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1 May 2017

This speech was delivered by WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman David North to open the 2017 International May Day Online Rally held on April 30.

On behalf of the International Committee of the Fourth International and the international editorial board of the World Socialist Web Site, I extend our revolutionary greetings to our members, readers and supporters all over the world. For the fourth consecutive year, the International Committee of the Fourth International is celebrating the historical day of international working class solidarity with an online rally. The first of these rallies was held in 2014, on the eve of the one hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, and the seventy-fifth anniversary of the start of World War II in September 1939.

David North's contribution to the International May Day Online Rally 2017

This years May Day also coincides with an auspicious anniversary: the centenary of the 1917 Russian Revolution. One hundred years ago, May Day was celebrated throughout Russia just eight weeks after the overthrow of the Romanov dynasty. Hatred of the war was a major factor in the outbreak of the February Revolution. But the Russian bourgeoisie had no intention of ending it without achieving the territorial gains that had led the tsar to go to war in the first place. By the time of May Day, Nicholas II had been removed from power, but the interests of the imperialist ruling elite had not yet been satisfied. The bourgeois Provisional Government was determined to continue the war.

The reformist leaders of the Soviet of Workers and Soldiers Deputiesthe Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionariessupported the Provisional Government and refused to demand an immediate end to the war. They used the overthrow of the tsar as a pretext to rebrand the imperialist war as a war for democracy. For the bourgeoisie, the wars continuation was seen as necessary, and not only to gain control of Constantinople. It was intended as well to disorient the masses and maintain their subordination to the capitalist state. A war to exhaust the enemy, Trotsky later wrote, was thus converted into a war to exhaust the revolution.

Only one party opposed the warthe Bolshevik Party, though it adopted its intransigent anti-war stance only after Lenin had returned to Russia from exile in early April. It required nearly three weeks of intense political struggle by Lenin within the Bolshevik Party to shift its position from support for the Provisional Government to the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist state and the transfer of power to the soviets.

In historical retrospect, where outcomes often are seen as inevitable, one tends to underestimate the intensity of the political struggle that was required for Lenin to change the policy of the Bolshevik Party. But it must be understood that this struggle did not take place in a vacuum. The defensist position of many party leadersthat is, support for the continuation of the war under the newly unfurled banner of democracywas, to a considerable extent, an adaptation to the confused patriotic sentiments of the masses in the first days and weeks of the revolution.

A section of Bolshevik leaders argued that the renunciation of revolutionary defensism would isolate the party from the working class. It would be, they warned, reduced to a group of propagandists. Lenin emphatically rejected this argument. He wrote:

Is it not more becoming for internationalists at this moment to show that they can resist mass intoxication rather than to wish to remain with the masses, i.e., to succumb to the general epidemic? Have we not seen how in all the belligerent countries of Europe the chauvinists tried to justify themselves on the grounds that they wished to remain with the masses? Must we not be able to remain for a time in the minority against the mass intoxication? Is it not the work of the propagandists at the present moment that forms the key point for disentangling the proletarian line from the defensist and petty-bourgeois mass intoxication? It was this fusion of the masses, proletarian and non-proletarian, regardless of class differences within the masses, that formed one of the conditions for the defensist epidemic. To speak contemptuously of a group of propagandists advocating a proletarian line does not seem to be very becoming.

How profoundly different Lenins principled politics was from that of all opportunists, then and now, who habitually justify their betrayals as necessary accommodations to the existing level of mass consciousness.

Reoriented by Lenin, the Bolsheviks fought against the chauvinist intoxication. Even by May Day, this mood had not entirely dissipated. One story published in the New York Times, as filthy then as it is today, on the May Day rallies in Petrograd, was headlined: Russian Crowds Hoot Lenine. The journalist of the Times reported, with satisfaction: Speeches made by followers of the Radical Socialist agitator Lenine were greeted with cries of: Enough! Hold your tongue.

Another article assured American readers that virtually all Russian socialist leaders supported the war, and concluded with the information: Manifestoes now being issued are undisguisedly advocating that Lenine share the fate of Rasputin. But within six months, the Bolsheviks, with the support of the working class, overthrew the Provisional Government. The October Revolution marked the beginning of the end of World War I.

