What’s wrong with Socialism? To begin answering that question, one need look no further than the way in which Socialism’s attitude towards individuals within society has oftentimes throughout the political philosophy’s history led to the mass-murder of those people the State saw as interfering with the greater good of society as a whole.
The writer John Rogers once said, “You don’t really understand an antagonist until you understand why he’s a protagonist in his own version of the world.” Regardless the death, destruction, or poverty they leave in their wake, how do Socialists see themselves as the good guys in their version of the world?
Put simply, Socialists view society as one great, big entity, and they view the State as responsible for treating society as a good doctor would treat a sick patient. Never you mind that the supposed cures of Socialism are worse than the diseases they’re meant to remedy.
Socialists see each man, woman, or child as mere cells within the organism of society, pieces of tissue which are as good as dead apart from the whole. This approach gives incredible focus and passion to the Socialists’ efforts, yet this way of perceiving individual human beings is also tragically how the Soviet, Nazi, and Maoist States – to name the three most infamous branches of Socialism – justified the heinous acts of evil they perpetrated against their own people.
Socialists don’t see the trees for the forest, and they don’t sympathize with the individual when the needs or desires of the collective are at stake. Instead they demonize as monstrously selfish the most basic of human ambitions toward self-determination, free speech, and private property, and then proceed to make war on those who pursue these things without the express authorization and oversight of the State.
Given Socialism’s fundamental misapprehension of and hostility toward basic human nature, any country which sees Socialism creeping in should be very much on its guard. As an individual American man who has lived his entire life in the United States of America, whose wife and children and extended family and friends are all individuals who live in this country, I am deeply concerned at the very real prospect of America’s humanity being swept away before my eyes by a tidal wave of Socialism. What sort of nation will my descendants inherit if we cannot turn back this tide? These and similar concerns have inspired me to write what you are reading now.
Socialism In America
Socialism is here in America, and it has been for quite some time. Socialism is, after all, the real heart of the Democratic Party. This fact became increasingly apparent to me as I watched the Democratic candidates for President debating the issues at the beginning of the primary season leading up to the 2016 election. The question in the early debates especially was not whether the State is the solution to all the problems of society and of the world; that was a foregone conclusion. Rather the debate was over how quickly and transparently America should become a Socialist nation and tackle these national and international problems as such.
Read the history of America’s Democratic Party and you’ll see that Progressives have been more or less trying to conceal their true identity for the better of the past century. Now they’re finally taking the mask off, hoping the objects of their affection – American voters – won’t find their real face hideous having come to love and depend on them for a vast array of social welfare programs.
In truth the American public has been like so many frogs in a cook pot of water, the Progressives like so many Fabians turning up the heat gradually so we don’t all jump out of said cook pot. We may now be approaching the point of no return when the frogs are too much cooked to jump out even if they suddenly decide to.
With Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders running for President, advocating outright Socialism in America, a lot of young people are enthralled. They’re “feeling the Bern,” as they say. And who could blame them? Bernie is offering these youth the sun, moon, and stars if they elect him. Free college? An increased minimum wage for unskilled workers? America as a Utopian fatherland or motherland to take over for their real dad and mom once they move out of their basements?
The appeal is both obvious and strong.
Modern American youth know nothing of the history of Socialism or America’s multi-generational struggle against it around the world. And, as hard as it is to believe, these youth care even less than they know. It doesn’t matter one whit to them whether Socialism is a good or bad thing because they’ve been carefully conditioned in the Progressive stronghold of public education and brainwashed by the pervasive influence of Leftist popular culture.
For eight hours a day in classrooms all over America, from Kindergarten through 12th grade at least, the foundation of Progressivism is laid and the framework for Socialist thinking is erected. This is to say nothing of the indoctrination which continues and intensifies in the colleges and universities after 12th grade. And then, after-hours during the school-years and ever-after indefinitely into adulthood, an average of four hours a day of television programming largely written and produced by Progressive Hollywood continues building and maintaining the Progressive mindset. The end result? Today’s youth, thoroughly indoctrinated to care only about themselves and what they want, to ignore any talk of knowable, universal, absolute truth, and to enthusiastically accept the core tenets of Progressive philosophy and of naked Socialism.
Will Socialism say it cares more about these brainwashed youth than does Capitalism or Free Enterprise or the old Republican form of government? Will it require less from them and give them more in return? If so, the youth will love Socialism and accept nothing less than its total victory. Their support for the system is mercenary and ironic in its selfishness despite claims to the selflessness and compassion of Socialism.
