Mark America

Soviet Union Part Deux

After witnessing the fall of the Berlin Wall, and indeed, the collapse of the entire border frontier between East and West firsthand near the end of my military service, I thought those days marked the final death-knell of communism around the world.  In more than two decades since those days of hope, as it seemed the globe might begin to abandon the plots and schemes of the central planners, what I witnessed is that rather than take the hard-learned lessons forward with us from then until now, we’ve forgotten them.  Discredited and defeated, communism should have been dead, but it’s not gone away after all.  In the last several years, it has made a resurgence, as the generational memories of the terror it brought upon the globe fade, and younger generations fall prey to the song of the socialist sirens.  With communism and its more socially acceptable forms, “socialism” and “progressivism” making a comeback, it should be a surprise to read that the French Prime Minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, announces in spittle-laden bellicosity that the rich fleeing France for Belgium to escape the high taxes should be considered less than patriotic.  Reading the translation of his remarks, one can only wonder how long it will be before France, like the Soviet Union before it, erects walls to prevent its most successful people, or even people seeking simple freedom from leaving.

When one reads of remarks like this, when armed with even a modicum of historical understanding, one must recognize the frightening threat of a return to the darkest days our world has yet known.  How far from Prime Minister Ayrault’s thinking are the gulags and concentration camps?  Certainly, he’s not proposed such a thing…yet.  Still, in the manner of his speaking, one can see the manifestation of the same old demons being raised up, under the same old guise, and with the same ugly motive. Perhaps worst of all, in castigating those wealthy people leaving France, among them notably the famed French actor Gerard Dépardieu, Ayrault’s accusation is that the wealthy who flee are suffering from a lack of generosity.  This is quite obviously a sick attempt at reversing the guilt onto the innocent, but it’s no surprise from a government now headed by President Francois Hollande, who declared infamously that he didn’t “like the rich.”  The reeking pomposity of socialist dictators-in-waiting has never known more hypocrisy.

In our own country, Barack Obama is continuing that same trend, and the long-time leftist slogan “Eat the Rich” seems near to being implemented in full.  At the rate things are progressing toward a complete worker’s paradise here in the United States, it’s only a matter of time before he decides we need a border fence after all, not to keep illegals out, but to make sure that none may leave. As the Europeans continue to build their coming continental concentration camp, from which only the powerful like Hollande and Ayrault will be afforded the chance to flee, Obama is building another right here, and he’s feeding the lap-dog press the same deceptive and hypocritical banter about the rich, as his family enjoys a multi-million dollar holiday in the state of his [alleged] birth. (Like most Marxists, I suspect he was actually hatched.)

How long will it be before we see the return of the barbed wire and fortifications, complete with machine gun nests, not to defend a country, but to keep its enslaved people from leaving?  With the spreading, grotesque mindset of communism once again spreading like black mold on a too-long neglected basement wall, it seems history is poised to once again repeat itself, because while a people may learn a given lesson by living it, they do a poor job of conveying those lessons to their children.  Worse, they pay for their children to be indoctrinated by the very mindset they overcame, and more is the pity and travesty that the education establishment will  have served not as the instrument of our protection, but the weapon by which the communist sappers undermined our cultural and intellectual fortifications.

You might have come to think it is an exaggeration to suggest that those now in power in France could build a wall, but one ought to consider the words of some of their politicians, as quote in the Telegraph:

“Socialist MP Yann Galut called for the actor to be “stripped of his nationality” if he failed to pay his dues in his mother country, saying the law should be changed to enable such a punishment.”

The idea that a politician is seeking to punish people in this way is not a novelty, but it isn’t lost on most conservatives that the underlying meaning is purely tyrannical.  Meanwhile, another government official had this to say:

“Benoît Hamon, the consumption minister, said the move amounted to giving France “the finger” and was “anti-patriotic”.”

Setting aside the fact of this man’s preposterous title, one must wonder at the sheer idiocy of a country that revels in revolution but cannot rise even to defend its own borders.  Being partly of French heritage, I can’t but imagine that my ancestors who came to North America sought the freedoms their countrymen now forsake, and I am mightily grateful that they saw fit to do so, but I am simultaneously disgusted at the fact that so many of their descendants now seem willing to forsake liberty here.  Communism isn’t dead after all, but tempting us to believe it permitted them to make inroads, and I don’t know if they can be stopped.

With darkness and depression enveloping the globe, it is time to remember the wall between East and West, because we may yet see its resurrection on a global scale.  It’s also time to reconsider whether we should have let so much of the wall be destroyed.  Demolishing it meant that the visible scar upon the face of civilization has been removed, and while the wall itself may have gone for a time, the mindset that had built it now thrives around the globe.  If we are to dismantle communism again, it must not be its mere instruments that we remove, but its entire philosophical base. It must be placed and kept on ice like a virus stored as a hedge against the need to redevelop new vaccines in case of a new outbreak.