After the Show - Part II - Granite Grok

After the Show – Part II

Bernie Is My ComradeAgain, we are absolutely amazed and disheartened that socialism has made such a return to American politics – it is the antithesis of what the Founders stood for.  I’ve gone over why I believe it has over and over again, so I’m not going to do it here.  Instead, we mentioned on last Saturday’s show (ok, I started it) that we’ve had some of our friends on GrokTALK! (and its predecessor, Meet The New Press) that grew up and lived under Communist rule – they are aghast at what is happening.  Before, it was the inch by inch model in slouching towards Socialism – and now with the Republicans joining in and Bernie and Hillary promising to enact policies that put Government in charge of everything, what the heck is the difference?

I had come across this and tried to mention it on the show – badly.  So here’s the part that caught my eye (reformatted, emphasis mine):

SOVIET IMMIGRANTS TO SANDERS SUPPORTERS: “HAVE YOU EVER LIVED UNDER A REVOLUTION?”

  • Janna Sundeyeva still remembers life in the Soviet Union, where stores in remote regions would lack meat for months at a time and toilet paper had to be snatched up quickly on the rare occasions it appeared.

“I don’t like big government,” Sundeyeva said. She made two circles with her thumbs and forefingers and pressed them against each other so they touched, like binoculars. This Venn diagram represents the interests of people and government, she said. “They don’t have very much in common.” To Sundeyeva, left-wingers seem to yearn for a workers’ revolution. “I would ask them: Have you ever lived under a revolution?” she said. “Do you know what it’s like? When someone comes and takes your family member in the night?”

  • One hundred years after the Bolshevik Revolution swept Communists into power, some Russians in America say they can’t believe a serious candidate in the United States is calling himself a socialist.  As another Russian émigré, Tatiana Menaker, put it, “We feel like we survived a plague, and now we are seeing people with boils on their skin.”…According to preliminary data from a survey being conducted by Sam Kliger, director of Russian-Jewish Community Affairs at the American Jewish Committee, between 60 and 70 percent of Russian-speaking Jews will vote Republican in this election. About that same percentage of American Jews backed Barack Obama in 2012.

They have experienced socialism and communism in a totalitarian regime,” Kliger said. “Anything that remotely resembles that, they hate it, they despise it.”

  • Socialism is a conspiracy of losers against achievers,” Menaker said. “America is the only country where you can come naked with no language and make it in 25 years.”  I suggested to Menaker’s guests that even the most extreme of Sanders’ proposals—to make America resemble a Scandinavian country—is not quite as radical workers rising up to seize the means of production.

The Russians didn’t buy it. There’s no need for America to become more like Finland or France, they said. “They think Finland is just America with free medical care. Finland is good for people who are on welfare for a long time,” Nadia Shkolnikov said. “Not if you want to rise up.”

Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” .  Given what I have seen in this election, and if either Bernie or Hillary win, we will be repeating it for THEY have not learned from, not the past history, but from their life’s history.

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