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Early Castro: “it’s never going to taste the same” — 17 Comments

  1. it’s never going to taste the same.

    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    The decline in the taste of soft drinks may seem a relatively trivial change, but it’s part of a generalized quality of life issue that is one of the many, many failures of Communism. Life loses much of its savor, its taste….

    The above hints at something which is missing from communism, and which – possibly above all else – is responsible for the impossibility of communism ever succeeding. I speak of what Father Robert Sirico calls: “touching the material world with our transcendence.” We are NOT strictly physical beings. We are also transcendent beings. Any political system which fails to account for our transcendence must itself fail.

    Father Sirico is the author of “Defending the Free Markets: a Moral Case for a Free Economy”:

    Think about who human beings are, the fact that we have a physical body and the fact that we also transcend our physicality. We all know that. We just observe ourselves and we see our physicality. But then we experience our transcendence when we fall in love or when we appreciate art and beauty.

    Those are indications that there is something more than the purely material to our existence, that there is something spiritual to our existence. Our touching the material world with our transcendence — with our minds, with our reason, with our creativity, with our courage — brings forth from nature resources that would lie dormant and useless to humanity but for the fact that we touched them and brought them forth.

    This begins the moral argument for the free society and the free economy.

  2. Frédérick Bastiat pointed out that socialism is theft and the government can’t create prosperity.

  3. In russia the term was when will it be like it was… as everyone was waiting for the hard times to end and the bitter sacrifices then bearing some kind of improvement or such. but it never really came…

    It’s no accident that emigrants from Communist countries are among the most virulent anti-Communists imaginable. Their cynicism about its false promises and its brutal leaders is profound, because they’ve lived it.

    and as red diaper babies tend to lean left, the children of such “immigrants” are also versed… some a lot, some not at all, as the “immigrants” wanted to spare them and hope they would never know…

    However, the reason i am putting quotes on it, is that these are not immigrants… an immigrant WANTS to leave their own country. but people didn’t immigrate from such places, they escaped, or were forced out…

    you wont call a person on a pile of foam battling sharks to get to the beach so that his feet touch sand so that they wont deport him… an immigrant…

    thats a refugee…
    same with defectors…
    they are refugees of a different sort.

    want to know the difference between a immigrant and a refugee? a refugee on some level wants to go back… feels that one day, they will return. till they are shattered and dont ever want to go back… but they also instill this same thing in their kids.

  4. how similar all these stories are, even though the countries might be different. The pattern could not be more clear,

    that’s because what is done is a refined process. That is, each time its tried, and such, its the same process, but improved (Darwinian). the evil gets better but the people stay the same ignorance, eventually they perfect it till your already living in it, and past the border, when they suddenly act upon the power that you think they don’t have because they didn’t act.

    that is, before exercising the power that is no longer able to be hidden, they go way past the line of tha power… they hold back what they can do, and instead keep building base till they cant be opposed.

    the states may be 100% failures, but i know of only one or two such things that were not successful, and none of them because of the people.

    There is something in human nature that falls prey to this dream, and it is a something can be taken advantage of over and over by cynical and power-hungry dictators.

    same process
    same ideas
    same experiences
    same inspirations…

    “the dream that would not die” and variations of that idea are old on the subject.

    “The Dream We Lost” was the title of a book similar to the one you just read… as is Stalin’s children…

    The full title is:
    The Dream We Lost Soviet Russia Then and Now
    http://ia600500.us.archive.org/14/items/dreamwelostsovie010072mbp/dreamwelostsovie010072mbp.pdf

    i recommended reading it several times on your quest of reading refugees from totalitarianism…

    this is what foreign affairs magazine said about it (in part)

    Miss Utley went to the Soviet Union some years ago as an English Socialist converted to Communism. In Russia she worked in several political and industrial agencies and thus came to know how the Soviet machine operates. She tells in this book of her disillusioning experiences and describes the present state of the Soviet experiment.

    i thought you would find it more interesting to read about a westerner whose ideals and such would cause them to immigrate, like the man who shot kennedy, to the soviet union…

    not a resident who watched the conversions…

    these stories are even more interesting… as they are much like malcom mudderige, and the award winning times author that hid the starvations… and so on and so on.

    westeners who are in love with what they believe so much, that they do what most here dont do (but many here wish they would) and that is rather than change the place they live in, leave and go tothe place that is like they dream of.

    then find the truth personally…

    “One’s character is one’s fate,” and one’s character is no doubt mainly the product of environment. But it is only as one approaches middle age that one can look back and see how the influences of one’s early youth determined the course of one’s life. Those influences in my case were both socialist and liberal. It was a passion for the emancipa- tion of mankind rather than the blueprint of a planned society or any mystical yearning to merge myself in a fellowship which led me to enter the Soviet Union and to leave it six years later with my political beliefs and my personal happiness alike shattered.

