of the economy like solar energy; and operate corporations like Amtrak and Freddie Mac. They will present socialism as the reasonable alternative to the unchecked greed of the captains of capitalism.

However, as it grows in numbers and influence, DSA will encounter a critical discrepancy — the telling difference between its pure socialism and the soft socialism of popular opinion. DSA purists seek public ownership of the means of production as well as centralized control of goods and services. Soft socialists see a limited role for the private sector à la Sweden. Will DSA be able to fuse the two kinds of socialism as conservatives like Frank Meyer and William F. Buckley Jr. blended traditional conservatism and libertarianism in the 1960s and 1970s?

Which brings us to the urgent need to depict the realities of socialism to Americans who have never heard of the Berlin Wall, the Gulag, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Tiananmen Square massacre, or the daily bread lines in Moscow.

According to the YouGov survey, one-third of all Americans would prefer to live under socialism rather than capitalism. Why? Is it idealism — the desire for a classless society in which everyone is equal and envy does not exist because everything is owned in common? Is it a lack of knowledge? When asked how many people have died under communism, only 31 percent of Americans could provide the correct answer — “Over 100 million.” About seven in ten Americans could not define communism.

Commented one millennial about his peers, “They don’t recognize that much of what they enjoy in life is a result of capitalism and would disappear if socialism were to be implemented. They haven’t seen socialism’s failures firsthand.”

______________________________________________________

Here are the realities of socialism and its grandmaster, Karl Marx.

  1. Socialism has never worked anywhere.

Socialism in all its forms — Marxism-Leninism in the Soviet Union, Maoism in China, “state socialism” in India, “democratic socialism” in Sweden, National Socialism in Nazi Germany — has never come close to realizing the classless ideal of its founding father, Karl Marx. Instead, socialists have been forced to adopt a wide range of capitalist measures, including private ownership of railroads and airlines (United Kingdom), special economic zones (China), and open markets and foreign investment (Sweden).

Mikhail Gorbachev took over a bankrupt Soviet Union in 1985 and desperately tried to resuscitate “socialism” (i.e., communism) through perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness). He failed abjectly and was forced to preside over the dissolution of the once mighty Soviet empire on Christmas Day, 1991, seven decades after Lenin mounted a truck in St. Petersburg to announce the triumph of the Bolshevik Revolution.

In the late 1970s, Deng Xiaoping abandoned the rigid excesses of Maoist thought and adopted a form of communism with “Chinese characteristics” that was more capitalist than socialist in several ways. Deng, however, also ensured the Communist Party’s control of any new homeland enterprise or foreign investment.

After decades of sluggish growth and bureaucratic inefficiency, India rejected state socialism in the 1990s and shifted to a capitalist approach that spawned the world’s largest middle class of more than three hundred million (nearly equal to the entire U.S. population). Sweden is often described as a “socialist” country, but is not and never has been socialist. It is a social democracy in which the means of production are owned primarily by private individuals. Among the proofs of its commitment to a market economy is that Sweden ranked number 19 worldwide in the Heritage Foundation’s 2017 Index of Economic Freedom.

Socialism’s failure to deliver on its promises of bread, peace, and land to the people is confirmed by the repeated, open resistance of dissidents: in Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, Poland in 1980 with the formation of Solidarity, China’s Tiananmen Square in 1989, and in present-day Cuba with the resolute Ladies in White who parade every Sunday after mass to call attention to the many jailed dissidents including their husbands and sons.

Socialism failed in America in the early 19th century when the English philanthropist Robert Owen launched New Harmony, a “village of cooperation” on the banks of the Wabash River in Indiana. Volunteers flocked to the socialist experiment, but most were better at sitting in a chair than making one. Within a few years, New Harmony collapsed, and Owen went home.

  1. The founding father of socialism is the messianic Karl Marx.

Marx was an atheist socialist who insisted that his was the only “scientific” socialism based not on wishful thinking but the inexorable laws of history. The whole of history, declared Marx and his close collaborator and friend Friedrich Engels, is the history of the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. The inevitable collapse of capitalism and the victory of the proletariat would end the conflict and usher in a classless society and pure socialism or communism (Marx used both terms interchangeably). He listed 10 necessary measures as steps along the way to his utopia, including a progressive income tax, the abolition of private property, free education for all, and centralization of the means of communication and transport in “the hands of the state.”

