The Ridgewood Blog Brings a Free Market Laissez-faire Point of View to Local, New Jersey State and National Issues.
By Charles Stampul
Karl Marx perfected the art of exploiting people in his personal life while developing a way to scale the practice. One could imagine him roasting Genghis Kahn in hell. Continue reading More Deaths Linked To Karl Marx Than Genghis Khan
the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Washington DC, Congressman Van Drew attended a press conference with his fellow colleagues announcing his support for the Crucial Communism Teaching Act. Congresswoman Maria Salazar (R-FL) is leading this critical effort in teaching our young people the evils of communism.
the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Ridgewood NJ, The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation just released the fourth annual report conducted by YouGov on generational attitudes toward socialism, communism, and collectivism.
This year’s study showed increased support for communism (36%) among Millennials compared to 2018. Opinions of capitalism took a steep decline from 2018 to 2019, with only one-in-two among Millennials (ages 23-38) and Gen Z (ages 16-22) having a favorable opinion of capitalism. Socialism’s favorability decreased markedly from 2018, among all generations except for Millennials and the Silent Generation (ages 74+).
Continue reading New poll finds that 70% of Millennials are likely to vote socialist
The Left’s Appalling Whitewashing of Castro’s Legacy
Mike Gonzalez / @Gundisalvus / November 26, 2016 / comments
“Fidel Castro’s legacy is one of firing squads, theft, unimaginable suffering, poverty, and the denial of fundamental human rights,” President-elect Donald Trump said of the Cuban dictator’s death.
COMMENTARY BY
Mike Gonzalez@Gundisalvus
Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation, is a widely experienced international correspondent, commentator, and editor who has reported from Asia, Europe, and Latin America. He served in the George W. Bush administration, first at the Securities and Exchange Commission and then at the State Department, and is the author of “A Race for the Future: How Conservatives Can Break the Liberal Monopoly on Hispanic Americans.”Read his research.
You will hear some people today excuse Fidel Castro’s crimes by begging that he accomplished social goals. Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn have already beclowned themselves on that front. They were merely the first.
Our own President Barack Obama opted for washing his hands, choosing to neither praise Castro after his death Friday, nor to condemn the tragedy his communist dictatorship has inflicted on the Cuban people for 57 years.
“History will record and judge the enormous impact of this singular figure on the people and world around him,” said Obama, playing Pilate.
No social accomplishment, to be sure, could justify keeping an entire people hostage, denying them the right to elect their own leaders or exercise any human rights for half a century. But there weren’t any accomplishments.
On the contrary, Castro destroyed a thriving society and imposed penury, either out of Marxist dogma or out of resentment that his out-of-wedlock birth had left him with a stigma among Cuba’s middle classes.
Cuba had problems in 1958, as many societies do. But on a number of fronts, it was the lead country in Latin America, or among the very top. Its social indicators were not just ahead of Asia and Africa, but also ahead of many European countries.
Many Europeans, including half of all my great-grandparents, immigrated to Cuba in the 20th century—barely a century ago—seeking to improve their lives economically. They did, and their granddaughter, my mother, went to law school.
After 57 years of communism, it is risible to think of a single European immigrating to Cuba to improve his fortunes. Risible in a dark, macabre way.
That’s anecdotal, but the numbers back up what 2 million Cuban-Americans today (i.e., Cuban-born people who can speak freely) know to be true.
A study by the State Department’s Hugo Llorens and Kirby Smith shows, for example, that in infant mortality, literacy rates, per capita food consumption, passenger cars per capita, number of telephones, radios, televisions, and many other indicators, Cuba led when Castro took over on New Year’s Eve 1958.
The United Nations statistics leave no doubt. In infant mortality, Cuba’s 32 deaths per 1,000 live births was well ahead of Japan, West Germany, Luxembourg, Ireland, France, Italy, Spain (40, 36, 39, 33, 34, 50, and 53 respectively), and many others.
In food consumption, in terms of calories per day, Cuba was ahead of all of Latin America except cattle-rich Argentina and Uruguay. In automobiles per 1,000 inhabitants, Cuba’s 24 was ahead over everyone in Latin America expect oil-producing Venezuela (27).
As for literacy rates, Cuba’s 76 percent in the late 1950s put it closely behind only Argentina, Chile, and Costa Rica. Giant Brazil’s percentage, by comparison, was 49 percent.
And Cuba’s gross domestic product per capita in 1959 was higher than those of Ireland, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, most of Latin America, Asia, and Africa, again according to U.N. statistics.
In most vital statistics, therefore, Cuba was on a par with Mediterranean countries and southern U.S. states.
And today? Castro’s communism has not just left Cubans economically pauperized, but politically bereft, a situation that Obama’s unilateral concessions to Castro’s little brother, the 85-year-old Raul, Cuba’s present leader, has only made worse.
According to the Cuban Committee for Human Rights and National Reconciliation, which is recognized by Amnesty International and Freedom House, so far this year there have already been over 8,505 political arrests during the first eight months. This represents the highest rate of political arrests in decades.
