Opinion

CNN, millennials think socialism is cool, forgets history

Alex Berezow, opinion columnist for USA Today, penned what many of us who served against the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) already knew — that American millennials say they would rather live in a socialist or communist country than a capitalist democracy, but forget what “Socialism really is.”

Berezow said that it is frustrating to him that many Americans are ignorant of the crimes of socialist and communist movements and that his grandparents from the USSR would disagree.

Berezow wrote:

My grandmother grew up in Ukraine, which was then a part of the USSR — the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. After waking each morning, she checked to see if any of her family members died during the night. Many of her compatriots were already dead because Joseph Stalin, the Soviet leader, implemented a mass starvation program.

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Known as the “Holodomor,” the goal of the policy was to starve Ukrainians into submission. It worked as intended: Stalin murdered perhaps four million Ukrainians. (For this reason and others, Ukrainians are a bit prickly when asked if their accent is Russian.)

My grandmother only escaped this torture when she, along with the Russian man who would become my grandfather, were kidnapped by the Nazis and taken to Germany as slave labor. Thus, they stopped living the Soviet Socialist dream and began experiencing the National Socialist dream, instead.

‘It is frustrating to me that many Americans are ignorant of the crimes of socialist and communist movements.’

I was reminded of all this last month when CNN celebrated Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday with a tweet that claimed the civil rights hero “was a socialist before it was cool.” There are two substantial problems with this.

First, The Most Trusted Name in News is on historically dubious ground. Dr. King was a brilliant theologian but not an expert in political economy. His writings on the topic are contradictory. On the one hand, Dr. King wrote, “I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic”; on the other hand, he had a visceral hatred of communism, which he called “fundamentally incompatible” with Christianity in his book Strength to Love.

Second, what exactly is cool about socialism?

After the war, my grandparents understandably resisted going back to the USSR, especially since Stalin had issued Order 270, which declared Soviet prisoners of war “traitors” who should be sent to gulags. Though my grandparents weren’t soldiers, they decided that it would be wise not to find out if the policy applied to civilians. So, they pretended to be Polish and came to America. At the time, the U.S. was gladly accepting refugees from “s—hole countries.”

It is frustrating to me that many Americans are ignorant of this history. While the crimes of the Nazis are well known, the crimes of the Soviets are not.

That explains how (likely a social media intern at) CNN can tweet about how cool socialism is. It also explains how one Buzzfeed editor wished for “full communism” for Christmas, and another Buzzfeed reporter dismissed the victims of communism as a “white nationalist talking point.”

These repulsive sentiments are surprisingly common. Indeed, it is still fashionable for intellectuals — particularly those in the cozy confines of academia who never had to suffer under it — to praise the virtues of socialism. This white-washed version of history is a moral blind spot that is the Left’s equivalent of Holocaust denial.

To be fair, I think those who praise socialism do so more out of ignorance than out of malice. But ignorance is not a good excuse. Those who defend socialism today rely on flawed arguments that don’t stand up to scrutiny.

The biggest misunderstanding is the notion that socialism (which is good) and communism (which is bad) are not the same thing. That might be true in theory, but it never quite works out that way in practice. It is impossible to separate socialism from communism because the former (an economic system) inevitably leads to the latter (a sociopolitical system). Why? Because centralized economic control only works if citizens have no rights.

Read more at USA Today.

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CLC

Fmr. Sgt, USAF Intelligence, NSA/DOD; Studied Cryptology at Community College of the Air Force

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