On May 3, Roger Moore, the New York Times, and Mary Gabriel of the Los Angeles Times wished Karl Marx a happy 200th birthday, praising him for his wonderful insights into the desirable governmental form, socialism. Now there are two problems with this: One: Marx has been dead for 182 years and is unlikely to be enjoying a happy birthday. Two: His ideas, while idealistic in their hopes, were vastly flawed and simply wrong. The Communist Manifesto that he co-authored with Friedrich Engels became the basis of totalitarian governments which, instead of freeing their people, subjugated them in the worst possible way for decades, with millions slaughtered for disagreeing with the government or simply for being of the wrong ethnicity. I, for one, find nothing to congratulate Marx for, and those who do are ignorant of the lessons that began with the Russian Revolution in the early 1900s and continue until today in countries like Cuba, Venezuela, and North Korea.
I have had some experience with socialism and its father, communism, as have all of my generation who grew up with the threat of nuclear war hanging over our heads. We knew that living conditions in the Soviet Union (the vast empire of Russia and its satellite states), officially known then as the “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,” were grim, that Christianity was pretty much outlawed and that the few Bibles that had not been confiscated were torn page by page and handed out so that each Christian could have some part of God’s Word. We knew that those same pages were hidden on the bottoms of chairs and the back of drawers so that when the KGB, the Secret Police, came hunting, they would not find them and drag the secret Christians off to the Gulags, the prison camps in the frozen tundra of Siberia.
We knew that educated people who might disagree with the government’s socialistic ideas were removed from schools and universities and sent to collective farms to raise sheep and pigs, and that no one worked very hard because there was no incentive, no getting ahead through hard work. You got the same wage, the same food, the same housing no matter what you did.
We understood that only the members of the Communist Party had nice cars, good clothes, summer homes on lakes, and shopped in well-stocked department stores. . . stores which the rest of the population, had they had the money to do so, were not allowed to shop in. They, instead, stood in daily long lines for whatever they needed to buy.
A friend of ours had relatives who, as Germans living in the eastern part of the country, had been caught behind the Iron Curtain at the end of WWII. (East Germany had become a satellite of the Soviet Union along with the countries the Soviets had “freed” from the Nazis. . . Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and others.) These East Germans proudly wrote to their relatives in the U.S. that they had finally saved up enough money to buy a new car and had gone to the dealership to pay for it. They only had to wait the ten years, now, until their name came up on the list and the car that they had paid for would finally become theirs! This kind of situation was normal under socialism because when everything is provided equally (for the non-elites), there is no incentive to work, no way to get ahead, and so the economies grind ahead with painstaking slowness.
What many of us did not know until years later was the extreme atrocities that were carried in the name of socialism in Russian and in China. Georgian historian Roy Aleksandrovich Medvedev published a report in 1989 enumerating the deaths under Stalin’s regime. He cites: 1 million imprisoned or exiled between 1927 to 1929; 9 to 11 million peasants forced off their lands and another 2 to 3 million peasants arrested or exiled in the mass collectivization program; 6 to 7 million killed by an artificial famine in 1932-1934; 1 million exiled from Moscow and Leningrad in 1935; 1 million executed during the ”Great Terror” of 1937-1938; 4 to 6 million dispatched to forced labor camps; 10 to 12 million people forcibly relocated during World War II; and at least 1 million arrested for various “political crimes” from 1946 to 1953. In all he estimates 20 million Russian deaths under the communistic regime.
The numbers in China are even worse. 65 million died there. In other Communistic countries: Vietnam – 1 million; North Korea – 2 million; Cambodia – 2 million; Eastern Europe – 1 million. In the Cuba of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, so loved by the left, an estimated 97,000 people have been executed and another 60,000 died trying to escape Cuba by sea; many of the dead were black Cubans. Cuban interrogators were also sent to North Vietnam during the Vietnam war in order to practice torture on American soldiers who had been captured by the Viet Cong, killing at least one American prisoner of war.
Eventually even those who are at first taken in by the idealism of socialism begin to realize that it stifles their lives and enslaves them, and when they do, they begin to speak out against it. And, of course, the government can not tolerate dissidents, can not tolerate ideas contrary to their professed dogma, so those who dare to object are silenced, much as they are in America now through intimidation and name calling. In a socialistic society, however, intimidation and name calling are passed over for the more efficient imprisonment, torture, and death. That has been a by-product of every socialistic society in history.
Under socialism, there are no homeless and no one without a job because the government provides both, much as Bernie Sanders and others on the left would like to provide every American with a guaranteed job. It sounds wonderful, does it not? And yet the reality is very different. Free college tuition? Yes! But only for those whom the government decides are deserving of college and only to the college that the government chooses for them. Cheap housing for everyone? Yes! But often more than one family in an apartment in shoddy buildings with thin walls and neighbors listening to hear if you say anything critical of the government so they can turn you in for a reward. Jobs for all? Yes! But your job might be cleaning toilets in a public bathroom, or sweeping the gutters with a broom, or slopping pigs at a hog farm. You don’t choose. The government does. Remember the old saying, “He who pays the piper calls the tune.” That is how it is in socialism. If you earn something, whatever you work hard for and earn is yours. you choose. But if it is given to you by the government, they choose what to give and you had better be happy with it!
