There are few places on earth where the regimentation and control of the population are more suffocating than in that country of eleven million people that has been governed with an iron fist for 62 years by the Castro brothers and the Communist Party.

Every neighborhood is under close surveillance by “Committees for the Defense of the Revolution” that make sure that any attempt at showing public discontent is nipped in the bud. That thousands of Cubans, desperate under the economic and social conditions they have been suffering for years, could take to the streets in such large numbers shouting out slogans against the regime and crying for freedom speaks to their extreme courage and to a significant amount of dissent among the spies supposed to control them.

So, yes, those Cuban protesters are heroes for showing the world what they really think of the communist dictatorship and, in the face of the vicious repression unleashed by Miguel Díaz-Canel, the puppet president who answers to Raúl Castro, continuing to demonstrate even as scores of people were beaten up, arrested and sent to detention centers where they are being tortured. The whereabouts of those detained are in many cases still unknown.

A few months ago, during the VIII Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba, the hierarchy of the Revolution underwent some changes. Part of the international community met with a certain degree of hope the fact that Raúl Castro left his post as the first secretary of the Communist Party in favor of Díaz-Canel and that the political bureau was reshuffled (leaders from Castro’s generation, such as Ramón Machado Ventura and Ramón Valdés, were replaced by younger revolutionaries). But those were purely cosmetic changes.

What better proof than the response by Díaz-Canel to the massive demonstrations? He ordered thousands of thugs who serve in the military and the police and in paramilitary units (including “rapid-response brigades”) to unleash hell on the people of Cuba, who had no weapons other than their voices.

Cuba is still run by Raúl Castro through his cronies. His former son-in-law, Gen. Luis Alberto Rodríguez López-Calleja, the head of Gaesa, a network of companies run by the military that controls seventy percent of the island’s economy, a key figure for quite some time, became a member of the political bureau in April. Raúl Castro’s son, Col. Alejandro Castro Espín, who runs several spy agencies, is another key figure. Díaz-Canel, a disciplined cadre, is nothing but a figurehead in a power structure in which the Castro family calls the shots.

And there is not the slightest sign that the regime is willing to begin a transition to liberal democracy under the rule of law.

From time to time, given the economic pressure, it is under since the collapse of Venezuela’s economy (Cuba has lived on Venezuelan subsidies, at one point amounting to 12 percent of the island´s gross domestic product, for years), it allows a measure of private enterprise, but nothing that could create social upward mobility and the rise of a middle class potentially eager for political reform.

It is not the first time large numbers of Cubans show their rejection of the communist regime. Traditionally the Castros dealt with critics with brutal, selective repression. Whenever those protests went beyond small groups of dissidents, the regime has launched waves of emigration to the United States (for instance in 1980 and 1994), using migrants as a political weapon against the enemy and an escape valve to relieve the pressure.

For the moment, Díaz-Canel, who is blaming the protests on the U.S. “blockade” (even though Cuba actually trades with ninety countries, including the U.S., its fifth source of imports), is using brutal repression. We should not be surprised if the next step is to open the gates for thousands of migrants to head north.

The post Cuba’s Heroes appeared first on The Beacon.

I wrote a response to that piece, pointing out how sex under former communist regimes was far from wonderful. Under Nicolae Ceausescu, for example, unmarried Romanians over age 25 were fined. Without access to birth control, the number of illegal abortions spiked. I also posited that maybe people had more sex in East Germany because they lacked other alternative activities as a means of bonding with their partners or for recreation. (Even if the sex is bad, the law of large numbers would work in their favor.)

We now have another data point for our analysis—Venezuela. Sorry for those expecting some sexy socialist utopia, but unless your kink is hunger and unplanned pregnancies, it doesn’t look good.

In a country dominated by price controls, runaway inflation, and other nightmarish economic policies, it should come as no surprise that all kinds of goods are in short supply. Birth control is no exception. When things like condoms or intrauterine devices (IUDs) can be found, they’re often unaffordable.