Much of the appeal of Marxism was its scathing critique of capitalism and its 19th century excesses, which included 16-hour work days and Dickensian working conditions. It was the early days of the Industrial Revolution when exploitation of workers, young and old, was widespread and horrific. By the end of the century, much had changed. Capitalism was not breaking down under the pressure of industrial concentration as Marx had predicted. To the contrary, economies were expanding and the lives of workers were slowly but demonstrably improving. Rather than developing into revolutionaries (as predicted by Marx), the workers were becoming reformers and even bourgeoisie.

The core philosophical weakness of Marxism was the founder’s insistence that his version of Hegelian dialectic — thesis, antithesis, synthesis — was scientific and without flaw. He asserted that feudalism had been replaced by capitalism which would be replaced by socialism in an irreversible process. But it is now close to 200 years since the publication of The Communist Manifesto, and capitalism rather than socialism dominates much of the global economy. In the Heritage Foundation’s 2018 Index of Economic Freedom, 102 countries, many of them less developed or emerging economies, showed advances in economic growth and individual prosperity. Economic freedom improved globally for the sixth year in a row.

Marx was not the first utopian. Plato had his Republic,and Thomas More his Utopia. They were centrally ruled and devoid of individual choice. More’s Utopia was a highly regimented “paradise” in which all citizens dressed alike and lived in identical houses and where private discussion of public affairs incurred the death penalty. Marx insisted that his socialist Utopia would be different because it would be classless and free of all nationalist sentiment because the nation state would have withered away. Ever melodramatic, he called on the “workingmen of all countries” to unite against the ruling classes — they had “nothing to lose but their chains.”

It was powerful rhetoric, but was Marx’s socialist world any more possible than the utopias proposed by Plato and More and other central planners? How good a historian and how accurate a prophet was Karl Marx?

Contrary to Marx, feudalism broke down, not because of economic contradictions, but because of the new trade routes which helped England and other countries move from a land-based to a money-based economy. Capitalism did not emerge naturally as the antithesis of feudalism but through a series of events including the emergence of the Puritan ethic, inventions like the cotton gin, the individualism of the Enlightenment, and the emergence of classical liberalism in the writings of thinkers like Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill.

Nor did Marx anticipate that workers would become increasingly affluent, independent, and even bourgeois. He did not foresee that capitalists would address problems such as unemployment and inflation, monopolies, Social Security and health care, and the proper balance of private and public control over the means of production.

Furthermore, the working class has not fallen into greater and greater misery. The industrial nations have seen a dramatic rise in the standard of living of the average worker. The middle class has not disappeared but expanded. As the esteemed economist Paul Samuelson wrote: “As a prophet Marx was colossally unlucky and his system colossally useless.”

  1. Socialism forbids the age-old right of private property.

In The Communist Manifesto Marx says, “The theory of the communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.” He knew that depriving individuals of this basic freedom would not be easy and that dictatorship by the proletariat — and violence — would be required. However, the abolition of private property is necessary, Marx argued, because it is the central cause of the perennial clash between the classes.

But private property is not just any right; it is integral to civilization. There never was a time or place when all possessions were collectively owned. There is no convincing evidence, writes the Harvard historian Richard Pipes, that there were societies that knew “no boundary posts and fences” or ignored “mine” and “thine.”

It is often argued that socialism is a secular version of Christianity, referring to Acts 2-5, which describes the early Christians as having “all things in common.” It is true that following Pentecost, Christians sold their possessions and property and shared the results with “any [that] might have need.” But there is a critical distinction between Christians and socialists: Jesus urged his followers to give up their possessions while socialists want to give away the possessions of others. St. Paul is sometimes quoted as saying that “money is the root of all evil.” What he actually wrote in a letter to Timothy was that “loveof money is the root of all kinds of evil.” His indictment, as the former AEI president Arthur Brooks has pointed out, was of an inordinate attachment to money.

More secular sources about the consequential role of private property can be cited. In The Constitution of Liberty, Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek writes that the recognition of private property is “an essential condition for the prevention of coercion.” He quotes Lord Acton as saying that “a people averse to the institution of private property is without the first element of freedom” and Henry Maine as asserting: “Nobody is at liberty to attack [private] property and to say at the same time that he values civilization. The history of the two cannot be disentangled.” In view of the alleged lack of individual liberty in classical Greece, writes Hayek, it deserves mention that in 5th century Greece the sanctity of the private home was so recognized that even under the rule of the “Thirty Tyrants,” a man could save his life by staying at home. The power of private property indeed.