It is entirely appropriate to review the political lessons of 1917, but not only because this is the centenary of the Russian Revolution. The struggle against the imperialist preparations for war is the spearhead of the revolutionary struggle against capitalism. Never has the danger of a nuclear conflagration been as great as it is today.

In the three previous online May Day rallies, the International Committee has called urgent attention to the relentless growth of geo-political and inter-imperialist tensions. We have warned that without the building of a mass working class movement against war, based on an international socialist perspective, the ruling elites will plunge mankind into a catastrophe.

Even among the supporters of the International Committee, not to mention the many thousands of readers of the World Socialist Web Site, these warnings may have been viewed as overstated, and even alarmist. But in light of the events of the past several months, do the warnings of the International Committee still seem exaggerated?

The most experienced experts in imperialist geo-politics are being compelled to recognize the possibility of a catastrophic war. In the current issue of Foreign Affairs, the leading publication of the American foreign policy establishment, a series of essays has been published under the collective title Present at the Destruction? The tone of these articles is set in an essay written by a leading US foreign policy specialist, G. John Ikenberry. Surveying the reckless policies of the Trump administration, he writes: Across ancient and modern eras, orders built by great powers have come and gonebut they have usually ended in murder, not suicide. And what form will this suicide take? The second essay in Foreign Affairs bears the title A Vision of Trump at War, by Philip Gordon, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. His article outlines several geo-political scenarios in which conflicts spiral out of control and lead to war with Iran or North Korea, Russia or China.

The scholarly journal Comparative Strategy published an article in late 2016 titled Reconceptualizing nuclear risks: Bringing deliberate nuclear use back in. The authorsboth professors at Georgetown University in Washington, DCargue against the widespread assumption that a nuclear war would most likely take place as a result of a political miscalculation or accident. That is not the case, they say. The main danger of such a war, they warn, arises from the growing willingness of leaders to consider the use of nuclear weapons as tools of statecraft. The authors define deliberate nuclear use as the intentional detonation of a nuclear weapon or weapons against an enemy target, or engaging in an intentional process of nuclear threat and escalation whereby a nuclear detonation against an adversary is the end result.

The essay specifies five well-known military strategies that may lead to the deliberate use of nuclear warfare: 1) Nuclear use against a nonnuclear opponent, in which a nuclear-capable state may be tempted to use nuclear weapons to try to end the conflict; 2) Splendid first strike, whose purpose is to destroy all of an adversarys nuclear weapons in a single campaign, leaving the adversary unable to retaliate; 3) Use em or lose em, a strategy that may be employed in a confrontation involving two nuclear-armed states, where one of the states decides to launch a nuclear attack before its own arsenal is wiped out; 4) Nuclear brinksmanship, in which the risk of war is deliberately escalated in the hope that the adversary will back down. But this strategy is pursued with the understanding that the confrontation may lead to war; and 5) Limited nuclear war, a strategy based on the concept that nuclear war, once started, can be contained without escalating into a full-scale and unlimited thermo-nuclear exchange.

Who are the maniacs who have devised this strategy? The willingness to consider any of these strategies is, itself, a sign of madness. The use of nuclear weapons would have incalculable consequences. Will this fact deter the ruling classes from resorting to war? The entire history of the twentieth century, not to mention the experience of just the first 17 years of the twenty-first, argues against such a hopeful assumption. The political strategy of the working class must be based on reality, not self-deluding hopes. Just two weeks ago, the United States dropped a 21,600-pound Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb on Afghanistan.

This was the largest bomb used by the United States in a military action since the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, nearly 72 years ago. One might have assumed that this event would have dominated world news for weeks. Far from it. The use of this bomb received little more than routine coverage and then faded quickly from the news.

Just three days ago, Donald Trump stated: There is a chance that we could end up having a major, major conflict with North Korea. Absolutely. This was said in a casual way, as if Trump were discussing whether he planned to play golf this coming weekend. And the media reported Trumps remarks without demanding that he explain precisely what he meant, what the outcome of a war would be, how many would be killed, wounded, maimed, what the ecological consequences of such a war would be.

What is one to make of this phlegmatic response by the media to a statement by the president of the United States that there is absolutely a real danger of a major, major conflictthat is, a nuclear warwith North Korea? It expresses a blind and unquestioning acceptance of the logic of imperialism. The media and the rest of the political superstructure of the capitalist stateand I am speaking of all the major capitalist states, not only the USare, with their lies as well as with their silences, preparing for war.