A pack of three condoms, for example, costs $4.40—three times the monthly minimum wage. Oral contraceptives cost $11. An IUD costs $40, not including the fee to have a doctor place it. According to one report, the lack of access and high costs put birth control out of reach for about 90 percent of the population.

Many women turn to the black market to meet their family-planning needs, only to find that the items they’ve bought are not what they were promised. Those pills that were supposed to prevent pregnancy sometimes turn out to be no more than sugar pills.

The results are not surprising. Women in Venezuela are experiencing a surge in unplanned pregnancies during a time when they can barely afford to feed themselves and their existing children. Many are turning to illegal abortions as a result, with sometimes fatal consequences. Maternal fatalities have increased from 113 per 100,000 live births in 2014 to 127 per 100,000 live births in 2017, according to the World Health Organization. After declining for decades, infant mortality has also increased. While some 14.7 infants per 1,000 live births would die in 2010, that number is now 21 deaths per 1,000 live births. Suicide rates have also spiked.

I’d be curious to know what the author of the original Times article would have to say about the current state of reproductive health in Venezuela. Far from the equality that was promised under the late Hugo Chávez and the current Nicolás Maduro regime, women in Venezuela are undoubtedly suffering. When offered the choice between more orgasms or more condoms, I think I know what Venezuelan women would choose.

The post Socialism Kills Your Sex Life appeared first on The Beacon.

Sen. McCarthy had launched the “red scare,” Harrison explained, and in 1950 began accusing Americans of being Communists and putting them on a blacklist. Others followed McCarthy’s lead and focused on Hollywood, blacklisting many actors and directors so they could never work again. Harrison is right that McCarthy specialized in accusation, but Rick’s “pawn-tification” has some problems.

“The curiosity is not that there were undoubtedly many Reds that made government their vocation, but that the entire Communist Party was not on the federal payroll.” That was the late actor Robert Vaughn in Only Victims: A Study of Show Business Blacklisting, a book based on his PhD thesis at the University of Southern California.

Communists also dominated many industrial and entertainment unions. As Bruce Cook noted in Trumbo, Communist screenwriter Dalton Trumbo wrote the speech that U.S. Secretary of State Edward Stettinius gave at the opening session of the United Nations. As Allen Weinstein explained in Perjury, Alger Hiss was a Stalinist spy in the State Department and the Soviet Union wanted Hiss to head the United Nations. Communist penetration of the U.S. government ran deep, and for all his bluster, McCarthy didn’t know the half.

He also did great harm to the anti-Communist cause, then being led by liberal Democrats such as Hollywood union leaders Ronald Reagan and Roy Brewer. In fierce battles during 1945-46, the anti-Communist forces prevailed over the studio Stalinists. It wasn’t until 1947 that the House Committee on Un-American Activities came snooping around. McCarthy didn’t hit stride until 1950, so Hollywood did not follow his lead. Senators don’t serve on House committees and McCarthy, who died in 1957, never had anything to do with Hollywood.

Back in 2014, a customer brought Harrison, the “Pawn Stars” host, a painting of Vietnamese Communist Ho Chi Minh, an agent of the Comintern. Rick called in Mark Hall-Paton of the Clark County Museum, who explained that the Soviet Union established the Comintern to “guide” the national Communist parties. In reality, the Communist International, its full name, funded and directed all the national Communist parties, including the Communist Party USA.

Though often entertaining, “Pawn Stars” is not the best source on Communism. For insight on Joseph McCarthy see, Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his Fight Against America’s Enemies.

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Sen. Klobuchar repeats the common belief that Joe McCarthy headed the House Committee on Un-American Activities that investigated Communist influence in the movies. Actually, senators do not serve on House committees, and McCarthy never had anything to do with Hollywood. The Hollywood liberals who fought the screen Stalinists, sometimes in bloody street battles, considered McCarthy a hindrance to the anti-Communist cause. 