  1. Socialism insists that human nature is malleable, not constant.

Karl Marx’s attitude toward human nature flows from Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who challenged the traditional idea of a fixed human nature bestowed by God. Rousseau wrote, “We do not know what our nature permits us to be.” Locke saw human nature as a tabula rasa —a blank page. Hobbes famously described man’s natural state as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

Marx borrowed from the Enlightenment to say that human nature is intrinsically malleable. The Communist state established by Lenin in Russia in November 1917, wrote Richard Pipes, was “a grandiose experiment in public education” to create an entirely new type of human being — Soviet Man.

Christian theology with its idea of a fixed human nature infuriated Marx, who was not just an atheist but a God-hater who denounced religion as “the opium of the people.” His disciples, led by Lenin, always targeted the churches when they came to power. They initiated without apology a campaign of terror, shutting down churches, executing priests and bishops and violating nuns. The horrors were justified as part of the class-cleansing Marx envisioned.

The Founders of the American Revolution rejected those who believed that man was born without any imprint and sided with those who accepted that man was born in the image of God. As the Declaration of Independence states, all men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” The Founders disagreed with those who thought man was perfectible and instead took the Christian position that man’s nature was fallen.

As Madison famously observed, “If men were angels there would be no need for government” and “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” It is a reflection of human nature, Madison said, that “such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government.” George Washington summed up the Founders’ realism: “We must take human nature as we find it, perfection falls not to the share of mortals.”

The essential difference between the visions of Karl Marx and George Washington, aside from the question of human nature, is that in Marx’s socialist world there is a dictatorship of the Communist Party, while in a liberal democracy like the United States “We the People” tell the government what to do, the government does not tell the people what to do.

  1. Socialism depends upon dictatorship to attain and remain in power.

Without exception, every socialist leader from Vladimir Lenin to Fidel Castro promised to initiate basic political freedoms such as free elections, a free press, and free assembly. None fulfilled those promises.

Personal experience with this common falsehood has been eloquently provided by six famous intellectuals in The God That Failed. They describe their journey into Communism and their exit when they encountered the gigantic gap between their vision of a socialist Utopia and the totalitarian reality of the socialist state. All of them, points out editor Richard Crossman, chose Marxist socialism because they had lost faith in democracy and were willing to sacrifice “bourgeois liberties” in order to defeat Nazi Germany. Their socialist conversion was rooted in despair with Western values that produced the Great Depression and permitted Fascism.

Their conversion was greatly strengthened by what Crossman calls “the Christian conscience” even among those who were not orthodox Christians. The emotional appeal of Marxist socialism lay in the sacrifices, material and spiritual, which it demanded as well as the unswerving obedience to the socialist line no matter how radically or quickly it changed. A case in point: Communists condemned Adolf Hitler throughout the 1930s until the summer of 1939, when Joseph Stalin and Hitler signed a non-aggression pact. Immediately, all “true” socialists were obliged to reverse course and hail the agreement as a major step toward peace. It was, in fact, a cynical deal that allowed the Nazis and the Soviets to invade and divide up Poland, thereby precipitating World War II.

With the Hitler-Stalin pact, scales fell from the eyes of the six intellectuals, starting with the Hungarian novelist Arthur Koestler, who now condemned the infamous show trials ordered by Stalin: “At no time and in no country have more revolutionaries been killed and reduced to slavery than in Soviet Russia.” The American black writer Richard Wright wrote, “At that [socialist] meeting I learned that when a man was informed of the wish of the Party he submitted, even though he knew with all the strength of his brain that the wish was not a wise one, was one that would ultimately harm the Party’s interests.”

After visiting the Soviet Union, the French Nobel Laureate André Gide said bluntly, “I doubt whether in any country in the world — not even in Hitler’s Germany — have the mind and spirit ever been less free, more bent, more terrorized and indeed vassalized — than in the Soviet Union.” Gide said that “the Soviet Union has deceived our fondest hopes and shown us tragically in what treacherous quicksand an honest revolution can founder.”

The American journalist Louis Fisher, once an enthusiastic chronicler of Soviet economic advances, recounted how much the Soviet Union had changed: “Ubiquitous fear, amply justified by terror, had killed revolt, silenced protest, and destroyed civil courage. In place of idealism, cynical safety-first. In place of dedication, pursuit of personal aggrandizement. In place of living spirit, dead conformism, bureaucratic formalism, and the parrotism of false clichés.”

