By Stephen Smoot
“Young people are acquiring the conviction that foul deeds are never punished on earth, that they always bring prosperity.
It is going to be uncomfortable, horrible, to live in such a country!”
Thus wrote Alexander Solzhenitsyn in the greatest written work created outside of the Holy Bible, The Gulag Archipelago. Every child in every American school should read this book in high school, not just for its sheer literary brilliance, but also for the eternal truths within.
The “country,” Solzenitsyn referred to directly was the Soviet Union, through whose political prisons he circulated for years.
More metaphorically, New York City is drifting into a form of Islamo-Marxism as Americans are forced to consider what happens when democracy chooses a very non democratic leader with stated prejudices against a vulnerable minority. This has certainly happened before and it never ends well.
Too many Americans worry about the ghosts of evil terrorism in hoods in the past instead of thinking hard about the evil totalitarians just elected into office in the Big Apple. They march wearing black with the specific intent of intimidating the Jewish population of the city (the world’s largest Jewish city, still) into subservience or a mass abandonment as its first step into consolidating its foothold here.
“It is going to be uncomfortable, horrible, to live in such a ‘country!’”
Another country recently heard from, however, now has fresh hope of a brighter future.
Wondering how Venezuela fared under the Marxism that Hugo Chavez imposed decades ago requires nothing more than listening to one of the leaders of the West Virginia State Senate. State Senator Patricia Rucker’s (R-Jefferson) family hails from Venezuela. She, like Congressman Alex Mooney at the same time, made their family’s suffering under Communism an inspiration to their political work.
Senator Rucker once explained a single and horrific detail of life under Venezuelan Marxists, an element that underscores the evil of all Communists from New York City to Beijing. It is not succoring the people they desire so much as playing the succubus of the people. They establish control and steal from all so they can smile from podiums, wearing beautiful suits and porn star mustaches, and controlling through intimidation.
She explained that up until the rule of Chavez, that yes, many Venezuelans lived in poverty but that almost no one starved. Entirely located within the tropics, the growing season never ended.
Alongside roadways and in public parks, one could find endless food producing trees and shrubs.
The people could always eat so long as someone could simply walk down the road and gather from the Eden-like bounty that greeted everyone.
That is, until the Chavez “beautification program.”
The dictator promised to make the cities, highways, and public parks more beautiful. Apparently that only meant ripping out every form of plantlife that the people could use for food. In comparison, imagine the impact on a number of struggling West Virginia families if the State killed off all of the game animals many rely on for food.
Once Chavez and his Communist minions took away the food (since one had to actually go pick it, it still does not disprove the Milton Friedman maxim that “there is no such thing as a free lunch”) they had control.
No longer could “rugged individualism” rely on personal initiative to feed the family in times of want. Now they had to rely on what the incoming Communist New York City called “the warmth of collectivism.”
Which meant that the people half starved, like the Spartan helots, to make them more pliable and less able to resist the evil that had overwhelmed them.”Elections” meant nothing as the Communists found excuses to set them aside and stay in authority. Of course those who complain most in America about “democracy” objected the loudest to the removal of an illegitimate and unpopular Leftism whose main purpose lay in doing the Western Hemispheric bidding of Russia and Red China.
This was far from the worst crime of the Venezuelan Communist regime, but it set the stage for all the rest. Much like when other totalitarians have disarmed the previously free people and taken away their guns before subjugating them.
Venezuela’s government actions included the intentional destabilization of American society by pumping in deadly fentanyl and the murderous drug gangs who distributed it and terrified legitimate immigrants from that abused nation.
Never deny that fentanyl first is a weapon of cold war deployed against the most vulnerable Americans with the intent to undermine society. And, obviously, it has been working. Countless Americans died because the United States government failed to crack down on the country itself and what it has been sending across the US southern border.
Taking out Venezuela’s Marxists was a blow for our suffering addicts and their families just as much as for the people of that country.
President Trump’s move was not without precedent. It mimicked almost exactly President George H. W. Bush’s use of the United States military and the music of Metallica to capture Panamanian dictator and drug-lord Manuela Noriega, who was the guest of the United States prison system after his capture.
It also follows the precedent set by President Ronald Reagan who removed a Cuban-backed Communist government in Grenada.
It is possible for those who feel the move was unwise, for whatever reason, to understand that millions of people no longer feel the shackles that lay on their persons until Trump’s arrest of their dictator.
But it should be mandatory, as fellow human beings, to celebrate with them their renewed independence as a sovereign people, with a Nobel Prize winner waiting in the wings to join them in moving toward a better future.
And also hope beyond hope that the ancient culture of Iran and, until the rise of Islamic totalitarianism, American ally, will also soon throw off the shackles of an evil regime to pursue a better path.