McCarthy’s focus was government, and the “decency” comment came from U.S. Army Counsel Joseph Welch in the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings, seven years after the HCUA Hollywood hearings and three years before the senator’s death. McCarthy was an unsavory, accusatory type who damaged the anti-Communist cause, but as M. Stanton Evans noted in Blacklisted by History, the Wisconsin Republican didn’t know the half of it. 

“The curiosity is not that there were undoubtedly many Reds that made government their vocation, but that the entire Communist Party was not on the federal payroll.” That quote is from actor Robert Vaughn (The Young Philadelphians, Bullit) in his Ph.D. thesis published in 1972 as Only Victims: A Study of Show Business Blacklisting. Vaughn’s findings have since been substantiated by revelations from the Comintern and Soviet archives. For the case of Alger Hiss, a Stalinist agent in the State Department, see Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, by Allen Weinstein.

Politicians like Amy Klobuchar decry Joe McCarthy but have no trouble with the vicious guilt-by-accusation tactics on display in the hearing for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. For the full story on that travesty, see Mollie Hemingway and Carrie Severino in Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court. In those hearings, Sen. Klobuchar accepted the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford as infallible, pressed Kavanaugh about his drinking habits, and voted against him, claiming the vote was not political.

That’s the new McCarthyism, and those who deploy it show little sense of decency. 

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The first, what it teaches us about history. Historicists believe that history is teleologically guided by impersonal forces that shape things inexorably. Several thinkers, among them Karl Popper in The Open Society and its Enemies, debunked this theory compellingly in their day. But many people who are not necessarily inspired by ideological considerations take historical events for granted. How often have we heard that the fall of the Berlin Wall was inevitable?

A close look at what unfolded prior to November 9, 1989, indicates that certain choices individuals made at a particular point in time were crucially important and that there was nothing inevitable about them—nor about their timing.

It was not inevitable that Mikhail Gorbachev would respond to the unrest in the Soviet empire in the way he did weeks before November, 1989. His intention had been not to dismantle communism, but to reform it in order to save it from within.

When East Germans began to flee to Czechoslovakia, seeking to enter the West German embassy, and to Hungary, where the barbed wire on its Austrian border had been removed, Gorbachev could have reacted as his predecessors did, in Hungary in 1956 by crushing Nagy’s attempt at reforming the communist system and in Czechoslovakia in 1968 by destroying Alexander’s Dubcek’s Prague Spring. After all, earlier developments in Poland highlighted the danger of threatening the entire communist structure. But he decided not to intervene, taking many risks against his own position in Moscow.

Another crucial decision was the October 1989 coup led by Egon Krenz against the hardline leader of East Germany, Erich Honecker, whose Stasi was the most robust political police in the empire. Until then Honecker’s loyal disciple, Krenz had been approached about removing Honecker months earlier and had refused. Honecker was not only highly respected in the Soviet orbit but also a powerful ally of those who resisted Gorbachev’s reforms in Moscow and elsewhere.

A second lesson I take is the devastation the communist system can bring on a country with a strong economic base and culture.

East Germany’s Saxony had been the leading state in Germany’s industrial revolution in the 19^th century and, as one of the free cities of the Holy Roman Empire and a member of the Hanseatic League, a medieval commercial confederation that had a long tradition of enterprise and trade. But at the time of the country’s reunification in 1990, East Germany’s productivity was one-tenth that of its western counterpart; its per capita income represented about one-third of the other side’s. Despite the equivalent of 1.6 trillion euros spent by the German government in trying to make the eastern states converge with the western states, by 2010 the eastern states’ per capita income was still one-third below that of the western states.

The third lesson is that the fight for freedom needs to be constantly renewed. Today, given the social frustration among many Germans from the east, illiberal populist movements have caught the imagination of many voters. The anti-immigration Alternative for Germany party recently garnered one-fourth of the vote in Brandenburg and Saxony, reaching second place. Their slogan—“Let’s complete the change”—directly addressed the eastern states’ resentment at their failure to catch up.