So it was in the Soviet Union under Stalin; so it has been in every socialist experiment since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. The Soviet-Nazi agreement was the cracking point for many intellectuals in the West, including the American Louis Fisher, who accused Stalin of building an imperialistic militaristic system in which he is, and his successor will be, “the Supreme Slave Master.” How then, Fisher asked, can anyone interested in the welfare of people and the peace and progress of humanity support such a system? “Because there is rottenness in the democratic world?” he asked and answered, “We can fight the rottenness. What can Soviet citizens do about Stalinism?”

It took decades, but the citizens of all the nations behind the Iron Curtain finally threw off their chains in 1989, and wrote finis to Soviet communism. Tragically, there are still more than 1 billion people living today under the Marxist socialist regimes of China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, and Laos.

  1. Socialism is responsible for the deaths of more than 100 million victims.

If you were asked how many Jews died in the Holocaust, you would probably respond, “Six million.” We learned the correct answer in our schools and universities, through the books and articles we have read, the movies and television programs we have watched, our conversations with families, friends, and colleagues. There is a continuing campaign to remind us of the Holocaust and to declare, “Never again.” And rightly so. The holocaust carried out by the Nazis — their deliberate campaign of genocide — was the greatest evil of the 20th century.

But if you were asked, “How many victims of communism have there been?” You would probably hesitate and respond — “Five million? Twenty million? Fifty million?” Few of us would know the right answer: at least 100 million men, women, and children, more than all the deaths of all the major wars of the 20thcentury. Communism committed the great crime of the last century.

It is a number difficult to comprehend, let alone accept. Surely, you might say, there could not have been that many. But we can be certain of saying that there have been at least 100 million victims of communism because of the painstaking research of the editors of The Black Book of Communism, published by the Harvard University Press. They document that each and every Marxist socialist regime has prevailed by way of a pistol to the back of the head and a death sentence in a forced labor camp.

There is no exception whether in China under Mao Zedong, North Korea under Kim Il Sung, Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh, Cuba under Fidel Castro, Cambodia under Pol Pot, or Ethiopia under Mengistu Haile Mariam.

According to Stephane Courtois, the editor in chief of The Black Book of Communism, the leading mass murderer is Pol Pot, whose attempt to communize Cambodia resulted in the deaths of one fourth of the country’s population. His closest rival is Mao, under whom as many as 40 million Chinese died in just one socialist campaign — the grossly misnamed Great Leap Forward. Of the Soviet Union’s first two dictators, Lenin and Stalin, Courtois says, “The blood turns cold at its venture into planned, logical and ‘politically collect’ mass slaughter.”

What price socialism? We must not limit ourselves to numbers.

The Chinese philosopher Lin Yutang listed the “little terrors” that prevailed in China — making children of 12 subject to capital punishment, sending women to work in underground coal mines, harassing workers during their lunchtime with threats of prison if they were late returning to work.

There were the costs in terror. One Soviet defector wrote about Soviet life: “We lived in a world swarming with invisible eyes and ears.”

There were the costs in thought control. The content of everything in print and broadcast was limited to authorized “truths.” The Soviet press dismissed the 1932-33 forced famine in Ukraine that took the lives of seven million innocents as an anti-communist myth. One Western apologist for the regime, Edouard Herriot, wrote: “I have crossed the whole of Ukraine, and I can assure you that the entire country is like a garden in full bloom.”

There were the costs to the world. There was no crisis anywhere in the world from Southeast Asia to the Caribbean, from sub-Saharan Africa to the Middle East, in which the ideological ambitions of Moscow and its imitators, driven by Marxist-Leninist thought, were not involved throughout the 20th and into the 21st century.

This is the reality of socialism — a pseudo-religion grounded in pseudo-science and enforced by political tyranny. This is the case against socialism — a god that failed, a science that never was, a political system headed for the ash heap of history. source

Brethren, although this article is long,  it is written by a brilliant American. Here is his bio, if you are interested:

Biography of Lee Edwards, Ph.D.

I would hope that many readers would pass this along to others who are not convinced of the horrors of Marxism/Socialism.  Even if one person in each of your lives is affected by the facts presented in this piece, wouldn’t that be wonderful?

