The thin line
A thin line exists between the front-running democratic candidate Bernie Sanders’ self-proclaimed socialist policies and the communist policies that entrenched the U.S.S.R during the 20th century. It is a distinction I believe Sanders is educated and experienced enough to make. It is not, however, a distinction I believe young neo-leftist Americans are educated enough, or willing enough, to make.
Therefore my primary concern with a Sanders administration isn’t rooted in the administration at all, but the newly empowered youth who, even now, ignorantly promote radical ideological concepts like class warfare, equality of outcome and religious amoralism.
In their fervor, I can clearly see the specter of the passionate revolutionaries who took control of Russia in 1917. The same revolutionaries who killed, arrested and exiled the nation’s newly freed serfs because they had too many animals on their property; they were religious or simply because they expressed dissatisfaction with their new lives under the communist party.
American education does little justice to the tens of millions who perished under the iron boots of Lenin and Stalin. We explain very little on how this nation, with its rosy progressive idealism, transformed itself into a machination of blood and terror. So, when Bernie Sanders speaks about income equality, and I hear some college kid shout “Eat the rich,” I become worried.
I worry because I do not believe these individuals know where to draw the line when it comes to left-wing extremism. In their youth, at a point in their lives in which they are vulnerable to historical shortsightedness, they have not yet understood that once dependency on the state has been formed, once reliance on the state for food and housing and medicine has been secured, people cease being a commodity to the state. They cease being a free and powerful citizen. They adorn the yoke of chattel and die when the nation dictates.
I’m not saying progressive policies are inherently bad; in fact, quite the opposite. Under a moral power structure social welfare policies can do quite well. They can feed the hungry; heal the sick. We need people to fight for the common person, but it is a fight that must be won properly. If not, progressivism becomes as oppressive as facism.
The thin line which then separates the benefits socialism from the brutalities of communism is found, not in the ideological motive of the political movement, but in the personal motivations of individual representatives of the ideology. Simply put, you and everything you encompass, both good and bad, represent your movement. If you are, under the guise of social progress, seeking blood as payment for the tragic realities of your society, you will drown in it.