    I came to communism via Greek history, the French revolutionary literature I had read in childhood, and the English nineteenth-century poets of freedom; not as a revolt; against a strict bourgeois upbringing, nor on account of failure to make a place for myself in capitalist society, but profoundly influenced by a happy childhood, a socialist father, and a Continental education. For me the communist ideal seemed the fulfillment of the age-long struggle of mankind for freedom and justice. I was, perhaps, mainly attracted to communism by its internationalism and its anti-imperialism. The Labour party in England had alienated me by its participation in the exploitation and oppression of the conquered races of Africa and Asia. My studies both of ancient history and modern economics made me abhor slavery in any form, and the Communists were the only socialists whose ideal was a world-wide equality and liberty.

    The same influences of my upbring- ing which by 1925 had turned my hopes toward the U.S.S.R., were to make it impossible for me to accept the Soviet regime once I came to know it intimately.

    I was, in Stalinist phraseology, a “rotten liberal,” a “petty bourgeois intellectual”-one who foolishly desired social justice, freedom, and equality, and had imagined that socialism meant an end to oppression and injustice.

    the same ideals that got her into it
    where the same ideals that got her to run from it

    as i said… you never changed..
    you only realized that they were not what you thought they were, and so, they no longer seemed to reflect you…

  5. she was VERY well connected into the deep of it.. which makes it even more interesting (Thoug not enough to actually read it when recommended)

    My father, whose influence over me was profound, had known William Morris in his youth, had been a friend of Marx’s daughters and an associate of Bernard Shaw, the Webbs, and other Fabians. He had taken part in the great labor struggles of the late eighties and nineties, had been arrested with John Burns in a demonstration in Trafalgar Square, and had spoken from the same platform as Friedrich Engels in Manchester. Although he had retired from politics soon after I was born, I had been brought up in the socialist tradition.

    My mother, daughter of a radical North Country family, had met my father at the age of sixteen when Aveling (the famous translator of Marx’s Capital, who married Eleanor Marx) had brought him to my grandfather’s house in Manchester. My grandfather, although a “bourgeois,” being a manufacturer, was a free-thinker and a republi- can, and boasted of how his wife’s mother, when very ill, had hidden the great Chartist leader, Feargus O’Connor, in her bed when the police were searching the house for him.

    it is seldom that you can read someone so introspective, open, and who writes so well..

    funny, but feminists dont celebrate her

    all of them i have ever recommended have a certain air of sameness, because they are victims of the same PROCESS…

    just as the victims of ponzi, and madoff would sound very familiar, its the same process…

    if you would have read you would then have been enjoined to read Max Eastman

    much of what your searchign to know has been written in depth.

    its kind of like watching someone want to learn about religion and all that, and see them pick up DAWKINS and never read the greats arguments and such that he avoids… and have no way to know what else is out there as they have no Virgil to guide them through hell…

    Max Eastman, in his illuminating analysis of the motive patterns of socialism, has distinguished the “fraternal passion” impulse as the one which finds satisfaction in Stalin’s totalitarian state capitalism. Socialists motivated by the “thirst for co-operative emotion, for the sense of membership in a totality” can excuse the crimes and cruelty and hypocrisy of the U.S.S.R. and find nothing wrong with a society in which not only is human freedom dead, but the very concept of freedom has become “counter-revolutionary.” Hence the Dean of Canterbury praises Soviet Russia from the same unconscious motives as impelled the Dominican friars to uphold the Church of Rome in the days of the Inquisition. The Russian Bolshevik party to him, as to the Webbs, the editors of the New Republic, and scores of other “socialists” in England and America, is-or was-a “brotherhood” which they uphold as Catholics and Protestants upheld the religious fanatics who drenched Europe in blood during the Wars of Religion.

  6. All the evidence about the failure of communism/socialism/fascism is available. Many, many books such as neo reports on. Many others reporting on the economic affects of those centrally planned, elite run economies. Even to someone as poorly read as me, it is quite clear – it does not work! Yet there are so many who just don’t want to see it. Even when they read about it, they seem unable to believe it could happen here.

    Yes, we have a much deeper tradition of freedom, a more freedom loving society, and more complex economy than Cuba, Chile, Argentina, or even the old Soviet Union. Yet a Nancy Pelosi can float the idea of confiscating IRAs and 401Ks without fear of being denounced far and wide or, better yet, of being tarred and feathered. And confiscating retirement accounts would be a first step toward “leveling” the playing field.

    There are 49 retired couples in my neighborhood. Most of them are well educated retired Boeing employees, bankers, farmers, etc., but only about ten of those couples are aware that Obama, Pelosi, Reid, and their progressive cohorts are a threat to their now happy lives. It’s difficult to live among such people because I know all but the ten will probably vote for Obama. Most of them resent the fact that I have Romney/Ryan signs in my yard. Many treat me like I’m a bit of a barbarian. Fortunately, our covenants allow such signs or they would gladly tell me to take them down. They would love to tell me how to behave. It is to weep.