As the ruling elites prepare for war, the working class must be mobilized to prevent it. The essential foundation for the struggle against war is an understanding of its causes. As Lenin explained in 1917, war is the product of the development of world capitalism and of its billions of threads and connections. It cannot be stopped, he said, without overthrowing the power of capital and transferring state power to another class, the proletariat.

Therefore, the fight against war poses, in the sharpest form, the fundamental political problem of this historical epoch: the resolution of the crisis of revolutionary leadership. Never has the contradiction between the very advanced state of the crisis of capitalism and the subjective consciousness of the working class been so great. But it is this very contradiction that provides the impulse for an immense and rapid development in political consciousness.

As capitalism hurtles toward the abyss, it is creating the conditions for the political radicalization of the working classbillions of human beingsin all parts of the world. It is true that social consciousness lags behind social being, but that does not mean that the working class is blind to the bankruptcy of the existing social system, which has nothing to offer the massesleast of all hope for a better future. The idea of progress has disappeared from bourgeois thought. Where does one still hear predictions that conditions of life on this planet will be better twenty years from now than they are today? If a global poll were taken, in which all people were asked what they considered to be more probable within the next fifty yearsthe elimination of poverty or the destruction of the planet through a military and/or ecological disasteris there any question as to what the overwhelming majority would answer?

Yes, there is a crisis of political leadership in the working class. But it is a crisis that can be solved, because the working class is a revolutionary force that embodies the objectively existing potential for the socialist reconstruction of society.

This is the foundation upon which the International Committee fights to carry out the historical task posed by Trotsky when he founded the Fourth International as the World Party of Socialist Revolution in 1938.

We do not underestimate the immensity of the challenges that confront the International Committee in building this world party. But no other party will undertake this task. There is not another organization in the world that can claim, with any degree of seriousness, that it either represents the interests of the working class or advances a revolutionary program.

Our use of the term pseudo-left is not a factionally motivated exaggeration. It is a precise definition of organizations of the affluent middle class that have nothing to do with Marxism, Trotskyism, or the revolutionary struggle for socialism. The International Committee does not tail behind such nationalist charlatans as Tsipras, Iglesias, Melnchon or Sanders. The political organizations led by or allied with such figures are, to borrow a phrase from Trotsky, rotten through and through.

Without succumbing to immodesty, the International Committee and its sections have every right, in this centennial year of the Russian Revolution, to look to the future with confidence. The influence of the World Socialist Web Site, the voice of the International Committee, is growing rapidly. As our readership expands, so will the size of our organizations. And we are convinced that the global radicalization of the working class will lead to the establishment of new sections of the International Committee. We hope that our listeners in many parts of the world will be among those who take this vital initiative and found new sections in the countries in which they live.

One hundred years ago, upon returning to Petrograd, Lenin wrote: We are out to rebuild the world, and that is, indeed, what the Bolsheviks did. This is the aim of the Fourth Internationalthe rebuilding of the world on a socialist foundationthat is, a world without poverty, exploitation, political oppression and war. We call upon all those who are attending this rally, in all parts of the world, to join us in this fight.

David North

See the original post:
May Day 2017: Lessons of history and the fight for socialism - World ... - World Socialist Web Site

A Venezuelan YouTuber known asCarlos Gaio released a video Monday that he says will turn into a series titled My Socialist Hell.

In the video, Gaio goes into detail about the conditions he is currently living in within the failing country of Venezuela. Currently,Venezuela is suffering from a shortage of almost everything, from food, to medicine, to something as simple as toilet paper.

Gaio begins by saying that his government is not actually a government, it is more accuratelya dictatorship. He says they are running the country as a socialist one, but as Gaio says if you take a look at history, socialism never worked.

Take a look at the USSR. Take a look at Romania, says Gaio. Take a look at all the eastern European countries that were run by socialism during the 70s and 80s. They dont have these forms of government anymore.

Gaio, 31, goes on to tell the viewer that he was an English teacher who has been unemployed since December 2015. The former teacher says that finding a job is very difficult in the countrys current economic state, as they cannot pay for anymore employees. To make money, Gaio says he taught privately, but this is only a temporary solution, and maybe even a fruitless gesture as the Venezuelan currency the bolivar is practically worthless.

