Most of us can visualize “wolf in sheep clothing”: a wolf somehow draped with a sheepskin to conceal his real identity, with the intent of sneaking up on the unwary flock in order to enjoy a sheep dinner. In a similar manner, one would think that most of us could visualize “Communist in Capitalist Clothing” and also understand the Communist’s motive. But in practice, it appears that many of us humans remain clueless as the predator systematically absconds with our life, liberty and happiness.
One of the current reasons for our lack of vigilance is the success of those who have worked diligently to reinvent definitions of Pragmatism, Liberalism, Marxism, Socialism and Communism to make them more ambiguous and confusing. I know a person who seems to actually understand the minute differences between those approaches to governing; once he volunteered that the label “Marxist” for a politician frequently should be, more accurately, “Marxist – Leninist”. Although I respect those who have managed to learn these small details, I suspect that most of us don’t see two cents worth of difference across the whole lot. Collectively, all of those labels refer to a form of government that is all about “coerce and control”, with abhorrence of even a small decision being made outside of the government.
Socialism, the blanket term, was an inadvertent side effect of the industrial revolution, the greatest improvement ever in the lives of ordinary people. As the standard of living rapidly and dramatically improved in the industrializing western nations, people naturally looked back at the progress they had made from their feudal subsistence past. As always, after things have gotten better, this retrospection generated anger at those undefinable forces or people considered responsible for that miserable past. This angst was the catalyst for vast numbers of people to fall prey to Marxist propaganda, believing in its fairy-tale vision, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”.
At Thanksgiving time in the U.S. we should remember the earliest experience with failed Socialism in the new world. The Plymouth Colony began with what we call Socialism today, only to watch it progressively fail to the point where the colony was in serious danger of starvation and extinction. Governor Bradford, in a brave act of political leadership, mandated a return to the form of economic activity familiar to the colonists—what we call Capitalism now (and it worked so well that Bradford declared a holiday after a fall harvest “to give thanks…”). The colonists literally learned, or relearned, that there’s no such thing as a free lunch.
But is the U. S. at present meekly acquiescing as a pack of Communists in Capitalist clothing pull our country down into the same black hole that Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain are currently spiraling into? No Socialist government in history has ever survived even a third as long as that of the United States. Are we going to cheer our entrance into Socialism and bankruptcy at the same time? Will we continue to idolize and support the chief wolf in sheep’s clothing, gorged with his easy plunder already and still agitating the pack to binge on everything, down to the last remaining morsel of the flock that used to be the United States of America?
Will we wake up to the same unbelieving morning after the election as have Poland, the United Kingdom, Greece, Italy, and most of the struggling European Union member states? Will we, too, have to learn the unacceptable cost of the free lunch? Is the eventual victory of the President Of The Communists inevitable? Do we have sufficient remaining optimism to believe in the possibility of electing a genuine President Of All The People?
Posted by thedrake01 