Government As Good Doctor, Society As Sick Patient
What’s the harm in cultivating generations of useful idiots if that’s what it takes to treat the ills of society? A good surgeon sedates the patient whenever he can before he picks up the scalpel because it not only lessens the perception of suffering on the part of the patient being operated on, it decreases the risk of making a bad cut when the patient won’t jerk or struggle on the operating table.
Again, Progressives and Democrats – Socialists all – approach governing peoples much like a doctor would approach a sick patient. When their societies have problems, and societies always do because they are full of fallible, imperfect human beings, these problems need to be diagnosed and treated as quickly and comprehensively as possible. That’s where a large and powerful State filled with expert manipulators comes in. And propaganda is used to sedate the masses so they won’t get up from the table and leave the operating room.
Unfortunately, this mindset toward individual men, women, and children within society is why Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong were able to justify in their own minds the mass murder of tens of millions of their own people they regarded as cancerous. In sending innocent men, women, and children to gulags, concentration camps, gas chambers, and firing squads, these three believed they were Great Physicians of State healing their society and removing sick and diseased tissue as necessary. Put simply, they didn’t view what they were doing as evil, but rather believed strongly they were accomplishing a greater good by employing what we see rightly as unspeakable evil. Though we would rightly place them among the most evil men in history, they saw themselves as great heroes rather than villains and were confident history would remember them as such and thank them for their valiant efforts.
Now please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying that modern American Democrats are Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. There were and are significant differences, and I don’t believe in guilt by association. Yet it cannot be ignored that these three men and their political philosophy, similarly to Democrats and Progressives in America today, believed in treating each nation as one giant organism, and treating the individual people within that organism as a doctor would treat pieces of tissue in your body or mine. Where all three of these men rejected the Christian conscience of the God-fearing that would’ve restrained their actions, they were able to perpetrate the most horrendous cruelty on the masses they governed.
It’s essential that we note how individualism is anathema to such men as these. There is only the nation, the people, the body politic. You and I as lone persons are only important to the extent that we make up society. Apart from that we’re viewed as worthless.
In this way, we’re all either so many vegetables or so many weeds, waiting to be plucked for one purpose or the other. The Socialist State will only allow us to remain in the garden so long as we continue ripening and thereby benefit it, or else can go unnoticed by the gardener when he regards us as weeds.
Abortion – Nipping Us In The Bud
It should now be apparent to you if it wasn’t before that this is why abortion is defended as sacred by the Democratic Party in America. Legalized abortion allows for the removal of what such men as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao would have also deemed to be tumorous tissue in the body politic or weeds in the nation’s garden. Abortion is the preferred method of removal, when possible, well before the tumor on society has a chance to metastasize and become cancerous. The weeds must be pulled out by the roots before they can choke out the vegetables, and the sooner this uprooting can be done the better.
Children unwanted before they’re born, after spending their intervening years resented and neglected because they were unwanted, will likely grow up to be unwanted adults. They’ll become angry, worthless people bent on mischief and marked by a distinct lack of productivity. At least that’s how the Progressive Socialists figure. Naturally, the task of removing these burdens from society is much tidier when society is able to rid itself of them as early as possible, before they have a chance to complain about and resist their own extermination. This is why Socialists prefer to nip such people in the bud in their mother’s womb, before they can see the light of day and be met with saving compassion by those in the outside world.
Once again, I am not saying the Democratic Party in America is just like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. Yet when you consider just how many tens of millions of Americans have been murdered by abortion under the supposedly benign watch-care and protection of Progressives and closet Socialists in the Democratic Party of America, how passionately those Democrats defend abortion in America and have been essential to its survival and spread, it may actually be unfair to compare American Democrats to the most notable Nazis and Communists of Germany, China, and the Soviet Union – unfair not because such a comparison is too harsh toward the American Democrats, but rather because it is too lenient.
Yet it all makes perfect sense when the same underlying philosophy and morality is shared by all. If the ends justify the means, if there either is no God or else the State acts as His infallible arbiter on Earth, and if the State is responsible to solve all the ills of society, why shouldn’t the State employ from time to time the mass murder of its own citizens if that’s what is required to accomplish the greater good?
The Greater Good According to National Socialist Germany
No, what motivated the Nazis to perpetrate the Holocaust was not a desire to become as supremely evil as they possibly could, though that’s all too often the overly simplistic way we see them in hindsight so as to avoid even a hint of sympathy for their wickedness. It’s essential that we take note of how strongly the Nazis believed they were accomplishing the greater good through oppression, torture, and murder of millions of individuals. They didn’t see what they were doing as murder of fellow human beings. Those they targeted were first dehumanized and made out to seem like sub-human cancers on the body politic. This dehumanization was both what led to the targeting of those who were murdered en masse in the first place, and also what enabled Nazi Germany to stomach the carnage it perpetrated.