    75 days to go!

  7. The four most dangerous words in the english language “this time is different”. There is even a very good econ book with the same title, which I recommend.

  8. The year 1776 saw the birth of two major statements on freedom: one, obviously, was “The Declaration of Independence”; the other was the publication of Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations”*. True political freedom is inseparable from economic freedom.

    *The shorter, better known, title.

  9. P.J. O’Rourke said it best in the early ’90s before China dumped any pretense of having a socialist economy: “Cuban cigars are rationed in Havana, you can’t get good Chinese take-out in Beijing, and that tells you all you need to know about socialism”.

    Socialism fails, always, because it is contrary to human nature. But just as surely, there will be those who think like Bullwinkle with his rabbit-out-of-the-hat trick, “this time for sure!” Human nature also includes varying degrees of gullibility.

  10. .

    What was that saying about an ascendant Nazi Germany?

    .

    “Picture a boot stomping on the
    face of humanity — forever…

    .

    Communism is just the same shit in a different colored uniform.

  11. }}} like the man who shot kennedy, to the soviet union…

    There was generally no evidence Oswald ever lost his faith in the ideal of Communism. As with most libtard idiots, all he lost faith in was a specific single implementation of it.

    Libtards simply CANNOT learn from experience.

    It’s their defining quality, I believe…

    The notion that “it just wasn’t done right”, never, ever leads to the inevitable, self-evident conclusion:

    “the only way to do it right, is to never do it at all”.

    Create a thousand, a million Hells, and they’ll still be absolutely sure that the Next Time a Heaven will result.

  12. IGotBupkis: that saying was not about Nazi Germany. It occurs in Orwell’s 1984, and it described the goals of the dystopic totalitarian mind control of “Ingsoc”–an English Socialism of the future.

  13. —–“Marxist truth!”, sneered Skashkash. “Marx himself didn’t believe it!”
    —–
    “[Prove it!]”
    —–“Very well,” replied Skashkash. “First, Karl Marx held two values above all others — the revolution and scientific truth. Second, Marx, a man of undoubted genius, died without ever finishing his magnum opus, ‘Das Kapital’. A genius does not die without finishing his life’s work – I could cite you examples as nauseum – but Marx lingered for years without finishing ‘Das Kapital’.”
    —–
    “So what? He got old and sick and couldn’t write, but what he wrote was the truth.”
    —–“No, the reason that Marx never finished his work was that his two prime values, revolution and scientific truth, were in conflict. He had, as you will doubtless recall, set up a progression of social orders, from chattel slavery, to feudalism, to capitalism, to what he called socialism – a kind of unspecified utopia. In fact, there was another step after capitalism available for his study, but he suppressed it, because it was incompatible with his notion of revolution. He called it the ‘Oriental Mode of Production’ and it was amply demonstrated in Chinese history. It is capitalism made subordinate to the state by means of innumerable petty regulations. You could describe it as enlightened petty despotism, or as symbiosis of the individual and the collective. Had Marx elected to follow scientific truth instead of revolution, he would have predicted what happened in the U.S. after the Great Depression. He would have been a major prophet.”

    Alexis A. Gilliland, ‘Long Shot for Rosinante’

    A nice little SF book set on an O’Neill colony Space Station, published in the early 1980s, about a “Second American Revolution” that takes place when the colony breaks off from its American roots.

    The argument above takes place between the station’s AI computer (Skashkash) and one of the residents, a firm believer in Marxist Theory.

  14. LOL, I stand corrected, Neo. I thought it was Orwell, but was pretty sure it was about Nazi Germany. But it’s certainly an apt description of the end result of any socialist revolution.

    Funny how liberals always assume the dictatorships will come from the Right, which I think is usually pretty rare in developed nations, isn’t it? Don’t most of them, historically so far, come from the Left? Isn’t Nazi Germany one of the few (debatable, I think) exceptions to that?

  15. IGotBupkis: very debatable. In fact, I think the argument that Nazis were of the left is stronger than that they were from the right. See this.

  16. Good set-up question for Fidel worshipers/PSF[Pendejos Sin Fronteras]:
    Life expectancy in Cuba is 5 years greater than life expectancy in Latin America [79 versus 74 years.] Does this difference of five years in life expectancy show that Fidel and his brother have been good stewards of the Cuban nation?

    When the PSF/Fidel worshipers reply with a resounding YES, then ask them the following question.
    Life expectancy in Cuba in the 1950s was 8 years greater than life expectancy in Latin America [62 versus 54 years.] Does this difference of eight years in life expectancy show that Batista was a good steward of the Cuban nation?

    The point is two-fold. First: contrary to the claims of PSFs, Castro took over a country that, for all its problems, was relatively well-off. Second: while there has been progress in public health in Cuba under the Castro regime, there has also been progress in public health in the rest of Latin America.

  17. Pingback:No more “Coca-Cola, Cawy, Materva and Ironbeer” | Fausta's Blog

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