Meanwhile, we are in the midst of a new Cuban migration crisis. The United States is faced with the largest migration of Cuban nationals since the rafters of 1994. The number of Cubans fleeing to the United States in 2015 was nearly twice that of 2014.
Some 51,000 Cubans last year entered the United States, and this year’s figures will easily surpass that. The numbers of Cuban nationals fleeing Cuba have now quintupled since Obama took office, when it was less than 7,000 annually.
President-elect Donald Trump has promised he will reverse Obama’s opening unless Raul Castro opens up Cuba politically. This Castro won’t do and there were reports today that dissidents are being rounded up and carted off.
And so far, Trump’s statement on the “brutal dictator” Castro has been the moral one and the one closest to the mark: “Fidel Castro’s legacy is one of firing squads, theft, unimaginable suffering, poverty and the denial of fundamental human rights.”
Today, therefore, will be a day for clarity. What world leaders say about the departed tyrant will reveal whether they have an inner moral compass or not.
BY JÁNOS MARTONYI
JUNE 15, 2015
What is communism? Is it a beautiful idea, a utopian dream of bright future? Is it a coherent ideology of “historic materialism,” one that will abolish exploitation, eradicate inequality and injustice, abuses, estrangement, alienation, or Entfremdung, as it was called in the mid-nineteenth century by a young German philosopher, Karl Marx?
Or is it something else?
Is it a mother who enters the room of a twelve-year-old kid, wakes him up in the morning at 3 AM, and tells his son: “My son, you have to get up, the Soviet Army is attacking Budapest again”? Or is it the same mother, who, a couple of months later, wakes up his son again at 4 AM: “My son, you have to get up, your father has been taken away by the political police?”
We have to give a clear answer to people who are still saying that communism or Marxism-Leninism was a great idea, a beautiful idea — only the implementation was wrong. This is utterly and fatally wrong. It is not true.
It is not true because this was an idea, which was aggressive and violent, right in its inception, right from the beginning. The language was violent, the substance was violent, and of course everything, which has happened since, has been enormously violent.
That is why somebody said, that “revolutions are like trees: you can tell them by their fruits.” Communism had a logical outcome. Because if you want to destroy the existing political, economic and social order, and you want to put a new one in its place, it is a logical consequence that while destroying the existing structures, you sooner or later start destroying the basic human rights, the basic liberties, human dignity and yes, you start destroying thousands, millions, tens of millions of human lives.
That is the true face of communism.
Winston Churchill said right at the beginning, don’t think it is a peaceful utopian idea, because sooner or later it will be converted into external aggression, external expansion, because that is the nature of the ideology.
It is not by chance that in most countries, the communist dictatorship was established by sheer military force, in most cases coming from the outside. Certainly, it was the case in my country and all countries of the region.
The support of the communists in these countries was significantly less than in many Western European countries that never turned communist. Why? Because there was no presence of the Red Army in those countries.
Inevitably, dictatorships have to erect walls, barbed wires, iron curtains. But these are not external walls or barbed wires. The free minds were captured from within – as it was said by Czesław Miłosz.
A famous Hungarian poet, Gyula Illyés, wrote a fantastic poem about tyranny in which he says, “where there is tyranny, there is tyranny everywhere”. It is not just in the concentration camps, it is not just in the prisons, it is in the smile of the children, it is in your laugh, it is in your daily life.
As Havel said, the basic problem here was a morally contaminated environment: moral relativism, and moral corruption. That is to my mind the most important toxic legacy of communism.
Yet, there is an innate desire and aspiration for freedom in every human being, in every community or nation. That is why so many uprisings, revolutions, freedom fights and wars of independence took place. And finally, yes, in the ‘Year of Miracles,’ Central and Eastern Europe was liberated.
At the same time, we should never forget and we have to remember that this was only possible because there was a great nation that sacrificed more human lives to roll back and defeat communism around the world than any other nation. And this nation was and is the United States of America.
This is the reason why the stakes of moral clarity about the crimes of communist regimes in the past as well as the present are particularly high for America. This is why we hope that the mission of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation will be part of a genuine national consensus, a non-negotiable minimum of bipartisan nature.
https://blog.victimsofcommunism.org/remarks-of-janos-martonyi/
By Juan Reinaldo Sanchez
May 10, 2015 | 6:00am
For 17 years, Juan Reinaldo Sanchez served as bodyguard to Fidel Castro. But when he became disillusioned with the Cuban dictator’s hypocrisy and tried to retire in 1994, Castro had him thrown in prison. Sanchez made 10 attempts to escape the island, finally making it to the US in 2008. Now he reveals all in his new book, “The Double Life of Fidel Castro.” In this excerpt, Sanchez exposes “El Jefe’s” privileged life.
Modal Trigger
“The Double Life of Fidel Castro: My 17 Years as Personal Bodyguard to El Lider Maximo” by Juan Reinaldo Sanchez (St. Martin’s Press)
To Cubans, Fidel Castro presents himself as a man of the people, claiming to make only 900 pesos a month (about $38) and owning no property other than a modest “fisherman’s hut” somewhere on the coast.
