Opinion by Allan McNew
It’s election season again with opinion letter writers to the editor arguing over what is or isn’t socialism while shouting over one another and questioning the other’s intelligence.
An old saying: “If you want someone to think you’re wise, agree with them.”
Politics is about power. Those who seek power, regardless of the political label one runs under, can be divided into two groups, those who want to tell everyone else what to do and those who want to be left alone.
Unclothed Communism and fascism are pretty much the same thing regardless of who “owns” the means of production, the oligarchy dictates what will be produced and how. Fascism tends to place more of an emphasis on race than communism, but that depends on local flavors. The early 20th century Italian fascists didn’t chase Jews around like the German fascists did. Fascism tends to be nationalistic, while communism is roughly divided between the Stalinist and the Trotskyist views of socialism in one country at the time and under the circumstances versus socialism taking the world by storm all at once.
The concepts of socialism and communism were the same to Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and so on and so forth, others in the socialist fold describe socialism as the precursor to communism. The leaders of socialist movements study the works of Marx, Lenin, Gramsci and Mao, among others.
“Capitalism” is a label coined by Marx according to his interpretation of economics, just as “The Wealth of Nations” by Adam Smith was another interpretation.
Maoist communism in China was an abject failure, marked by famines, poverty, backwardness and under capitalization. There might presently be lip service honoring Mao and the communist ideological ancestry, but the Chinese government has moved on to crony capitalism saddled to fascist mercantilism.
The Soviet Union was a failure too, and when it fell it became an oligarchic kleptocracy riddled with corruption and crony capitalism.
It seems to me that elitists and true believers who travel under the Democratic Party label strive to dictate to the common folk as to how the most intimate and insignificant details of their lives will be conducted while the party is obsessed with race. The Democrat Party has been obsessed with race ever since Republicans freed their slaves 150 some years ago.
Originally it was anti-black, then it was about civil rights and now when most everyone seems to be getting along better than ever, it’s blanket condemnation of whites as being congenitally disposed to oppressive bigotry, can’t help themselves – making the description itself racist bigotry.
The Democrat Party also seeks to have unfettered control over the means of production, which, combined with minute control of society and obsession with race, suggests fascism.
But, some of the current topics of debate:
“The economy is good and inflation is down.” Nice try at gaslighting the subject. Everyone knows what the price of groceries, gas and other commodities were and what income could buy on the last inauguration day of Jan 20. 2020 and now, three years later. The spin on inflation is that currently the rate of inflation is down. However, the fact is inflated prices are here to stay and continue to rise and income isn’t keeping up.
“Employment is up.” The refilling of jobs rendered vacant by the response to covid isn’t some great harbinger of accomplishment, and people who are uncounted as unemployed by exhausting unemployment benefits and those who have given up seeking employment doesn’t suggest that employment is “up.”
Illegal immigration. Kids are no longer being held in the Obama cages (that’s when they were built and first utilized), they are now being sex trafficked for prostitution by the cartels. And, people wouldn’t be drowning in the Rio Grande or dying by being abandoned by cartel polleros in the desert if the border was shut tight, like it nearly was under Trump. Biden rescinded everything Trump did to secure the border, and his directing the Border Patrol to remove constantine wire placed by Texas to inhibit border crossings shows that despite every excuse Biden comes up with concerning the border, he wants it wide open.