It appears that Bernie Sanders may actually get the nomination he’s coveted for years. Right now he’s trailing fellow Democrat Joe Biden in South Carolina, but Biden is fading. Sanders, meanwhile, is leading in Nevada and also in national polls. Could it be, then, that we may get a socialist President in 2020? Why not? Electoral politics in America is becoming quite strange indeed. We elected Donald Trump in 2016. How many people believed that was going to happen?
Why do so many Americans, particularly young Americans, find Bernie and his socialism so appealing? I think a good deal of the appeal revolves around marketing. Bernie’s been at it for a long time and demagogues have a strange appeal. In the late 1920’s, for example, Huey Long, was elected governor of Louisiana by running on a populist platform that attracted Louisiana’s masses to his side. His promise of chicken in every pot and a fair deal for Louisiana’s poor was a powerful message and it catapulted him to power. By the mid 1930’s he set his sights on bigger and grander things. His “share the welath program,” with its catchy slogan, “every man a king, but none will wear a crown” had incredible appeal with the masses. And, why wouldn’t it? It sounded so much like a socialist fair deal. By 1935, Long had over 4 million Americans willing to support him if he were to run for the Presidency. What the masses never saw, though, was Long’s ruthless ways. Once he got to the top, he intended to stay there. This is how he did it:
“Long’s folksy manner and sympathy for the underprivileged diverted attention from his ruthless autocratic methods. Surrounding himself with gangsterlike bodyguards, he dictated outright to members of the legislature, using intimidation if necessary. When he was about to leave office to serve in the U.S. Senate (1932), he fired the legally elected lieutenant governor and replaced him with two designated successors who would obey him from Washington. In order to fend off local challenges to his control in 1934, he effected radical changes in the Louisiana government, abolishing local government and taking personal control of all educational, police, and fire job appointments throughout the state. He achieved absolute control of the state militia, judiciary, and election and tax-assessing apparatus, while denying citizens any legal or electoral redress.”
I’ve always found it fascinating that demagogues always tell the masses they’re all about fairness and equality. Always! Bernie Sanders is no exception. He’ll tickle people’s ears to get the votes and leave out the “unimportant,” dirty details.
In 1988, Bernie and his wife, Jane, took a honeymoon trip to Russia. It was an absolute swoonfest, as this YouTube video link to one of the events he attended attests. He talked about the Moscow subway at length and extolled its beauty, all but bowing before Josef Stalin’s corpse in worship. He was absolutely right. Nancy and I have seen the Moscow subway first hand. The stations have gorgeous murals on the walls and massive, ornate chandeliers hanging from the ceilings. Bronze statues of Soviet soldiers line the corridors, with their jut jaws and firm stances poised and ever ready to defend the socialist utopia. They stand guard over other bronze statues of Russian peasants, some of whom are more than likely Kulaks from the Ukraine.
Bernie was right. The Moscow subway is absolutely stunning. What he failed to mention to his listeners was where Stalin got the wherewithal and money to build this Soviet showpiece. First of all, Stalin’s socialist utopia had no one with the necessary skills to design or engineer such a grand projet, so Stalin brought in engineers who had worked on London’s subway (affectionately known as the Tube). According to a 2015 NPR report, somewhere in the process “Stalin worried that they were learning too much about the layout of the city, so he had them tried for spying and deported.”
That just about covers the logistics, but where did the money for the project come from? Stalin, ever the clever opportunist, looked to Ukraine, the Soviet Union’s breadbasket. He collectivized the wheat farms of the Kulaks, Ukraine’s wealthy wheat farmers, and the remaining poor farmers, took their crops, including the meager subsitence crops the Kulaks and poor farmers tried to hide from Soviet thugs who roamed from small farm to small farm. They even stole the crops that might have kept the Kulaks and other poor farmers alive. Once Stalin sold the wheat on international markets, he had more than enough hard cash to fund his showcase.
When all was said and done, about four million Ukranians had died in Stalin’s deliberately induced famine. That grisly period is now known as the Holodomor, or death by famine. I think genocide is probably a more accurate descritpion.
Did this trouble Stalin and his henchmen? Not at all. To them, the Kulaks and peasant farmers were nothing but cockaroaches or vermin. They needed to be exterminated.