Gaio hopes that these videos will help him raise money in order to be able to escape the country, and move somewhere where he can have a normal life.

Read the original here:
Venezuelan YouTuber starts video series describing 'my socialist hell' - TheBlaze.com

1 May 2017

This speech was delivered by WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman David North to open the 2017 International May Day Online Rally held on April 30.

On behalf of the International Committee of the Fourth International and the international editorial board of the World Socialist Web Site, I extend our revolutionary greetings to our members, readers and supporters all over the world. For the fourth consecutive year, the International Committee of the Fourth International is celebrating the historical day of international working class solidarity with an online rally. The first of these rallies was held in 2014, on the eve of the one hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, and the seventy-fifth anniversary of the start of World War II in September 1939.

David North's contribution to the International May Day Online Rally 2017

This years May Day also coincides with an auspicious anniversary: the centenary of the 1917 Russian Revolution. One hundred years ago, May Day was celebrated throughout Russia just eight weeks after the overthrow of the Romanov dynasty. Hatred of the war was a major factor in the outbreak of the February Revolution. But the Russian bourgeoisie had no intention of ending it without achieving the territorial gains that had led the tsar to go to war in the first place. By the time of May Day, Nicholas II had been removed from power, but the interests of the imperialist ruling elite had not yet been satisfied. The bourgeois Provisional Government was determined to continue the war.

The reformist leaders of the Soviet of Workers and Soldiers Deputiesthe Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionariessupported the Provisional Government and refused to demand an immediate end to the war. They used the overthrow of the tsar as a pretext to rebrand the imperialist war as a war for democracy. For the bourgeoisie, the wars continuation was seen as necessary, and not only to gain control of Constantinople. It was intended as well to disorient the masses and maintain their subordination to the capitalist state. A war to exhaust the enemy, Trotsky later wrote, was thus converted into a war to exhaust the revolution.

Only one party opposed the warthe Bolshevik Party, though it adopted its intransigent anti-war stance only after Lenin had returned to Russia from exile in early April. It required nearly three weeks of intense political struggle by Lenin within the Bolshevik Party to shift its position from support for the Provisional Government to the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist state and the transfer of power to the soviets.

In historical retrospect, where outcomes often are seen as inevitable, one tends to underestimate the intensity of the political struggle that was required for Lenin to change the policy of the Bolshevik Party. But it must be understood that this struggle did not take place in a vacuum. The defensist position of many party leadersthat is, support for the continuation of the war under the newly unfurled banner of democracywas, to a considerable extent, an adaptation to the confused patriotic sentiments of the masses in the first days and weeks of the revolution.

A section of Bolshevik leaders argued that the renunciation of revolutionary defensism would isolate the party from the working class. It would be, they warned, reduced to a group of propagandists. Lenin emphatically rejected this argument. He wrote:

Is it not more becoming for internationalists at this moment to show that they can resist mass intoxication rather than to wish to remain with the masses, i.e., to succumb to the general epidemic? Have we not seen how in all the belligerent countries of Europe the chauvinists tried to justify themselves on the grounds that they wished to remain with the masses? Must we not be able to remain for a time in the minority against the mass intoxication? Is it not the work of the propagandists at the present moment that forms the key point for disentangling the proletarian line from the defensist and petty-bourgeois mass intoxication? It was this fusion of the masses, proletarian and non-proletarian, regardless of class differences within the masses, that formed one of the conditions for the defensist epidemic. To speak contemptuously of a group of propagandists advocating a proletarian line does not seem to be very becoming.

How profoundly different Lenins principled politics was from that of all opportunists, then and now, who habitually justify their betrayals as necessary accommodations to the existing level of mass consciousness.

Reoriented by Lenin, the Bolsheviks fought against the chauvinist intoxication. Even by May Day, this mood had not entirely dissipated. One story published in the New York Times, as filthy then as it is today, on the May Day rallies in Petrograd, was headlined: Russian Crowds Hoot Lenine. The journalist of the Times reported, with satisfaction: Speeches made by followers of the Radical Socialist agitator Lenine were greeted with cries of: Enough! Hold your tongue.

