By David Harsanyi
Tuesday, March 10, 2020
After being hammered for his long history of defending
Communists — specifically for praising Cuba’s “literacy programs” — Democratic
Party presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders is now employing the other age-old,
and equally deceptive, defense of socialism.
At a Fox News Town Hall on Monday, Bernie was asked by a
Russian immigrant and student from the University of Michigan: Could Sanders
assure her that his brand of “democratic socialism” wouldn’t cause the same
kind of harm that socialism always causes?
“What happened and existed in the Soviet Union was not
socialism. It was authoritarian Communism,” Bernie replied, inducing a bunch of
his historically illiterate fans to applaud.
“And Communism,” Bernie goes on, “whether in Cuba,
whether in the Soviet Union or whether in other countries was marked by
totalitarianism, was marked by throwing millions of people into the Gulag.”
The fact that there were varying degrees of socialist
disasters is, of course, inarguable. Israel’s early socialistic experiment
merely kept many people poor, while Russia’s socialism kept many people
starving. Neither worked.
But leftists like Bernie like to act as if socialist
ideology is incompatible with totalitarianism, when the opposite is true. The
nationalization of industry and dispensing with property rights — necessary for
any genuine socialism to occur — can’t be instituted without coercion and a
centralized authoritarian effort. And even if the effort to redistribute
property is first supported by the majority, as soon the state comes for your
stuff — and it always does — the “democratic” part of the equation starts to
dissipate.
Stalin’s five-year plans to collectivize agriculture,
nationalize energy, and industrialize Russia were by definition socialist
ventures. Mao’s Cultural Revolution was undertaken in part to destroy the
entrepreneurship that had emerged when people tried to circumvent the
collectivization of Great Leap Forward, another socialist venture.
So I don’t understand why anyone lets Bernie get away
with describing the market economy of Denmark as “socialist” but places like
the Soviet Union — Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, to be more exact
— as not real socialism. Socialists think they can take credit for a “literacy
program” but ignore Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism, Castroism, Baathism,
Chavezism, the Khmer Rouge, etc. No one else gets to disregard the massive —
sometimes genocidal — failures of their ideology by arguing that, actually, it
had never been instituted correctly. No
one should.
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