The one fact about Socialism/Communism that jumps out at me immediately, and quite honestly I would not see a need to research anymore, is that God is outlawed.

GOD IS OUTLAWED!

Is it not crystal clear that this form of governing is satanic?

How Can I Be Saved?

Shalom b’Yeshua

MARANATHA!!

 

What MILLENNIALS DON’T Understand About SOCIALISM Part 1

On By Geri UngureanIn The Truth About Marxism/Communism4 Comments

Have you been struck with disbelief, as I have, at how Socialism is being embraced by Millennials in America?

This is due to revisionist historians writing their own version of American History. Actually, they rewrite the history of the entire world in much the same way.

I’m a baby boomer and sadly but inevitably, we are dying off.  Many of our children, who are now grown, have not a clue about Socialism and how it invariably morphs into Communism.

They also do not understand that in a Communist State, belief in God is forbidden. The State demands the obedience and worship of its subjects.

They will NOT compete with God.

Our young people have been indoctrinated by Socialist professors on campuses across the nation. We send our children off to college, hoping that they get a good education – NOT A LEFTIST INDOCTRINATION.

And before the reader says to me “But we sent our children to Christian colleges” please understand that most of these institutions have been infiltrated by Left leaning professors as well.  Can you say SOCIAL JUSTICE GOSPEL?

Our children do not understand that Socialism is an ideology, while Communism is the vehicle which must come into play to ENFORCE Socialism.

Many of the young people marching for Socialism and their undying love for Bernie Sanders, do not understand that their way of life in America – the things they own which they take for granted, would be luxuries under a Communist regime.

The Freedom to speak out against other points of view would be gone. Speaking against a Communist State will get one killed. But Bernie presents Socialism in a positive way, knowing full well that his adoring young followers are ignorant of what Socialism truly is, and the horrors of Communist Totalitarian regimes which have slaughtered Millions of people throughout history.

Tell your children to read a book published before 1960 about Joseph Stalin and how many people in Russia were slaughtered under his regime!

He was a monster who enjoyed watching the executions!

From politico.com

This article was written in “2016.”  Sometimes Politico surprises me with truth – and this is one of those times.

How Did America Forget What ‘Socialist’ Means?

Marion Smith is executive director of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington, D.C.

With Obama cuddling up to Cuba, it’s time to remind ourselves of the evils of socialism.

In 1936, when Franklin Roosevelt sought reelection to the presidency, some of his critics labeled him a “socialist.” The charge was so incendiary that the White House moved quickly to rebut it, labeling it an accusation “which no patriotic, honorable, decent citizen would purposefully inject into American affairs.”

That was then. Today, in America, for the first time in nearly a century, socialism is not a dirty word, or a shunned label, for many people. On the contrary. President Barack Obama, with a minimum of controversy, has reopened relations with the unabashedly socialist regime in Cuba, demanding almost no concessions in exchange for becoming the first U.S. president in 88 years to visit the island. (Indeed, on the eve of the president’s arrival, Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs declared that Cuba—together with China—was committed to the “irreversibility of socialism.”)

Meanwhile, the overwhelming and seemingly improbable support among America’s youth for the 74-year-old Bernie Sanders—a self-described democratic socialist who once proudly defended communist dictatorships across the world—is the latest example of a historical illiteracy that treats socialism as a benign economic system that is more equitable and fair than capitalism. A Pew poll from June 2015 shows a staggering 69 percent of voters under 30 expressing a willingness to vote for a socialist for president of the United States. This was well before Sanders’ electoral successes in the early Democratic primaries. A more recent YouGov survey found that voters under 30 actually have a higher opinion of socialism (43 percent in favor) than they do of capitalism (32 percent in favor).

“For older people, socialism is associated with communism and the Soviet Union and the Cold War,” says Michelle Diggles, a senior policy analyst at Third Way, a liberal D.C. think tank. “The oldest millennials were 8 years old when the Berlin Wall fell. They have never known a world where the Soviet Union exists. … The connotations associated with the word ‘socialism’ just don’t exist with millennials.”

Watching the false hope of socialism be resurrected amid ignorance of basic 20th century history is particularly distressing for me. I am a millennial American myself, but I am also head of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. I have dedicated my professional life to honoring the millions who paid with their lives so that totalitarian leaders could build their socialist “utopias.”