Another article assured American readers that virtually all Russian socialist leaders supported the war, and concluded with the information: Manifestoes now being issued are undisguisedly advocating that Lenine share the fate of Rasputin. But within six months, the Bolsheviks, with the support of the working class, overthrew the Provisional Government. The October Revolution marked the beginning of the end of World War I.

It is entirely appropriate to review the political lessons of 1917, but not only because this is the centenary of the Russian Revolution. The struggle against the imperialist preparations for war is the spearhead of the revolutionary struggle against capitalism. Never has the danger of a nuclear conflagration been as great as it is today.

In the three previous online May Day rallies, the International Committee has called urgent attention to the relentless growth of geo-political and inter-imperialist tensions. We have warned that without the building of a mass working class movement against war, based on an international socialist perspective, the ruling elites will plunge mankind into a catastrophe.

Even among the supporters of the International Committee, not to mention the many thousands of readers of the World Socialist Web Site, these warnings may have been viewed as overstated, and even alarmist. But in light of the events of the past several months, do the warnings of the International Committee still seem exaggerated?

The most experienced experts in imperialist geo-politics are being compelled to recognize the possibility of a catastrophic war. In the current issue of Foreign Affairs, the leading publication of the American foreign policy establishment, a series of essays has been published under the collective title Present at the Destruction? The tone of these articles is set in an essay written by a leading US foreign policy specialist, G. John Ikenberry. Surveying the reckless policies of the Trump administration, he writes: Across ancient and modern eras, orders built by great powers have come and gonebut they have usually ended in murder, not suicide. And what form will this suicide take? The second essay in Foreign Affairs bears the title A Vision of Trump at War, by Philip Gordon, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. His article outlines several geo-political scenarios in which conflicts spiral out of control and lead to war with Iran or North Korea, Russia or China.

The scholarly journal Comparative Strategy published an article in late 2016 titled Reconceptualizing nuclear risks: Bringing deliberate nuclear use back in. The authorsboth professors at Georgetown University in Washington, DCargue against the widespread assumption that a nuclear war would most likely take place as a result of a political miscalculation or accident. That is not the case, they say. The main danger of such a war, they warn, arises from the growing willingness of leaders to consider the use of nuclear weapons as tools of statecraft. The authors define deliberate nuclear use as the intentional detonation of a nuclear weapon or weapons against an enemy target, or engaging in an intentional process of nuclear threat and escalation whereby a nuclear detonation against an adversary is the end result.

The essay specifies five well-known military strategies that may lead to the deliberate use of nuclear warfare: 1) Nuclear use against a nonnuclear opponent, in which a nuclear-capable state may be tempted to use nuclear weapons to try to end the conflict; 2) Splendid first strike, whose purpose is to destroy all of an adversarys nuclear weapons in a single campaign, leaving the adversary unable to retaliate; 3) Use em or lose em, a strategy that may be employed in a confrontation involving two nuclear-armed states, where one of the states decides to launch a nuclear attack before its own arsenal is wiped out; 4) Nuclear brinksmanship, in which the risk of war is deliberately escalated in the hope that the adversary will back down. But this strategy is pursued with the understanding that the confrontation may lead to war; and 5) Limited nuclear war, a strategy based on the concept that nuclear war, once started, can be contained without escalating into a full-scale and unlimited thermo-nuclear exchange.

Who are the maniacs who have devised this strategy? The willingness to consider any of these strategies is, itself, a sign of madness. The use of nuclear weapons would have incalculable consequences. Will this fact deter the ruling classes from resorting to war? The entire history of the twentieth century, not to mention the experience of just the first 17 years of the twenty-first, argues against such a hopeful assumption. The political strategy of the working class must be based on reality, not self-deluding hopes. Just two weeks ago, the United States dropped a 21,600-pound Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb on Afghanistan.

This was the largest bomb used by the United States in a military action since the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, nearly 72 years ago. One might have assumed that this event would have dominated world news for weeks. Far from it. The use of this bomb received little more than routine coverage and then faded quickly from the news.

