By Peter Fernandez

For a new and improved class conscious,  hipper America,  socialism has always been  an alternative socio-economic theory promoted mostly by curly-haired politicians who protest neckties, and pony-tailed  academics with life-long subscriptions to Mother Jones, who seduce impressionable pupils into the alt-left bed.  And, now that Biden is our president-elect, he may well become socialism’s malleable puppetoon manipulated by the Bernies, the Pelosis, the Omars, as the Democrat Party’s media marketing partners, MSNBC and CNN.  Senator Sanders has already formed a unity policy plan with the president-elect, telling NBC News that Biden “will be the most liberal president since FDR.”

Democracy, a time-proven work-in-progress, has always worked better than socialism. But now that it has become  normalized to define the USA  as a  tottering 200 year old,  drooling, long-in-the-tooth, hoary-headed racist, who made his bourgeois bones  upon the shoulders of  racism and slavery,  we the unwashed white privileged may have to worship before “a shrine to an obscene deity,” PC Socialism.

This cock-eyed reality begs the question, “What is socialism?”  Socialism is an economic ideology that promotes the basic needs of the entire society, but not the individual.  Communism?  The same thing, but on a potentially much larger genocidal scale.  Socialists and communists argue their ideologies are strictly economic, but it has been proven through real history, not revisionist people’s propaganda kind of history, that it is much more.

According to http://www.thefreemanonline,  “The followers of Marxism call socialism the first phase of communism, which begins after the transitional stage from capitalism  to communism: the transitional stage starts with the seizure of political power and ends with the destruction of private ownership of the primary means of production with the transition to a state-planned economy.”  

President Trump won Florida in  this  November’s election, where 20% of the population is Latino. He also won Texas whose Hispanic population will be the largest single ethnic group in that state in two years. Many hail from  Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, where socialism was not  the promised utopian paradise as they were told it would be, but a grim and traumatic experience.

In 1963, my primos, or relatives, in Cuba were forced to leave for Vermont under threat of imprisonment or murder by Castro’s henchmen. Their homes, bank accounts and sugar plantation were stolen and given to “The People.” But that’s communism, you say. Yes, the ultimate form of socialism. 

Sure, socialism can work with capitalism, as in Armenia, Iceland, Sweden, Northern Ireland and Serbia. But only with exorbitant high taxes for all of the free stuff. What about Nicaragua and Venezuela? They are corrupt populist dictatorships based upon communism.

Upon reading Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto you may be underwhelmed by its didactic, dogmatic, drama-queen narrative. Or you may be reminded of Adolph Hitler’s chilling Mein Kampf, as I was, but minus the antisemitism. Marx and Engels, not to be confused with Cheech & Chong, sum up our entire economic-working universe in gross generalities and hyperbole: “By Bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage-labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage-laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.” The Communist Manifesto is seductive as well as sedating, but that has nothing to do with why Marx stated, “Religion is the opiate of the masses.”          

According to Lee Edwards, PH.D., a distinguished Fellow in Conservative Thought, “Socialism is no longer a parlor game for academics but a political alternative taken seriously by millennials.  They don’t recognize that much of what they enjoy in life is a result of capitalism and would disappear if socialism were to be implemented. This is the reality of socialism-a pseudo-religion grounded in pseudo-science and enforced by political tyranny.”

Regarding religion, Aldous Huxley suggested that atheists are more susceptible to socialism and communism “to satisfy their hunger for meaning.”  The number of religious adherents, let’s say to Judaism, Islam and Christianity, who support socialism is staggeringly less than the atheist or secularist who do.  Also, most socialists do not endorse most of the positions that churches take on political issues.  

“For many older Americans who recall The Soviet Union, socialism is taken in that negative context,” says Hadley Heath Manning, a millennial and policy director for the Independent Women’s Forum. She also stated that “younger Americans, on the other hand, relate to socialism to a generous welfare state that provides education and health care.”

George Barna, a researcher/pollster at Texas Christian University questions if socialism is just a lazier approach to life. “When somebody comes along and says, ‘We’ll take care of you, you just trust us, and we’re going to give you what you need to live the kind of life you want to live, people trust that without digging deep and finding out socialism hasn’t worked anywhere.”

Huxley also wrote that he and many of his colleagues saw atheism’s amorality as an “instrument of liberation” as it permitted them to become sexually radicalized hedonists who embraced socialism. He also explained that atheists are more likely to accept socialism or communism as a sub-stitute for faith.

In conclusion, here are some statistics gathered by the six authors who penned Europe’s Best-selling The Black Book of Communism. People murdered:

• USSR — 20 million
• China — 65 million
• Vietnam — 1 million
• North Korea — 2 million
• Cambodia — 2 million
• Eastern Europe — 1 million
• Latin America — 150,000
• Africa — 1.7 million
• Afghanistan — 1.5 million

“The difference between the visions of Karl Marx and George Washington,” wrote Edwards, “aside from the question of human nature, is that in Marx’s socialist world there is a dictatorship of the Communist Party, while in a liberal democracy like the United States, ‘We the People’ tell the government what to do, the government does not tell the people what to do.”

Peter Fernandez is a Northfield, VT resident and author of children’s books. This is his third column for Vermont Daily.