In truth, El Jefe is worth hundreds of millions and owns 20 properties, including a chalet where he goes duck hunting every year and a private marina in the Bay of Pigs.
ISIS, Communism, and the Lure of Violent Utopianism
Jihadi John is nothing new.
A. Barton Hinkle | March 9, 2015
“Nihilists! . . . I mean, say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.” So proclaimed Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski, and Americans stunned by the horror of the Islamic State’s barbarity could be tempted to think the same. The Nazis were totalitarian monsters, but at least they believed in something, no matter how evil. Whereas ISIS is simply—in Secretary of State John Kerry’s words—“inexplicable, nihilistic, and valueless.” Particularly mystifying to some is how people such as Mohammed Emwazi, the Islamic State butcher known as Jihadi John, could join such a movement despite growing up in comfortable circumstances in London and getting a university degree in computer programming. Nor is he alone. Many of those drawn to ISIS are intelligent, educated and economically well-off. What drives them to chop off people’s heads?
The horrible truth is that ISIS and its converts, such as Jihadi John, represent nothing new in the modern era. The movement is not inexplicable—a recent essay in The Atlantic explicated it well, albeit controversially. It is not valueless; it champions the values of one very strict reading of Islam. And it is not nihilistic. A nihilist is someone who believes there is nothing to believe in. The fanatics of the Islamic State, however, believe very strongly in the absolute rightness of their own Utopian vision for the world.
Absolute belief renders ISIS’ atrocities not only explicable but seemingly almost mandatory. After all, if you hold the keys to the perfection of life on Earth, then anyone who stands in your way is actively depriving everyone else of that outcome and thereby ensuring the continued suffering of millions. Eliminating such people therefore serves the good of all mankind. (And the grisly beheadings, crucifixions, immolations? They can be justified on the same grounds as the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were: They will shock and awe the enemy into an earlier surrender, and thus save lives in the end. Mercy becomes a justification for cruelty.)
None of this is new. A century ago another Utopian movement behaved very much the same.
https://reason.com/archives/2015/03/09/isis-communism-and-the-lure-of-violent-u
Rudy Giuliani clarifies Obama comments by claiming the President has been influenced by communism, socialism
BY Celeste Katz
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Friday, February 20, 2015, 8:50 PM
Trying to explain his controversial comments that President Obama doesn’t love America, Rudy Giuliani said Friday that he believes the President has been influenced by communism and socialism.
“Look, this man was brought up basically in a white family, so whatever he learned or didn’t learn, I attribute this more to the influence of communism and socialism” than to his race, Giuliani told the Daily News.
“I don’t (see) this President as being particularly a product of African-American society or something like that. He isn’t,” the former mayor added. “Logically, think about his background. . . The ideas that are troubling me and are leading to this come from communists with whom he associated when he was 9 years old” through family connections.
When Obama was 9, he was living in Indonesia with his mother and his stepfather. Giuliani said he was referencing Obama’s grandfather having introduced him to Frank Marshall Davis, a member of the Communist Party.
Wayne Barrett: What Rudy Giuliani knows about love — a response to his ‘doesn’t love America’ critique of Obama
The former mayor also brought up Obama’s relationship with “quasi-communist” community organizer Saul Alinsky and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
Giuliani, a 2008 presidential hopeful, set off a national firestorm when he told an exclusive gathering of conservatives, pols and media figures on Wednesday night, “I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that this President loves America.
Mark Wilson/Getty Images The former mayor also brought up Obama’s relationship with ‘quasi-communist’ community organizer Saul Alinsky and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
“He doesn’t love you. He doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up: To love this country,” Giuliani said of Obama at the Manhattan dinner, which was arranged for Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.
https://www.nydailynews.com/giuliani-claims-obama-influenced-communism-article-1.2123541
Democrat Congressman: ‘We’ve Proved That Communism Works’
Democratic Florida Rep. Joe Garcia — fresh off being caught eating his own earwax on camera — was caught red-handed (or is it yellow-fingered?) in another gaffe this week, claiming that low crime rates in border cities with lots of federal immigration workers is proof that “Communism works.”
Garcia made the comment during a Google hangout he convened last week to talk about comprehensive immigration reform with supporters. The Democrat attempted to point out how, for all their talk about limited government, many Republicans are fine spending loads of government money on border security.
“Let me give you an example, the kind of money we’ve poured in,” he said. “So the most dangerous — sorry, the safest city in America is El Paso, Texas. It happens to be across the border from the most dangerous city in the Americas, which is Juarez. Right?”
“And two of the safest cities in America, two of them are on the border with Mexico,” Garcia continued. “And of course, the reason is we’ve proved that Communism works. If you give everybody a good government job, there’s no crime.”
Read more: https://dailycaller.com/2014/05/21/dem-congressman-weve-proved-that-communism-works/#ixzz32RdhMM24