Just three days ago, Donald Trump stated: There is a chance that we could end up having a major, major conflict with North Korea. Absolutely. This was said in a casual way, as if Trump were discussing whether he planned to play golf this coming weekend. And the media reported Trumps remarks without demanding that he explain precisely what he meant, what the outcome of a war would be, how many would be killed, wounded, maimed, what the ecological consequences of such a war would be.

What is one to make of this phlegmatic response by the media to a statement by the president of the United States that there is absolutely a real danger of a major, major conflictthat is, a nuclear warwith North Korea? It expresses a blind and unquestioning acceptance of the logic of imperialism. The media and the rest of the political superstructure of the capitalist stateand I am speaking of all the major capitalist states, not only the USare, with their lies as well as with their silences, preparing for war.

As the ruling elites prepare for war, the working class must be mobilized to prevent it. The essential foundation for the struggle against war is an understanding of its causes. As Lenin explained in 1917, war is the product of the development of world capitalism and of its billions of threads and connections. It cannot be stopped, he said, without overthrowing the power of capital and transferring state power to another class, the proletariat.

Therefore, the fight against war poses, in the sharpest form, the fundamental political problem of this historical epoch: the resolution of the crisis of revolutionary leadership. Never has the contradiction between the very advanced state of the crisis of capitalism and the subjective consciousness of the working class been so great. But it is this very contradiction that provides the impulse for an immense and rapid development in political consciousness.

As capitalism hurtles toward the abyss, it is creating the conditions for the political radicalization of the working classbillions of human beingsin all parts of the world. It is true that social consciousness lags behind social being, but that does not mean that the working class is blind to the bankruptcy of the existing social system, which has nothing to offer the massesleast of all hope for a better future. The idea of progress has disappeared from bourgeois thought. Where does one still hear predictions that conditions of life on this planet will be better twenty years from now than they are today? If a global poll were taken, in which all people were asked what they considered to be more probable within the next fifty yearsthe elimination of poverty or the destruction of the planet through a military and/or ecological disasteris there any question as to what the overwhelming majority would answer?

Yes, there is a crisis of political leadership in the working class. But it is a crisis that can be solved, because the working class is a revolutionary force that embodies the objectively existing potential for the socialist reconstruction of society.

This is the foundation upon which the International Committee fights to carry out the historical task posed by Trotsky when he founded the Fourth International as the World Party of Socialist Revolution in 1938.

We do not underestimate the immensity of the challenges that confront the International Committee in building this world party. But no other party will undertake this task. There is not another organization in the world that can claim, with any degree of seriousness, that it either represents the interests of the working class or advances a revolutionary program.

Our use of the term pseudo-left is not a factionally motivated exaggeration. It is a precise definition of organizations of the affluent middle class that have nothing to do with Marxism, Trotskyism, or the revolutionary struggle for socialism. The International Committee does not tail behind such nationalist charlatans as Tsipras, Iglesias, Melnchon or Sanders. The political organizations led by or allied with such figures are, to borrow a phrase from Trotsky, rotten through and through.

Without succumbing to immodesty, the International Committee and its sections have every right, in this centennial year of the Russian Revolution, to look to the future with confidence. The influence of the World Socialist Web Site, the voice of the International Committee, is growing rapidly. As our readership expands, so will the size of our organizations. And we are convinced that the global radicalization of the working class will lead to the establishment of new sections of the International Committee. We hope that our listeners in many parts of the world will be among those who take this vital initiative and found new sections in the countries in which they live.

One hundred years ago, upon returning to Petrograd, Lenin wrote: We are out to rebuild the world, and that is, indeed, what the Bolsheviks did. This is the aim of the Fourth Internationalthe rebuilding of the world on a socialist foundationthat is, a world without poverty, exploitation, political oppression and war. We call upon all those who are attending this rally, in all parts of the world, to join us in this fight.

David North

See the rest here:
May Day 2017: Lessons of history and the fight for socialism - World Socialist Web Site

|

Posted: May 01, 2017 12:01 AM

Professor Ilya Somin called to designate May Day as the "Victims of Communism Day." I wholeheartedly support his idea with only one suggestion--let's call it the "Victims of Communism/Socialism Day."