November 9, 1989, has become engraved in the memories of freedom-loving people around the world. But new walls have been erected and will be erected in the future. The fight goes on.

The post The Berlin Wall Still Teaches Invaluable Lessons 30 Years After Its Fall appeared first on The Beacon.

Franklin Bynum, a 34-year-old attorney, avowed socialist, and DSA member, won the Democratic nomination for criminal court judge in Houston. At least 16 other socialists appeared on the ballot in primary races across Texas.

Many of the candidates and much of the support come from millennials, the largest generation of Americans in history. In part, millennials’ attraction to socialism can be traced back to Occupy Wall Street and the 2016 presidential campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders, a self-described socialist. These well-publicized movements emphasized inequalities in income, access to capital, criminal justice, healthcare, childcare, access to education, and housing affordability. Amy Zachmeyer, a 34-year-old union organizer who helped restart the Houston DSA chapter said that socialism “resonates with millennials who are making less money than their parents did, are less able to buy a home, and drowning in student debt.” Millennials’ attraction to socialism is reflected in surveys.

A 2016 survey of 18- to 29-year-olds by Harvard’s Institute of Politics found that 16 percent self-identified as socialists, while 33 percent supported socialism. Only 42 percent supported capitalism, while 51 percent did not. Another survey, in 2017, found that 51 percent of millennials identified socialism or communism as their favored socioeconomic system. Only 42 percent favored capitalism. Jorge Roman-Romero, 24, who leads a new DSA chapter in Tulsa, Oklahoma, said, “It’s not a liability to say that anymore,” referring to calling oneself a socialist candidate.

Frances Reade, 37, is vice chairwoman of the East Bay DSA chapter in the San Francisco Bay Area, which has about 1,000 members. She enjoys the free evening classes, known as “socialist school,” where they read and discuss political texts including Karl Marx. But it is doubtful that this Marxist night school is reading about the true history of socialism and communism in practice, which has brought more human suffering and death to the world than any other socioeconomic system.

For example, DSA chapters should read “Can There Be an ‘After Socialism’?” by University of Pennsylvania history professor Alan Charles Kors, which tells the story of socialism that Bernie Sanders and the Democratic Socialists of America won’t tell and that millennials don’t hear. Here is an extended excerpt:

The goal of socialism was to reap the cultural, scientific, creative, and communal rewards of abolishing private property and free markets, and to end human tyranny. Using the command of the state, Communism sought to create this socialist society. What in fact occurred was the achievement of power by a group of inhumane despots: Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, Kim Il Sung, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Castro, Mengistu, Ceausescu, Hoxha, and so on, and so on . . .

No cause, ever, in the history of all mankind, has produced more cold-blooded tyrants, more slaughtered innocents, and more orphans than socialism with power. It surpassed, exponentially, all other systems of production in turning out the dead. The bodies are all around us. And here is the problem: No one talks about them. No one honors them. No one does penance for them. No one has committed suicide for having been an apologist for those who did this to them. No one pays for them. No one is hunted down to account for them. It is exactly what Solzhenitsyn foresaw in The Gulag Archipelago: “No, no one would have to answer. No one would be looked into.” Until that happens, there is no “after socialism.”

The West accepts an epochal, monstrous, unforgivable double standard. We rehearse the crimes of Nazism almost daily, we teach them to our children as ultimate historical and moral lessons, and we bear witness to every victim. We are, with so few exceptions, almost silent on the crimes of Communism. So the bodies lie among us, unnoticed, everywhere. We insisted upon “de-Nazification,” and we excoriate those who tempered it in the name of new or emerging political realities. There never has been and never will be a similar “de-Communization,” although the slaughter of innocents was exponentially greater, and although those who signed the orders and ran the camps remain. In the case of Nazism, we hunt down ninety-year-old men because “the bones cry out” for justice. In the case of Communism, we insisted on “no witch hunts”—let the dead bury the living. But the dead can bury no one.

