New in PJ Media:
In Marxist theory, the final stage of socialism is true communism, when everyone shares of his or her resources equally, the state withers away, and true justice finally dawns upon the earth. We never have seen that stage and never will, because Marxism is rancid pseudo-religious hogwash that runs directly contrary to human nature. The real final stage of socialism is what we saw in the last ten years of the Soviet Union: an entrenched, all-encompassing, corrupt and inefficient state bureaucracy nominally presided over by a succession of senescent, barely-there incompetents. With his disgraceful descent into open authoritarianism Thursday evening, Old Joe Biden and the Democrats signaled their intention to skip right to that final stage: they’ve already got the doddering figurehead and the ravenous bureaucracy firmly in place.
During the first stages of socialism in Russia right after the Bolshevik revolution, the new workers’ paradise appeared from the outside, where the gulags weren’t so easy to see, to be youthful, dynamic, and promising. The American journalist Lincoln Steffens visited Soviet Russia in 1919 and was enthusiastic, declaring: “I have seen the future, and it works.” Other American intellectuals visited the Soviet Union and were likewise enthused; the New York Times’ Walter Duranty was so enamored of the place that he willfully covered up evidence of Stalin’s Ukrainian famine so that Times readers wouldn’t get a negative view of the new Russia.
This sort of thing went on for years. Two decades later, with the U.S. on the brink of entering World War II, three young folk singers named Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and Josh White, who called themselves the Almanac Singers, recorded Songs for John Doe, an album of peace songs. This was the time of the Nazi-Soviet pact, and as Seeger, Guthrie, and White were all hardcore Communists, they didn’t want the U.S. joining any war against Stalin’s ally Hitler. Hitler soon betrayed Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union, and suddenly these pacifists were passionate for the war and able to pose as patriots. For decades, Seeger, Guthrie, and multitudes of others worked tirelessly to make the Soviet Union and Marxism chic among American Leftists. It worked.
The Soviet Union itself, meanwhile, was governed first by Lenin and then by Stalin. Both were unscrupulous, inhuman, murderous thugs, and both remained in power only by ruthless reigns of terror and cults of personality that made them into gods more efficiently and comprehensively than any Roman emperor was ever deified. Even today, in post-Soviet Russia, Lenin is respected, and Stalin is revered. Lenin’s Tomb is still situated prominently in the Kremlin and gets a million visitors a year. Not far from it are the much more modest graves of most of the other Soviet leaders; Stalin’s is the only one that Russian visitors regularly decorate with flowers.
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somehistory says
It’s a different plot of land, and the year is different, but history is repeating. “When will they ever learn?”
Man is hard-headed and willful and “power corrupts.” They can’t see the *future* because they don’t have one.
gravenimage says
Biden and the Dems Are Skipping Straight to the Final Stage of Socialism
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Grim stuff.