According to Karl Max, socialism is the transition stage to communism. Communist countries such as the former Soviet Union and China under Mao, never claimed that they had achieved Communism. Instead, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and their Communist cadre, committed crimes against humanity, which caused a total of 80-100 million death in the 20th century, under the banner of socialism. It's also important to remember that the full name of Nazi is National-Socialist German Workers' Party. Socialism and communism are similar shades of darkness and we need to condemn both of them in the same sentence. In the meantime, we ought to commemorate victims of communism/socialism on the same day.

On this day of commemoration, I'd like to share an excerpt from my book, Confucius Never Said.

In 1966, when Chairman Mao launched his most brutal political campaign: the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Millions of Chinese peoples lives were turned upside down, and this movement, unlike any other of Maos political campaigns, hit young people especially hard.

Mao declared young people should go to the countryside and learn from the poor peasants. Thus he gave birth to a new movement that came to be known as Up to the mountains and down to the village. From 1966 to 1968, nearly all high school students and young adults were forced out of cities. Some were sent to the countryside; many were sent to the most remote and most under-developed areas of China. Over 17 million young people were impacted including my mothers three younger siblingsAunt San, Aunt Er, and Uncle Tan.

Aunt San was only 15 when she and her siblings were sent to the countryside, but they werent allowed to stay in the same village. The communists wanted to sever family ties so people could devote themselves 100% to the Partys causes.

Transitioning from a city girl to a peasant wasnt an easy process. Chinese farm work was very primitive. Mao believed that he had millions of people at his disposal, so why invest in machinery? Therefore, everything was done by hand.

Every day, Aunt San marched to the fields with other young people, following the lead of the local farmers and singing cheerful revolutionary songs along the way. In the fields, she had to plough, sow, rake, and weed. With a pole across her shoulders with a basket at each end, she carried human waste fertilizer to the fields.

Local communist leaders didn't care if one worked hard or not. Anyone who showed up would earn a days work points, which were tied to a food ration. It turned out that the daily food ration wasnt enough even for a girl, so Aunt San suffered famine edema. She wasnt alone. Some other girls couldnt stand the hunger, so they traded their bodies to village leaders in exchange for extra food.

Aunt San couldnt rest much in the evenings either, because daily evening study meetings were held in the village. The routine was to first bow to Maos enlarged portrait on the wall and wish him to live forever. Then the groups would study books supposedly written by Mao (no other books were available). The most dreadful part of the meetings was when everyone confessed his bad thoughts or bad deeds. Sometimes these self-confessions turned into accusations of other peoples bad thoughts and bad deeds. This daily exercise ensured no one trusted anyone else with his or her most intimate thoughts.

A year after Aunt San came to the countryside, she caught an infection in her left eye. The clinic in the village had only one staff member. Because he only knew how to deal with basic cuts, Aunt San asked the team captain if she could return to the city to get treatment. The team captain accused her of being a spoiled Miss Bourgeois Aristocrat. If she left, the captain threatened, her action would be equivalent to defying Chairman Maos decree. The consequence would be very severe. Aunt San had witnessed one village woman being forced to parade around the village naked, with nothing but two well-worn shoes tied around her neck. Her crime was that her husband was a landlord. Aunt San knew that the captain wouldnt hesitate to use her as an example to intimidate other students. It was a well-known Chinese Communist Party scare tactic to Kill a chicken in order to scare the monkey. All these threats and accusations were too much for a 16-year-old girl, so Aunt San stayed in the village and continued to work. Due to lack of medical treatment, she lost the sight in that eye.

When I first met Aunt San, it was in the mid-1980s. She met my mom and I at the bus stop. She was nothing like I had imagined. Because she had been able to see with only one eye for so many years, her facial muscles seemed twisted, and I was scared to look at her. Her skin was dark and rough. Years of hard labor made her look like my mothers aunt rather than her younger sister.

My mother told me that Aunt Sans childhood dream was to be a performing artist. If the Cultural Revolution hadnt taken place, Aunt San could have been a dancer or learned to play piano with her tender fingers. Harsh life in the village had turned this delicate city girl into an ordinary farmer.

After Maos passing in 1976, the youth who had been forced to the countryside started returning to the city. Aunt San finally was able to move back to her home town in late 1980s. Since she never finished high school, she initially had a hard time finding a job. Eventually, she took a job as a city sanitization worker, which was one of the dirtiest, lowest paying jobs available.