Therefore the dead lie among us, ignored, and anyone with moral eyes sees them, by their absence from our moral consciousness, spilling naked out of the television and movie screens, frozen in pain in our classrooms, and sprawled, unburied, across our politics and our culture. They sit next to us at our conferences. There could not have been an “after Nazism” without the recognition, the accounting, the justice, and the remembrance. Until we deal with the Communist dead, there is no “after socialism.”

To be moral beings, we must acknowledge these awful things appropriately and bear witness to the responsibilities of these most murderous times. Until socialism—like Nazism or fascism confronted by the death camps and the slaughter of innocents—is confronted with its lived reality, the greatest atrocities of all recorded human life, we will not live “after socialism.”

It will not happen. The pathology of Western intellectuals has committed them to an adversarial relationship with the culture—free markets and individual rights—that has produced the greatest alleviation of suffering; the greatest liberation from want, ignorance, and superstition; and the greatest increase of bounty and opportunity in the history of all human life.

This pathology allows Western intellectuals to step around the Everest of bodies of the victims of Communism without a tear, a scruple, a regret, an act of contrition, or a reevaluation of self, soul, and mind....

The bodies demand an accounting, an apology, and repentance. Without such things, there is no “after socialism.”

In a 1989 interview, Sanders said: “Socialism has a lot of different messages to different people. I think the issue of socialist ideology and what that meant or means is not terribly important.” Perhaps it’s not important to Sanders, but it was to the tens of millions of people who died at the hands of socialists or who currently toil under such regimes in Kim Jong-un’s North Korea and Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela.

A 2014 United Nations report on North Korea listed the conditions that ordinary citizens face in North Korea: “extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence, persecution on political, religious, racial, and gender grounds, the forcible transfer of populations, the enforced disappearance of persons and the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation” (p. 14). Two million to three million people are believed to have starved to death in North Korea in the 1990s, including “deliberate starvation” of political prisoners.

Venezuela’s government has practiced socialism since 1998. The result is an annual inflation rate today of 9,000 percent, an economy that shrinks 15 percent annually, empty shelves, crushing poverty, a fleeing population (10 percent of the population has emigrated), 12 percent of children under five suffer from malnutrition and a socialist president who prohibits outside aid, even from the Vatican. At the recent FEEcon 2018 conference in Atlanta, a young violinist from Venezuela, Wuilly Arteaga, talked about being beaten by government agents for publicly opposing his country’s despotic government.

So millennials, this is what socialism looks like in practice and where concentrated government power inevitably leads. As the old adage warns: A government powerful enough to give you everything you want is powerful enough to take away everything you have. That includes life itself.

Bernie Sanders and members of the Democratic Socialists of America choose to “step around the Everest of bodies . . . without a tear, a scruple, a regret, an act of contrition, or a reevaluation of self, soul, and mind.” By giving socialism and communism intellectual cover and acceptability, Sanders and the DSA help to hide the bodies and hide the truth from millennials, who have few memories of the atrocities and are likely unaware of socialism’s full record. Rather than being a Utopia, socialism and communism in practice create a hell on earth.

The post Hey Millennials: Here’s the Truth About Socialism, Kim Jong-un, and Nicolás Maduro appeared first on The Beacon.

Me: What does the “October Revolution” say to us today?

Lenin: The vanquished were right. History has sent the Provisional Government to the dustbin of history as well as Kerensky, its last boss. But I admit that the best of Russia was in the Provisional Government: liberals and socialists who had fought the Tsar and wanted reforms. There were even some lucid Mensheviks. If liberals like Prince Lvov, moderate social revolutionaries like Kerensky or Mensheviks like Tsereteli, who were in favor of a Constituent Assembly and moderate reforms, had triumphed, Russia would be different country.

Me: Your country was torn apart and became ungovernable. The Bolsheviks, who were not even a majority in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers Party, destroyed the Provisional Government.

Lenin: Our victory was not the brainchild of my genius or of the mediocrity of our adversaries. It was the result of my fanaticism, both ideological and strategic, and the Great War. The chaos and the commotion enabled us, who knew what we wanted and were prepared to do anything, to become strong. Fanaticism means being willing to do everything, even contradict oneself, to reach the goal.

