By Sumantra Maitra
Thursday, March 12, 2020
Democrat presidential candidate Bernie Sanders says he
wants to transform America into Scandinavia. In a recent town hall, Sanders
argued, like every freshman student after reading a page of “State and
Revolution,” that what happened in the Soviet Union was not “real socialism”
but “authoritarian communism.”
“When we talk about democratic socialism, I’m talking
about Finland, I’m talking about Denmark, I’m talking about Sweden,” Sanders
said. “And communism, whether in Cuba, whether in the Soviet Union … was marked
by totalitarianism, was marked by throwing millions of people into the Gulag.”
This is a trope, a “no true Scotsman” fallacy, that every
socialist uses whenever his examples inevitably crash and burn. Remember that
both Sanders and U.S. Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn once considered
Venezuela under Hugo Chavez a socialist paradise and an exemplar of
socioeconomic success, a claim they try to distance themselves from these days.
This idea that socialism never turns authoritarian, or
can be without eventual authoritarianism, is ridiculous. What exactly would a
socialist do in power when the people and the majority of the states oppose his
harebrained, unnatural utopian schemes? He or she will try to force it in
through executive actions. That in itself is authoritarianism, even in a
smiley-badgey version.
The reason it is unlikely there will ever be communism in
the United States is not due to the benevolence of our leftist leaders, who are
as power-hungry as their brethren across the globe, but because the U.S. Constitution
secures gun rights, which makes it impossible to ram through state-supported
totalitarian actions. That is why socialists try to bring about their policies
through a combination of judicial fiat (immigration, abortion) to outright
hysteria (green economics, guns).
But that is not the full story. As someone who resides in
Europe, it always baffles me that American liberals and socialists consider
Scandinavia the best-case scenario. The socialists claim it is the place where
socialism is perfected, even though the Scandinavians themselves refuse to be
called socialists. Remember the famous quip by
the Danish prime minister in reply to Sanders: “Denmark is far from a
socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.”
Liberals try to use Scandinavia as an example of a market
economy that is also an expansive welfare state, the kind they want to
replicate in the United States. But how good are the actual records? Can the
United States have Danish health care without having Danish
immigration restrictionism under a center-left U.S. government?
With Sanders as president, there would be no immigration
restriction even during a pandemic. Bernie wants Scandinavian health care, and
has given Finland as an example. Yet the Finnish
government collapsed for not being able to bear the cost of increasing
health care. And Finland is only a country of a few millions. Consider the
fiscal effect in a country, like the United States, of more than 300 million.
Sweden is considered the crown jewel of Scandinavian
societies. The Swedish government doesn’t allow for keeping crime statistics by
ethnicity (especially Middle Eastern migrants), lest right-wingers point out
the results. This is how benevolence in motives easily results in soft
totalitarianism and governmental censorship.
What is the result? Sweden is undergoing some of the
harshest crime, bombing, and gang-war waves in its history, mostly orchestrated
by Middle-Eastern gangs. Everyone knows, but they are powerless to say or do
anything because of political correctness. Swedish
police are accused of regularly covering up sexual assaults by mostly
Afghan refugees, as our liberal academics write paens touting Swedish feminist
foreign policy and their desire to incorporate that in the United States and
Great Britain.
Scandinavian
ads are so full of self-hatred that they claim nothing is ever truly
Scandinavian, before being pulled off YouTube due to public backlash.
Scandinavian politicians hate masculinity, and are quite open about it. Swedish gender studies scholars want to
boycott U.S. academic conferences due to Donald Trump’s election, even when
American taxpayers pay for European security. Most Scandinavian social sciences are a joke.
It is one of the stupidest ideas to assume that
totalitarianism needs jackboots. It doesn’t. In fact, some of the worst
totalitarians are the benevolent and maternalistic ones who just want to “make
sure you are good,” not free. One can argue that part of the reason
post-modernists and Euro-communists hate the Soviet Union is that even although
they aimed at similar egalitarian goals and virulent anti-traditionalism, the
Soviets were too authoritarian and hetero-patriarchal, and therefore too
masculine.
But just because they hate the Soviet Union doesn’t make
them liberal heroes. Scandinavian society is anything but truly liberal and
individualist. No society can be when taxes are sky high, the entire country is
geared towards equality, regardless of talent and merit, and social goals are
more important than pesky, utopia-ruining crime statistics.
Scandinavia boasts effete and feminized societies where
masculine traits like ambition are discouraged in favour of communitarianism.
The Scandinavian concept of JanteLoven actively discourages individualism,
private rights, social flaunting, and ambition.
Things like this are why there will never be a Tony Stark
or Gordon Gekko anywhere in Scandinavia. Nor will there ever be technological
advancement, economic might, and military prowess unparalleled in human
history. Whatever egalitarian and repressed social system that is, classic
Anglo-American freedom it is not.
I remember talking with a Scandinavian girl immediately
after Brexit. She was simply incapable of understanding why on Earth the United
Kingdom would pull up the drawbridge. After some fruitless waste of time, I
thought it must be cultural.
See, the English language, the right to property, and the
Magna Carta all embody a certain middle-finger-flipping spirit. The English
flipped the middle finger to European communitarianism and social discipline
for centuries, preferring entrepreneurial societies and individual freedom. The
Americans in turn flipped their fingers to the English. The English finally
managed to flip the bird again to the European Union.
This is because freedom and the ambition to grow
individually are cherished cultural traits, the world’s opinion be damned.
Forced egalitarianism is anti-nature, and it always turns to enforced equality
at the cost of personal ambition, innovation, and individualism.
It doesn’t matter who, the liberals or the socialists,
wants to portray Scandinavia as a utopian paradise. Flocks of people are not
leaving the United Kingdom or United States to migrate to Scandinavia, or for
that matter anywhere else in the world. It’s always the other way around.
There is no glory or happiness in being one of the many
thousands of Unknown Citizens
in a utopia. One should rather be free.
No comments:
Post a Comment