Aunt San was considered a lucky one. Many young girls of her generation who went to either the countryside or to the northwest wildness were raped, starved, or even murdered. Many of them never saw their families again. If these girls lived in a free society, they could be teachers, doctors, dancers, or any professionals they wanted to be. A dictators decree altered their lives forever. They were Chinas lost generation. Todays Chinese history books gloss over this period as if these women never existed.

We should never forget these women and millions of other victims of communism/socialism, in Professor Ilya Somin's words, "both for their sake and for our own."

"Climate Change" PageRemoved From EPA Website

Here is the original post:
Victims of Communism/Socialism Day - Townhall

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Recently, Pope Francisreleased a statement to members of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. The statement, broadly, was about work in society, and how social bonds are incredibly important. At the end of it, however, the Pope levied a harsh attack at what he referred to as libertarian individualism. This, in turn, has been met with harsh criticism by both Reason and Breitbart. This is the latest in a string of statements that has led to one disheartening conclusion,the Pope has two ideologies. Catholicism and Socialism.

Below is the relevant portion of the statement:

Finally, I cannot but speak of the serious risks associated with the invasion, at high levels of culture and education in both universities and in schools, of positions of libertarian individualism. A common feature of this fallacious paradigm is that it minimizes the common good, that is, living well, a good life in the community framework, and exalts the selfish ideal that deceptively proposes a beautiful life. If individualism affirms that it is only the individual who gives value to things and interpersonal relationships, and so it is only the individual who decides what is good and what is bad, then libertarianism, today in fashion, preaches that to establish freedom and individual responsibility, it is necessary to resort to the idea of self-causation. Thus, libertarian individualism denies the validity of the common good because on the one hand it supposes that the very idea of common implies the constriction of at least some individuals, and the other that the notion of good deprives freedom of its essence.

The radicalization of individualism in libertarian and therefore anti-social terms leads to the conclusion that everyone has the right to expand as far as his power allows, even at the expense of the exclusion and marginalization of the most vulnerable majority. Bonds would have to be cut inasmuch as they would limit freedom. By mistakenly matching the concept of bond to that of constraint, one ends up confusing what may condition freedom the constraints with the essence of created freedom, that is, bonds or relations, family and interpersonal, with the excluded and marginalized, with the common good, and finally with God.

The Popes explanation of libertarianism is incredibly flawed. Libertarianism is none of these things, it is simply the belief that government coercion on personal actions should be as limited as possible. It is not a rejection of social bonds, or a denial of the common good. It is, to most, the opposite. Most libertarians believe wholeheartedly that by lifting the threat of force and letting people interact freely, we will have a more prosperous and more pro-social society.

Notice, however, that I said most.

This is where Pope Francis finds an element of truth. There is a very sizable minority of libertarians who are not pro-social. This minority does not care about the freedom and well-beingof all people. They are simply libertarians because they believe that they should be able to do what the Pope has described. They actually want to expand their power at the expense of the majority. These are Brutalists. This is, however, where thetruth of the Popes statement ends.

The Pope does not seem to understand libertarian philosophy, and this statement shows his ignorance. He has associated the simple desire for less coercion to good deeds, to be a rejection of doing good deeds. The Papacy has shown this ignorance before. This backward view that only coerced wealth redistribution can aid the poor has shown to be folly, time and time again. This mistake isnt simply ignorance however, it is, unfortunately, the Popes ideology.

Looking to the Popes past statements and actions, it is likely that he is allowing his politics to bias his moral teachings, and not just about libertarianism. Pope Francis has consistently handled socialist dictatorships like China andVenezuelawith kid gloves. He has instead saved his ire for free market capitalism. When the head of the Catholic Church is more kind towards dictators than those that espouse liberty, we have a serious problem.

To be frank, I am a Protestant. Despite this, I had high hopes for Pope Francis. I was encouraged by his apparent rejection of Papal decadence and a shift in focus to charity and aiding the poor. I was also heartened by his more socially tolerant statements.

This is why my disappointment is all the greater. The Pope has rejected freedom and proven methods of bettering society. He has instead chosen a failed ideology that has been used to oppress our Christian brothers and sisters all over the world.

That stings.

capitalismcatholiclibertarianismLibertyPopePope FrancisSocialism

More:
The Problem of the Pope and Socialism - The Libertarian Republic