Many are still paying. Today, 20 percent of the world’s population continues to live under communist regimes, in China, Vietnam, Cuba, Laos and North Korea. These countries are some of the worst violators of human rights in history. China operates its own “gulag” system of labor camps for political prisoners. The Castros in Cuba—the Obama administration’s newest friends—routinely throw their opponents in prison, despite Raúl Castro’s misleading comments at his news conference with Obama on Monday. There remain more than 50 political prisoners in Cuba, which the Castro government denies.

Maybe we should have seen this loss of historical memory coming nearly 25 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Perhaps we should have heard the alarm bells of a 2011 Newsweek survey that reported 73 percent of Americans “couldn’t correctly say why we fought the Cold War” in response to a question taken from the official test for U.S. citizenship. Ignorance of socialism and America’s decadeslong struggle against it has become the norm, and the data suggest this norm will only harden as a generation of Americans pass away and national memory fades.

For a generation with no memory of bomb shelter drills or sledgehammers smashing the Berlin Wall to pieces, the sad reality of life under socialist rule has been forgotten, and the lessons of the Cold War have been relegated to the “ash heap of history” alongside communism. Instead, the concept of socialism has often been confused with liberalism. Socialism seems like a fine idea that means a more social equitable society for everyone—free health care and free education for starters. Socialism conjures the image of a place like Sweden and Denmark, which contrary to popular belief, are not socialist systems at all. In fact, Danish Prime Minster Lars Lokke Rasmussen responded to claims by Senator Bernie Sanders that the Scandinavian countries were socialist by saying: “Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.”

Socialism is not roads, welfare, and free education. Socialism has always had a more ominous goal and shares close historical and ideological connections with more reviled terms: Marxism and communism. Karl Marx took socialism to what he viewed as its natural conclusion: The “abolition of private property.”

Class warfare is a long-running theme in socialism, even in this country. American socialist (and failed presidential candidate) Eugene Debs promised a world where “no man will work to make a profit for another.” Even earlier, French socialist Jean Jaurès lamented: “All this misery, all this injustice and disorder, results from the fact that one class monopolizes the means of production and of life, and imposes its laws on another class and on society as a whole.” Jaurés said that to equalize things, “to break down the supremacy of one class,” the ultimate “aim of socialism, whether collectivist or communist, is to transform capitalist property into social property.”

The process of transforming “capitalist property”—that is, something legitimately purchased, inherited or otherwise earned—into “social property” for everyone is when socialism becomes sinister. This promise of redistribution always involves winners and losers picked by the government. What if one has acquired capitalist property and does not wish it to become “social property?” Well, then the government might have to step in and take it.

The loss of private property—which ensures one’s independent livelihood—perforce erodes one’s ability to exercise free speech. What if the owner of some capitalist property taken by the government dares to protest its seizure? That sort of dissent must be stifled to maintain order, so free speech is replaced by government-sanctioned propaganda. Unpopular opinions are shamed, and those expressing them are barred from forums like colleges and universities.

How do we know? Because we’ve seen it happen time and again. Ninety-nine years ago the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia showed the danger of combining socialist ideas with totalitarian violence, which created modern totalitarian communism. It was Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin who expressed a sort of unifying theory, finally achieving Marx’s goals. “In striving for socialism,” Lenin said in 1917, “we are convinced it will develop into communism.” The result in more than 40 national experiments since then has been either totalitarian dictatorship or economic collapse, costing some 100 million lives before the communist experiment collapsed in Europe and the Soviet Union.

To be sure, not everyone in these societies was a loser, which gets at one of the great paradoxes of all socialist systems: the extreme inequality that allows a cabal of party members to control the political and economic power in a country to the exclusion of an overwhelming majority of the citizens. Only socialist countries have achieved the tragic distinction of launching rockets into outer space while millions of their citizens starve to death in famine. Now that’s inequality!

The Center for Global Policy at George Mason University has recorded an interesting historical development. Its Political Instability Task Force plotted a chart showing the percentage of countries in which mass killings were occurring from the end of World War II until the present day. For most of the second half of the 20th century, that percentage increased steadily. Then, in the early 1990s, a precipitous drop occurred, and in the 2010s we have seen the lowest percentage of countries on Earth with ongoing mass killings ever recorded. What happened in the early 1990s? The Cold War ended and millions were freed from behind communist walls and secret police holding cells. This was also when our millennial generation was born.