My experiences with socialism got more personal than what I have discussed here. Czechoslovakia began to slowly open its borders to tourism from the West in the late 1980s in an attempt to boost its failing economy, and my husband and I, excited at the prospect of seeing a Communist country for ourselves, chose to add that twice to our itinerary with students that we took to Europe from our local high school. I missed the first foray into this communist country, having to return home for my father’s funeral in the midst of our European tour. According to my husband, I didn’t miss much. On our second trip, our bus was stopped at the Czech border for an extremely long time while our courier (the European provided by the student travel organization to shepherd us around Europe) had his paperwork closely examined by the border guards. They then entered the bus to carefully look at each American passport, comparing our pictures to our faces. Finally, a guide from the government’s official tourist bureau entered the bus and we were off. The first thing she did was to suggest that we collect American dollars which she would then secretly exchange for us into official Czech currency on the Black Market, giving us a much better exchange rate, she assured us, and no doubt earning her a little extra on the side. We collected the money and that first evening, after escorting us on a walking tour of downtown Prague, she calmly shook hands with my husband and they exchanged money. Right there on the busy street. I spent the rest of our stay waiting for the pounding on our hotel door by the Secret Police, but she had chosen her spot well, and no one ever bothered us.
The hotel was the official government tourist hotel. Like most of the other buildings in Prague, it was unadorned, grey concrete and had elevators that operated only when they felt like it. The city guide who directed us on a bus tour was in addition to the official government guide assigned to us. He directed our bus driver through the campus of the Prague University which he spoke of with much pride. We looked out on the weed strewn grassy areas that had obviously not been mowed in ages and at the broken windows in the university buildings. It all had a derelict look to it. The city guide boasted that there was no unemployment in Czechoslovakia, unlike in the West. And, soon after we stopped for a bathroom break to get a look at exactly what he was talking about. As we walked into the public bathroom we encountered a middle-aged woman seated at a small table beneath an even smaller, grimy window. On the table were food items, dishes, and a hot plate where she obviously cooked her meals. She demanded payment from us and then led us one by one to a vacant stall where she would wipe the toilet seat with her damp rag and then hand us a single section of toilet paper. Under socialism, everyone has a job!
As tourists, in our free time, we went shopping. In store after store we were amazed to find a few objects for sale carefully arranged on shelves lining the walls. We could walk around and look at them, but when any of us reached to pick something up, the clerk would shout at us not to touch anything. These were samples only and not for sale or examination. If we finally chose to buy an item, the clerk went to the back and brought what we had chosen out to us.
There was no color in Czechoslovakia. As we drove through the countryside and through the villages, the houses were all unpainted concrete, the lawns were ill-kept, no flowers bloomed except for weeds along the side of the road. In fact, the only flowers we saw were a carefully maintained floral arrangement in the shape of the Soviet Hammer and Sickle in the center of Prague. We finally ended our dreary stay in Czechoslovakia on an equally dreary day. Once again we were stopped at the border while guards with mirrors carefully examined the bottom of the bus lest some poor Czech was hanging on to the axles in an attempt to escape the socialist heaven. We had to get off the bus while it was also carefully searched and then we were allowed back in one by one as the guards examined our passport photos to be sure that each of us was in fact the American who had entered the country a few days before.
At last we were on our way, crossing into Austria, a western democracy. Suddenly, the sun broke through the clouds and as we rolled into a small Austrian village we were greeted by a band and crowds of cheering Austrians. They were not cheering for us, of course. It was some sort of festival, but the brightly clothed, smiling Austrians strolling in front of their equally brightly painted buildings were a stark contrast to what we had just left. Flowers spilled from window boxes in every house and the houses themselves were whitewashed and then painted with scenes from Austrian folklore or simply fancy scroll work around the windows and doors. We were back in a free country.
Some years later, following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ousting of communist governments from all of the Iron Curtain countries between 1989 and 1991, we once more had the opportunity to take a group of students and adults back to Czechoslovakia, now divided into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. We visited only the Czech Republic, returning again to Prague, the capital. It was then 2006, 18 years after our last, sobering visit, and the change could not have been more astounding. We stayed in a modern hotel with working elevators and shopped for garnet jewelry from a stand set up in the lobby by a local jeweler. The houses were clean, the grounds well-kept, flowers grew everywhere. People were smiling and friendly. In the center of Prague, where once a few items had been displayed on shelves in cold, uninviting stores, shops of every size literally overflowed with merchandise. Displays were set up on the sidewalks and tourists browsed contentedly, picking things up and examining them as they determined what to buy. Outdoor cafés abounded and the chatter of voices competed with the sounds of the cars on the streets. One enterprising man had a 1930s era Skoda convertible in which he took people on a tour of Prague. We joined him for the trip, listening and watching as he pointed things out to us and answered Russ’ questions about the history of the Skoda company and of Prague itself. Capitalism had come to Prague and with it happiness and hope.
In the early 1900s, Marx predicted that “the historical trend of our age is the fatal crisis which capitalist production has undergone in the European and American countries where it has reached its highest peak, a crisis that will end in its destruction, in the return of modern society to a higher form of the most archaic type—collective production and appropriation”. But Marx could not have been more wrong. In country after country around the world, socialism has been tried and has failed, while capitalism has flourished.
A good case in point in North Korea. We think of North Korea as a dictatorship because all socialistic societies become in fact dictatorships. How else can the people be prevented from choosing a different form of government, one which will give them the chance to prosper as socialism manifestly does not? But North Korea is certainly a socialistic country. And it is a failing country. The average worker in North Korea makes $1,340 a year. The average worker in South Korea, an equally small but capitalistic economy, earns at least 22 times more!
So when Mary Gabriel of the Los Angeles Times ends her happy birthday article with the words, “So dear Karl, as you celebrate your 200th birthday . . . it’s great that you are still around to help us, if not in person, then through your work and your words. You inspire us still.” one wishes to send her off to North Korea for a few years to see first hand what the inspiration of Karl Marx has wrought. I, for one, am smart enough to know socialism for the abomination it is.