I defy you to point to a single sentence written by Marx or Lenin complaining about corporate jet owners, or a single sentence uttered by Obama demanding that the kulaks pay their “fair share” of the harvest.
Thanks to reader Rich who writes:
I saw this pair of messages on a car parked next to mine at a restaurant in Melbourne Florida, very near Patrick AFB. Anti-Obama sentiment runs strong around here.
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Comments
I thought Obama was really just a very confused Maoist without the idealism, nationalism, internal consistency and common sense…
My grandfather was one of those kulaks. The third time he was hauled up in front of a firing squad for “hoarding wheat”, and then let go with a “warning”, he escaped to Germany and his family followed, with much travail. Within 18 months he realized the futility of establishing himself in Germany at that time and moved his family to America. Date – 1923. Started over at 40, in a new country, new language, with only his brains and brawn. Died a pillar of his church and community with 11 grandchildren who all are college educated and productive.
My grandfather warned, in the 50’s, that he saw signs of the US going the way of Russia. He urged his children to read, to learn and be prepared. I think of him often these days.
I can’t find those (especially not “corporate jets” They didn’t exist then). But I found this from Stalin:
“America is like a healthy body and its resistance is threefold: its patriotism, its morality, and its spiritual life. If we can undermine these three areas, America will collapse from within.” (Quotes Daddy)
And this from Mao:
“I do not agree with the view that to be moral, the motive of one’s action has to be benefiting others. People like me want to satisfy our hearts to the full, and in doing so we automatically have the most valuable moral codes.” (Thinkexist.com)
Not quite the same as “corporate jets” and “fair share” but reflect similar Marxist sentiment as Obama. The actual reality of Marxism; not theory, but how these avowed Marxists lived it.
I don’t necessarily think those bumper stickers reach too far.
Obama has certainly identified himself with Marxists, as this quote from his book “Dreams from my Father” shows.
“To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists.”
It could be that he changed his views since that time, but we don’t know that. It would be nice if someone would ask him when he rejected Marxism.
I find it interesting that this quote shows no actual belief in anything. It shows that his primary goal is to avoid being “mistaken for a sellout”. Thus his actions are genrated by a fundamental fear of being taken for someone who is helping “the enemy”. There is no principaled choice involved and the definition of “the enemy” is the fad of the day stated by the group that he is desparate to join.
Had his professors been conservatives, he would be screaming that he is a member of the TEA Party. This shows why his definition of “compromise” is that the other side must give in to him. He cannot understand that anyone would have a moral choice or would stand by principals and ethics.
Obama is far to the Left of Marx.
Marx believed that the profits of industry should be distributed to the labourers rather than the entrepreneurs. This fails every time its tried because there’s no point being an entrepreneur in a socialist state.
Obama, on the other hand, believes that we should tax the wages of our labourers and redistribute them to those that don’t work at all. This we are currently doing in excess of $2 Trillion per year. If you don’t understand why this will fail, then you are a Liberal.
Many unfortunately forget that there was a relatively lengthy period of time leading up to Joseph Stalin’s boldest, out-and-out open class warfare pronouncements, culminating in early 1930 with the unleashing of his full bore “dekulakization” program. During the decade in which he was consolidating It didn’t just “emerge” one fine day. In the process of consolidating his power, he first took on the left in the communist party, and then the right. For a period of time in the 1920s lip service was even paid to a role for market forces in the agricultural sector by the communists.
But ultimately, his “crash collectivization,” or “socialization” of the countryside, was based on the profoundly false premise that agricultural collectives would be able to produce more food . . . to feed the urban masses who were industrializing the Soviet Union economy. History, they rationalized, literally demanded it.
Of course during that period, the question was frequently raised, “Who is a Kulak?” Much like defining the elusive class enemy of “progressives” today — the rich — definitions and characteristics change rather frequently, so it was a hard question to pin down. As one persistent story has it, Stalin reportedly mused at one point that the answer to the elusive question was simple: “Who are the Kulaks? They are those who oppose us.”
Willie Sutton said that he robbed banks because that’s where the money was. Joseph Stalin robbed the Ukraine of years of grain harvests because that was where the wheat was. The Ukraine was and is the breadbasket of Eastern Europe. And in the process of first killing and/or forcibly exiling the kulaks, and then implementing a plan for setting unreasonably high quota production requirements for the Ukraine, resulting in all of the harvest being shipped to Russia and other Soviet republics, the result was the mass starvation of the Ukrainian people. He and his communist party thereby committed one of the worst genocidal crimes of of modern times.
Reading only a few pages of Robert Conquests’s “Harvest of Sorrow” would lead anyone other than the most hard-headed and idiotic of “progressives” to understand the dangers and the potential consequences of engaging in open class warfare, and how even minor justifications quickly filled the heads of the Soviet communists with a sense of entitlement, regardless of how obvious such justifications would eventually lead to commission of those horrendous crimes.