Sunday, March 15, 2009

Why don't "progressives" ever learn from history?

"Progressives" always fashion themselves as intellectually superiors to us conservative rubes.

Yet, if they are so smart why can't they seem to learn anything from history.

Case in point. The wonderful world of socialism. Ask someone who's lived in it......
"Socialism, a luxury of the wealthy. To the poor, a suicidal creed ..."
--David Hare, A Map of the World
Anyone who has lived inside the demoralized, unproductive, gray prison of a communist state, as I did in the mid-1980s, knows to what depths of impoverishment the egalitarian fantasies of socialism inevitably lead. They lead to decades of frustrated poverty and lifetimes of untreated illness culminating in early death. I remember the columns of death notices for men and women in their forties and fifties that appeared in the local newspaper. Gradually I learned to associate those death notices with the lack of fresh foodstuffs, the travesty of state health care, and the pervasive demoralization of an enslaved population drowning itself in cheap alcohol and cigarettes.

Gradually I came to understand that the condition of life under communism, so filled with repression, suspicion, and hopelessness, dragged one down into an early grave. Gradually I saw that within the communist state everyone-everyone except the leadership of course-subsists in a cage of gnawing bitterness and permanent defeatism.

Unnumbered lives were sacrificed on the ungodly altar of communism in the last century, not only in my temporary abode of Yugoslavia but throughout eastern Europe, Russia, and much of Asia, Africa, and South America, and now the American Left wishes to revive this monstrous ideology on our own shores. Every totalitarian regime begins with the same heartfelt promises of justice and equality, just those promises of fairness that Barack Obama has made the fixation of his political career. What tyrant, one might ask, has not risen to power on promises of benevolent change?



More....

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

The simplest definition of socialism is to legally require human A to depend on human B.

I challenge anyone to claim this as inaccurate.

Based on that, how can anyone conclude that the prospects for human A are anything but dismal?

Anonymous said...

Socialists foundational principle:

Equality of life is more important than quality of life.

Anonymous said...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWsx1X8PV_A

Anonymous said...

The liberal left in this country has increasingly become the elite rich.

They just want to complete the trifecta by subjugating the middle class.