There you have it. Stalin got his subway and the propaganda benefits that came with it. Someone, perhaps Napoleon, Robspierre, or Lenin, once said “you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.” In Stalin’s socialist utopia, the eggs became corpses and the omelet became a gorgeous subway.
I wonder if Bernie ever had an opportunity to ask his Soviet guides or Mikhail Grobachev himself how Stalin really managed to fund his project. Probably not, but if he had, they’d have him told that in their socialist utopia they actually defacated money whenever they needed it and had a massive bureaucracy that was dedicated to that task. I’ll bet Bernie would have believed them, figuring that bureaucracies like that explained why everyone in the Soviet Union was employed.
If he ever does get elected President, I wouldn’t be surprised to see batallions of Ex-Lax munching “stimulators” roaming the halls of federal agencies all around this country.
I knew Bernie and his adoring campaign staffers wouldn’t tell you about these inconvenient little deatils of Stalin’s utopia. It’s up to counter-revolutionaries like me.
Am I saying that Bernie Sanders would do what Stalin did to the Kulaks? He seems like such a nice guy. You’re right, he does seem like a harmless old coot. I’d wager that he’d sit down and swill down a beer with me and puff a cigar or two while we politely discussed equality and justice for the masses.
Appearances are often deceiving. In the case of Bernie Sanders, they’re meant to be. Demagogues and tyrants often seem like nice folks with wonderful ideas, but their marketing skills can’t hide the ruthless nature of the beasts within them. I’ve seen lots of glossies of Hitler hugging little children or playing games with his belved dog, Blondie. I’ve seen photographs of Josef Stalin cuddling up to little girls.
I can’t say for certain what Bernie Sanders would do as President to actually convert the United States to a socialist state, mainly because we have a Constitution and Bill of Rights as a buffer against demagogues and tyrants and their convoluted ideas of justice and equality. But, I have no doubt there is something sinister churning around inside Bernie’s gut. It comes as part of the socliast package, like peas and carrots or Forrest and Jennie.
We do have Constitutional protections. Thank God! But we also have something that could derail those protections.- a young, infatuated electorate. I’m not advocating shutting down the voting booths, mind you, but the right to vote does have its pitfalls, the primary one being a hoodwinked young elecorate. I say this because I was once young myself. I knew of no self-respecting Bostonian in my younger days who wasn’t a socialist at heart. I loved the sound of the word “free” as it flowed ever so gently from the honey-dripped tongues of the soap box socialists and firebrands who roamed around the Boston Common back in the mid to late fifties. If I could have voted for a socialist back then I would have and so would millions of my fellow teenagers. I loved the idea of free, especially if the required capital for the free stuff was going to be exrtracted from some unsuspecting American Kulak. Thankfully, I wasn’t old enough to vote back then since the voting age was twenty-one. I survey our current scene and think it wouldn’t be bad at all to turn back the clock to those days.
How did America get to this place? Can we fix ourselves or is the old saying true – there’s no fixing stupid? I’m beginning to wonder. I read an essay last night that Libertarian P.J. O’Rurke wrote back in 1982, some six years before Bernie and Jane spent their honeymoon extolling the virtues of soviet socialism. It was his account of ten days he’d spent on a Russian river cruise with a small group of left-wing American peacenicks. He titled the piece, appropriately, “Ship of Fools.”
Toward the end, in a section captioned “Loath Boat,” O’Rourke dsescribed a brief conversation he had with one of the left-wing women as they were passing through the locks of the Donn-Volga canal. The transcripton of the woman’s comments was classic:
“Isn’t it marvellous?” She said, staring at a gigantic blank wall of concrete. “They’re such wonderful engineers in the Soviet Union.” I agreed it was an impressive piece of work. “Marvelous, marvellous, marvelous, marvelous,” she said. She then peeked over the side. “And where do they get all their water?”
I’m tempted to go on and mention the warnings from some of the world’s great minds about the serious dangers that come with socialism, even socialism that’s branded as “democratic socialism.” I could mention the literary works of Solzhenitsyn, Pasternak, and Dostoevsky. I could mention dissidents like Natan Sharansky or Andrei Sakharov. I could mention the Russian Orthodox, Baptist, Pentecostal, or Seventh Day Adventist dissidents. I could, but it wouldn’t help. Bernie has a one track mind that’s consumed by a non-existent socialist utopia and so do far too many ofAmerica’s adoring young. I’m afraid, as I said earlier, you can’t fix stupid.