Oh, me! Oh, my! What do I spy?
Contributor to The Voice, Bela Suhayda, apparently still hasn’t read the definitions of “communism” and “socialism” yet. He still wallows in capitalist propaganda.
There’s a saying in Illinois (courtesy of former president Barack Obama): “You can put lipstick on a pig, it’s still a pig.”
•Some history: August 30, 1918, Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, was the victim of an assassination attempt. He survived two bullet wounds. The bullets were never removed which could have caused his serious cognitive disability. Had Lenin been in his right mind, he never would have named Josef Stalin as his successor upon his death. He would have chosen the likes of Leon Trotsky, the head of the Red Army. When Lenin died in 1924, Stalin began his reign of terror by purging the Bolshevik Party of real socialists and replacing Lenin’s followers with his favorites. Hundreds of thousands were sent to the concentration camps in Siberia; and, on Stalin’s orders, Leon Trotsky was assassinated August 21, 1940.
•A personal note: The woman who taught me how to speak Russian when I matriculated at Aurora College (now Aurora University), Dr. Vanda Sruoga, was a Lithuanian victim of Stalin’s purge. She and her husband were high school teachers and, as such, were labeled as “enemies of the State” and sent to one of those camps. Mr. Sruoga died there but his wife survived and was repatriated to the Soviet Republic of Lithuania upon the death of Stalin in 1953. Like the Suhaydas, she fled to America the first chance she got and eventually joined the teaching staff at A.C. She never dabbled in politics, however, but concentrated on her teaching duties.
•Suhayda’s chief gripe, it appears, is two-fold. First, he claims a socialist government will take away a person’s property and use it to further its own use. Second, a socialist government will take away a rich person’s money which he has “earned” and give it to the poor who hasn’t earned anything. Right on both counts, but – wait!
•Some more history: Prior to the arrival of Europeans to the Americas, there was no such thing as “private property.” The indigenous population settled down where there was a plentiful supply of food and water and became hunter/gatherers. No one “owned” anything; what they did was done for the common good.
Then the white people came with their notion of private property. They “bought” some land from friendly Indians who bargained honestly; after all, there was plenty of land available for small communities like their own. But the white people increased their numbers, and soon they began to take land without bargaining for it. The indigenous population became outcasts and were herded onto concentration camps – uh, reservations. Eventually, the white people began arguing amongst themselves over who owned what. That’s when government stepped in and introduced the concept of deeds and property taxes.
In 1840, the French philosopher, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, published a book anarchistically titled Property Is Theft. In it, he posited that the concept of private-property ownership led capitalists to the taking of wealth from labor which actually created it. The state, he said, existed only to protect these unequal property “rights” from “violence” by labor.
To be continued.