By Robert Tracinski
Monday, April 24, 2017
British athlete James Cracknell was recently caught
citing North Korea and Cuba as examples of how to “get a handle on
obesity”—which both regimes have done by starving their people.
Cracknell posted a half-hearted apology, and I don’t want
to be too hard on him, because in all likelihood he is simply not very bright
and just needs to refrain from speaking in public ever again. This is
unfortunate for him, since he has ambitions of running for Parliament.
The problem is that Cracknell has clearly been educated
and lives in an environment where the reasons for starvation in Communist
regimes are considered to be vague and complex and maybe can just be chalked
down to “behavior modification.” Cracking jokes about the Holocaust is a line
not to be crossed, but insensitive offhand references to brutal communist
dictatorships? No big deal.
This sort of thing is not new. As Elizabeth Nolan Brown
points out, by way of The Federalist’s
Bre Payton, there was once a craze about the “Cuban diet,” telling us how
healthy it is to be starved by your government. (I’d like to link you to the
original article, rather than just a screen-shot of it, but it has
not-so-mysteriously disappeared from the Web.)
If you want to find another country that is really doing
something about obesity, you can look to Venezuela, which is providing a
wonderful model for involuntary weight loss.
But a lot of people don’t seem to want to look at
Venezuela, because that would be uncomfortable. A few years back, a lot of them
were praising Venezuela as a model of socialism, the same way they praise Cuba.
Here’s just a small sample: David Sirota in Salon proclaimed Venezuela’s
“economic miracle” thanks to Hugo Chavez’s “full-throated advocacy of
socialism” and “fundamental critique of neoliberal [i.e., free market]
economics.” Left-leaning celebrities traipsed to Caracas to pay their respects.
Bernie Sanders declared just a few years ago that “the American dream is more
apt to be realized in…Venezuela” than here. He concluded by asking, “Who’s the
banana republic now?”
We’re seeing the answer to that. Today, Venezuelans are
starving and the remainders of the Chavez regime are sending gangs of armed
thugs into the streets to attack anyone who protests. And all of the people who
praised the Venezuelan regime as a paragon of socialism? They suddenly don’t
want to talk about it.
This is just the tip of an iceberg of insensitivity,
ignorance, and denial about socialism’s ongoing and historical track record.
The bodies keep piling up, but the ideology that produced those bodies always
gets a free pass. You know what this is? It’s the equivalent of Holocaust
denial for the Left.
There has long been a ritual, which I sincerely hope will
continue, in which young people are required to immerse themselves in the
horrors of the Holocaust. There is no shortage of books and movies and
documentaries and first-hand accounts—really harrowing stuff that keeps you up
at night and gets seared into your brain so you can’t forget it. And that’s the
point. You’re supposed to remember it and have it haunt your nightmares so that
you will never allow it to happen again.
But our culture never did that for the horrors of
socialism, which is how you get a majority of young people having a positive
view of socialism.
What have they missed that they can believe that? Here’s
what they’ve missed: the artificial famine in Ukraine, the Soviet Gulags, the
forced deportation of Lithuanians, the persecution of Christians, China’s Great
Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, the killing fields of Cambodia, North
Korea’s horrific prison camps and famines, the systematic impoverishment of
Cuba, and now Venezuela’s collapse into starvation and mass-murder. All of this
should be absolutely required background knowledge for any educated person.
I didn’t provide links for the second half of those
examples. If you don’t know them, your assignment is to go look them up,
because you’re precisely the sort of person who needs to learn about them.
Now when I cite all of this history, there’s always
someone who insists that it isn’t fair to pin all of these crimes on
“socialism” because those examples weren’t really
socialism. The only “real” socialism is the warm, fuzzy welfare-statism of a
handful of innucuous Western European countries. This is a pretty obvious
version of the No True Scotsman fallacy, and a good way of disavowing
responsibility for the disastrous results of a system you praised just a few
years earlier.
But these crimes follow inevitably from the basic idea
behind socialism: the idea that the good of “society” as a collective is more
important the rights or even the life of the individual. That’s the “social” in
“socialism,” and by throwing out the rights and liberty of the individual, it
serves as a rationalization for an endless amount of carnage. Who cares if this
particular person—or a few million people—suffer, so long as you can claim that
mankind collectively benefits?
Consider the name of the roving thugs who are beating and
killing dissidents in Venezuela right now: they call themselves collectivos. That says it all.
Socialism has been tested out more times and in more
variations than probably any other social system, It has been implemented in
every continent, every culture, every stage of economic development. It has
always led to disaster, to the extent it has been implemented. If you’re lucky,
your country gets off with a mere economic crisis, as in Greece. At the worst,
your country is in for decades of living hell.
This, too, should be seared into our brains so that we
never forget and never repeat it again. Because it hasn’t been, somebody is
always trying to make us repeat it.
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