Indeed, there is very much a generation gap in today’s socialist resurgence. Nate Silver points out that while polling from May 2015 shows a plurality of voters under 30 supporting socialism, that figure drops to a mere 15 percent among those over 65. The reason for this is not difficult to see. It reflects a difference in personal experience.

Millennials either missed the Cold War entirely or were young children in its final years, with little or no conception of the triumph of liberty achieved with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). They do not understand the menace that socialism— combined with power—posed to the people it enslaved and to the free nations that it threatened. The violence and brutality of the communist regimes of the past are irrelevant, just lines in the history book somewhere between the Spanish-American War and 9/11.

It’s more personal for older Americans. Perhaps some of their friends or neighbors—or they themselves—arrived in this country just ahead of Soviet tanks that were rolling into their homeland. Perhaps they remember the stories of citizens of these supposed utopian socialist prison states arrested, “disappeared,” tortured, or shot simply for trying to cross a border. Perhaps they remembered cowering under their school desks during drills in case of a nuclear attack, planned in communist Russia and launched from communist Cuba.

This is the context young American voters should know as they prepare to cast their vote this year—many of them for the first time. We should all be mindful of the power of words and ideologies, and how discredited ideas can flourish again as memories of their failure fade. We cannot forget the lessons of history. All of us, but especially the youngest among us who will have to live in that world for the longest, should make this election about the future by rejecting the ugly, violent legacy of socialism’s past. source

I do hope that many readers will be able to share this piece with friends and family who are avid Bernie Sanders’ supporters. They need a wake up call.

We, as believers in the Lord Jesus Christ, should shudder at the thought of a Marxist government in the U.S.  THAT is when we will have no choice but to go underground to worship – just like our brethren in China do today.

How Can I Be Saved?

Shalom b’Yeshua

MARANATHA!!

 

 

A Dean Koontz Book From 1981 Predicted Coronavirus In Bizarre Coincidence

On By Geri UngureanIn Dean Koontz Book from 198111 Comments

This book even cites the city of Wuhan!

It is said that truth is stranger than fiction, but in this case I think that it goes both ways!

From foxnews.com

Author Dean Koontz eerily predicted the coronavirus outbreak in his 1981 thriller “The Eyes of Darkness.”

The fictional novel tells the story of a Chinese military lab that creates a new virus to potentially use as a biological weapon during wartime. The lab is ironically located in Wuhan, China and the made-up virus is called Wuhan-400.

The coincidence between the book’s virus and the actual coronavirus outbreak is uncanny.

Currently, the coronavirus which originated in Wuhan, China is causing panic throughout the world. On Thursday, officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed that an American evacuee from Wuhan who is currently in Texas was diagnosed with the virus, making it the 15th case in the United States.

CDC officials told Fox News that there will “likely be additional cases in the coming days and weeks, including among other people recently returned from Wuhan.” Though the first 195 evacuees were released on Tuesday, “more than 600 people who returned on chartered flights from Wuhan remain under federal quarantine and are being closely monitored to contain the spread of the virus,” officials added.

Americans were evacuated from China on two chartered flights which brought them to Texas and Nebraska. Some 250 passengers were reportedly on the flight to Texas while an estimated 70 passengers were on the one to Nebraska.

The case also marks the first in Texas. The 14 other cases have been reported across the country, the first of which occurred in a Washington state man who has since been released from the hospital. Other cases have been confirmed in California, Wisconsin, Arizona, Massachusetts and Illinois. No deaths have been reported in the U.S., and the large majority of cases still remain in China.

Overall, more than 50,000 people have been sickened globally from the coronavirus while 1,370 have died. source

We were told by our Lord that many things would happen in these last days:

“And as he sat upon the mount of Olives, the disciples came unto him privately, saying, Tell us, when shall these things be? and what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?  And Jesus answered and said unto them, Take heed that no man deceive you. For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many.

 “And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.  For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places.

” All these are the beginning of sorrows.  Then shall they deliver you up to be afflicted, and shall kill you: and ye shall be hated of all nations for my name’s sake. And then shall many be offended, and shall betray one another, and shall hate one another.

And many false prophets shall rise, and shall deceive many. And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold.  But he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved. And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come”  (Matthew 24:3-14).

Keep your eyes on Jesus and continue to pray!

How Can I Be Saved?

Shalom b’Yeshua

MARANATHA!!

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