And why did the Nazi State dehumanize these millions of individuals – husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters? What was this greater good the German State believed it was pursuing by eliminating those they had deemed unfit? Quite simply, it had everything to do with genetics and the Socialist tendency to see the government as responsible for solving all the ills of society.
Even the most cursory glance at the history of Nazi Germany will tell you that national pride and Aryan racism were central to the operating philosophy of the German State. Conveniently for the Germans, the Aryan race – their race – had been deemed the most perfect and noble in all of humanity. Racial purity was absolutely of the utmost importance, and anything which watered down or compromised the purity of the Aryan bloodlines was to be seen as nothing less than a direct threat to the German State and People. Both the survival and glory of the entire human race depended, as the Nazis saw it, on racial and ethnic cleansing to put pure-blooded Aryans in control of the world.
Having lived in Southern Ohio for over a decade of my life, right on the edge of Appalachia, I’ve heard more than a few jokes made about people who shouldn’t be allowed to breed. One such quip is that this or that idiot or simpleton “could use a little chlorine in their gene pool.” Now I’ve only ever heard such statements made in jest, mind you, but that way of thinking of people was deadly serious in Nazi Germany. The Nazis not only listened to such talk, they made it their primary mission to see that the gene pool of first Germany, then Europe, then the world would be cleansed.
Though reprehensible in the extreme, none of this is debatable or in question. All of it is absolutely true and you no doubt know it already if you’re even the least bit acquainted with the history of World War II. What might surprise you, however, is learning that the most heinous atrocity by which we know Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany – namely, the Holocaust and the rounding up and mass extermination of 6 million Jews and at least 5 million more “undesirables” by the German State – neither started nor concluded with National Socialist Germany.
From Progressive America to Nazi Germany
The Nazis weren’t alone in seeing purification of the human race by the State as a noble and worthy cause. Many notable American intellectuals and politicians in the decades immediately preceding and during which the Nazis came to power not only fundamentally agreed with the Nazi “final solution to the Jew problem” and other racial issues, you might even say they gave the Nazis the idea.
I’ve personally visited Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. Established in 1890 and still operating today with a current annual budget of $150 million to research neuroscience, cancer, cell biology, genomics, and other such things, the CSHL was the base of the Eugenics Record Office between 1910 and 1939. At that time its primary purpose was collecting data on Americans to prove that “unfit” people came from poor families with little wealth and social standing.
Read the history of eugenics in America, if you’re unfamiliar with it. You will be amazed to learn that the question of how to eliminate poor, disabled, or immoral peoples was in many early 20th century American universities studied, contemplated, argued for, and taught widely and passionately as a problem of either superior or inferior genetics. For those who were deemed unfit, extermination was advocated by some eugenicists, forced sterilization by most if not all. Selective breeding of only the best genetic specimens of humanity was touted as a cure to society’s ills, however that might be achieved.
And compulsory sterilization was not only advocated in the halls of academia, it was actually implemented by government edict here in the United States of America. Thirty-one U.S. states passed eugenics-based compulsory sterilization laws starting in 1907 with Indiana. This made America, not Nazi Germany, the world leader in eugenics as a means of weeding out “defectives.” Indeed a book published by biologist Paul Popenoe in which California’s sterilization efforts were lauded was referenced often by the Nazi government to legitimize its own broad governmental eugenics campaign.
If you find these facts deeply troubling, you’re not alone. When I first stumbled onto this untold history, I wanted to believe that eugenics had perhaps been only privately advocated or implemented behind the scenes and in secret here in America. Unfortunately, further study leaves no doubt as to the reality. Eugenics was not a fringe idea or merely an academic consideration in the United States. Eugenics had major financial backers like the Carnegie Institution, Rockefeller Foundation, and J.H. Kellogg – inventor of the breakfast cereal Corn Flakes. And these backers were not ignorant of the slippery moral slope eugenics would someday lead Nazi Germany down. A 1911 Carnegie Institute report – pithily enough titled “Preliminary Report of the Committee of the Eugenic Section of the American Breeder’s Association to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means for Cutting Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the Human Population” – listed several recommended methods of ridding the gene pool of unfit traits – among those solutions was euthanasia or, put more bluntly, rounding up and exterminating those who had been deemed genetically inferior.
