Dave Skocik is a resident of Dover.
William Shakespeare noted that a rose by any other name is still a rose. Poet and philosopher Maya Angelou advised that, when people tell you who they are, believe them.
We’ve been hearing a lot from the Democratic Socialists of America. They avoid using the word “communism.” So have all the mass murderers since Karl Marx’s manifesto, which became the guideline for dictators and tyrants, and since the 1917 Russian Revolution, which killed hundreds of millions across the globe. Hint: Go online to visit the “Fundamental 12 Laws of the Soviet Union” that DSA parrots and search related material about the failures of socialism.
Joseph Stalin starved millions of Ukrainians to death when he nationalized the “kulaks” (family farms) in 1930, as part of his purges of perceived opponents. The 1937 Soviet census revealed only 162 million people due to famine mortality and collectivization. It was later hastily revised to 170 million to account for the missing 8 million. Census officials were accused of sabotage and executed.
Adolf Hitler, after rising to absolute power in 1933, began a campaign that expropriated the property and citizenship of German Jews, which later grew to the industrialized extermination of more than 9 million Jews, Gypsies and Christians in Germany and across Europe. He declared his invasion of Russia a war of annihilation of those he considered subhuman. In the “Night of the Long Knives” from June 30 to July 2, 1934, he ordered the murder of at least 85 members of his fellow fascists (the SA) to consolidate his power.
Fidel Castro took control of Cuba in 1959 and jailed and executed his enemies. He nationalized foreign businesses and industries, and invited Nikita Khrushchev for a head-of-state visit to cement ties to the USSR. By 1962, the CIA discovered the Russians were clandestinely shipping missiles into Cuba. When President John F. Kennedy was briefed that the missiles were nuclear-tipped, he declared that any missile launched from Cuba would be a declaration of war with Russia. To avoid nuclear war, the USSR removed the missiles. Cuba remains a socialist nightmare.
Mao Zedong’s cultural revolution in 1966 created purges that led uneducated students to kill teachers and others he feared would oppose him. An estimated 1.6 million died. Today’s Chinese government still jails and kills those who profess religion, including an estimated 1.2 million Uighurs held in slave labor camps. It’s alleged that live prisoners have organs harvested that China sells on its black market. The state kills its enemies, while making money from their bodies.
Pol Pot, during his reign in Cambodia between 1976-79, was responsible for the deaths of 2 million of his country’s 5 million people. He began by forcing the country’s intellectuals to labor on farms. Dictators don’t like people who might object to their rule, particularly so-called intellectuals who initially support them.
Saddam Hussein: Six days after his accession to the presidency of Iraq on July 22, 1979, Saddam called a Baath party conference in Baghdad to plan a campaign of arrests and executions. Names of some attendees were announced and removed from the hall. Twenty-one were executed. To assert Iraq’s hegemony over its neighbors, he led Iraq into war with Iran and into the later invasion of Kuwait. He used chemical weapons against Kurdish populations in northern Iraq and against Iranian forces during and after the eight-year war.
North Korea is a vassal state of China, run by the Kim family. Its leader, Kim Jong Un, rules by decree, starvation, work camps and death. It is the most prolific counterfeiter of American $100 bills smuggled to its agents in the U.S., at a 30% discount. It earns the country billions.
Like Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, dictators promise everything but deliver nothing but ruin.
A similar cabal of DSA candidates with no experience in governing calls for sweeping political and economic changes, including the abolition of the Electoral College, open borders (additional millions to be declared voting citizens), replacing police with social workers, disbanding and prosecuting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and establishing state ownership of corporations to ensure financial control of industry and even private property. Their demands include the elimination of the Constitution and the U.S. Senate, adding four judges to the Supreme Court and “people’s committees” to create laws, appoint the president and even allow sharia law. They all call for abandoning Israel, our strongest ally in the Middle East.
On this 25th anniversary of the 9/11 suicide attacks by Islamic terrorists who killed nearly 5,000 innocent people in the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, plus passengers in four airliners — including the heroes who overcame skyjackers headed for the White House and who crashed in a Pennsylvania farm field — DSA celebrity spokesperson Hasan Piker proclaimed that we deserved it. He also named Mao the greatest political leader in history and called the fall of the USSR in 1991 history’s greatest tragedy.
Bottom line: Human lust for power never changes. Rather than oppose the “convert-or-die” demands of radical Islam, they attack Israel, the only democracy in the entire Middle East. Israel shares our customs, traditions and belief in democracy. Some 20% of Israel’s citizens are Muslims and Arabs who live in peace.
In perspective, the following is a comparison of Nobel Prizes awarded for discoveries in medicine, science, industry and human rights since 1947.
Iran has two. In 2003, Shirin Ebadi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her pioneering efforts for democracy and women’s, children’s and refugees’ rights. She was stripped of her rights to teach or practice law in 1979, when Islamic radicals seized power. She has lived in exile in London since 2009. Nobel Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi, a 2023 winner, is in failing health in prison for speaking out on the deaths of some 40,000 unarmed Iranians at the hands of security forces.
Israel’s 14 Nobel Prizes — in chemistry, economics, medicine, literature and peace — are more per capita than Germany, the United States and France. It has more laureates in total than India, China and Spain.
It’s clear to this retired veteran that our elected officials, especially our federal representatives, owe us clarification on DSA’s mission to destroy the freedoms established and defended over 250 years. They need to affirm their support for our nation and those who have defended it since 1776.
People of all political persuasions should study history to understand who will protect or dismantle the only nation that millions lie, cheat, steal and sometimes die to be part of.
In conclusion, socialism by any other name is communism that rules through the barrel of a gun. Heed Maya Angelou’s caution above.
Reader reactions, pro or con, are welcomed at civiltalk@iniusa.org.