Take even a brief look into the history of eugenics in America to see prominent eugenicist Margaret Sanger – infamous founder of Planned Parenthood – argue to sterilize or otherwise discourage in the strongest possible terms breeding of the mentally ill, physically defective, poor and immoral people because they all would certainly pass along their inferior genes to their children. Though Sanger supposedly did not agree with rounding up and exterminating unfit adults, the organization she founded is now the leading provider of abortions in America, and it would be splitting hairs to argue that Planned Parenthood does not today round up those who have been deemed unfit so they can be exterminated. Not only that, but this same Planned Parenthood is funded directly by the United States government even now to the tune of $500 million a year, even after ample evidence being leaked to the public that its executives have made a practice of profiting from the illegal sale of aborted fetal tissue – literally, butchered babies’ bodies.
Beating Us At Our Own Game
American history was revised after 1945 to distance the eugenics movement which began in America from the atrocities which Hitler’s Germany eventually became known for. Once the harrowing photos, videos, and stories of rail-thin prisoners in concentration camps or desperate claw-marks on the inside walls of gas chambers revealed to the world the depths of the horror perpetrated by the Nazi eugenic extermination campaign, American Progressives were afraid of being shut-down and derided as themselves evil and corrupt. In no way, shape, or form would today’s Planned Parenthood or Democratic Party want to even be compared with Auschwitz, much less held partly responsible for being its inspiration.
Yet books like Edwin Black’s War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race make explicitly clear that the revisionist history is a whitewashing of the facts. An excerpt from Black’s book can be read online at The Guardian in which he quotes Joseph Dejarnette, superintendent of Virginia’s Western State Hospital saying in 1934:
“The Germans are beating us at our own game.”
And what were the Germans beating America at? Nothing less than racial cleansing. Dejarnette’s complaint was made 10 years into implementation of Virginia’s 1924 sterilization law. Note how this superintendent of an American state hospital was not upset that what the Germans were doing was evil. Rather his complaint implied that America was lagging behind and not going as far as it ought in pursuit of what he and many like him had deemed to be an inherently moral cause: curing society’s ills with the power and authority of the State by identifying and eliminating individual defectives – real men, women, and children – like so much cancer in the body or so many weeds in the garden.
What’s Wrong With Socialism?
Admittedly, the aims of Socialism are appealing. What decent person could be opposed to eliminating disease, poverty, and immorality from society? It’s easy to see how the tree of Socialism might be planted in the soil of man’s natural discontentedness with the effects of sin and death on mankind in particular and the Creation as a whole by extension. Yet it bears mentioning once again that the Devil has always been in the details when it comes to which means Socialism is willing to employ to achieve its stated ends.
Marxism, Progressivism, and Nazism are all just different branches from the same rotten trunk, that trunk being Socialism. What, after all, is the “progress” Progressives in America have been pursuing if not a steady march towards more and more Socialism?
Progressives of the Democratic Party in America have been carrying out a revolution in America slowly over decades, though we have had a harder time identifying and opposing their campaign as such. The Progressives have had a slower, more gradual approach to revolution whereas Socialists in Russia, Nazis in Germany, and Maoists in China all had to resort to open and heavy-handed violence against men, women, and children in order to accomplish the immediate and total overthrow of the old political systems of their countries before they could begin realizing their visions of Socialist Utopia.
Whether rapid and overtly violent, or slow and methodical and more manipulative in its methods, the Socialist revolution in America must be stopped. And we’re never going to stop the Progressive agenda of gradual Socialist revolution in America until our efforts are informed by an understanding of Socialism’s fundamental misapprehension of and hostility toward individual men, women, and children behaving as genuine individuals. There are many specific problems with Socialism, yes. But they all both begin and end with a declaration of war against the rights and will and nature of the individual.
What’s wrong with Socialism is the way it takes as a blow against society a private individual owning something which the State cannot control and bend to its will.
What’s wrong with Socialism is the way it feels threatened when an individual boldly communicates an idea, opinion, conviction, or belief which puts them at odds with the agenda of the State.
What’s wrong with Socialism is the way in which the State is deeply troubled when an individual makes choices on their own apart from the consensus of society because Socialists see independence and self-determination as dangerous and chaotic.
Quite simply, what’s wrong with Socialism is that it is a system at war with the individual, seeking to make mankind robotic and subservient to the State even as Socialists insist their vision is the most humane and liberating. The lessons of history from Soviet Russia to Nazi Germany to Maoist China make abundantly clear that the lengths to which Socialists are willing to go in order to achieve their Utopian nationalism or globalism are truly terrifying. In light of this, I absolutely do not want Socialism for America, my homeland. And neither should you.