Me: You applied the Red Terror and War Communism. With the former you consolidated your power; the latter failed and then you had to apply the New Economic Policy with capitalist elements.

Lenin: I had half-accepted the thesis that communism was possible in Russia without going through capitalism first. But I understood that some economic development must take place before applying socialism. The conditions for taking power were in place even if full industrial development had not yet occurred. When I overthrew the Provisional Government, I applied War Communism to control power. When I felt safe, I relaxed economic centralism: I knew that the peasants, a majority of Russians despite some industrialization, wanted to sell their surpluses and keep ownership of the lands they had taken from the oligarchy.

Me: But in that short period there were already signs of what would become the great economic lesson of the twentieth century: the failure of socialism and the triumph of markets.

Lenin: Yes. I have not renounced the idea that, in a future that now seems utopian, humanity will find a way to install socialism without killing the goose that lays the golden egg, which is capitalism. Stalin later sowed the germ of the destruction of the USSR when he began to apply his five-year collectivist plans.

Me: Do you buy the thesis that Trostsky was a “better” communist because he confronted Stalin?

Lenin: Trotsky was more like me than Stalin. Stalin was not an ideological fanatic but a paranoid man with power. Trostky was an ideological fanatic with military intuition.

Me: Communism killed one hundred million: more than twenty in Russia, sixty-five in China, one in Eastern Europe, two in Cambodia, two in Vietnam, two in North Korea, two in Africa, one and a half in Afghanistan, fifty thousand people in Latin America ...

Lenin: No man can contemplate his responsibility in such a tragedy without losing his mind or committing suicide. My survival mechanism is to bear the daily punishment of seeing that history has buried my work in ignominy.

Me: Is populism today the greatest danger?

Lenin: You forget that Russia invented populism in the second half of the nineteenth century. The populists (“Narodniks”) inaugurated our revolutionary tradition and subsequently morphed into terrorists. My brother, who was hanged by the authorities, was one of them. Then the socialists of different currents took over from them. Populism is the origin of the Russian tragedy.

The post My Interview with Lenin, One Hundred Years after the Revolution appeared first on The Beacon.

The 45-frame filmstrip, found in a family collection of St. Petersburg resident Sergei Pozdnyakov, depicts a day in the life of Igor, a boy living in 2017 Moscow. Titled “In the Year 2017,” it was created by V. Strukova and V. Shevchenko and produced at the Diafilm Studio in Moscow. The creators got a few things right.

Igor chats live with his mother, who is onboard a ship on the Black Sea, using a videophone, which foresees the emergence of today’s mobile connectivity via Skype or FaceTime. Another frame depicts scanning technology that reads handwriting on a note to know what a person wants to eat and then automatically cooks the meal. And another frame depicts what appears to be a self-driving car.

But overall, the creators imagined a future that does not resemble 2017 because they chose to project a false and exaggerated view of Soviet science. Among the incorrect predictions:

• Interstellar travel would be commonplace using space ships moving almost at the speed of light
• The Earth’s core would be mined for “eternal sources of energy” using “heat resistant” drilling machines powered by newly discovered “meson energy,” a theoretical form of atomic energy
• High-speed atomic-powered trains would traverse the Bering Strait between Siberia and Alaska
• Engineers would reverse the flow of the major Siberian rivers
• Underground cities would have “eternal spring” weather
• Children would attend schools that float on the Black Sea
• Flying stations would control the Earth’s weather (Igor’s dad works at the “Central Weather Control Institute”)
• A dam across the Bering Strait would halt currents from the Arctic Ocean, dramatically improving the climate in the Far East
• Printed maps and newspapers would still be ubiquitous, completely missing the emergence of Google maps, tablet computers, and the internet.

The filmstrip ends with the Soviet Union thriving and Soviet scientists saving the planet. The last surviving Western capitalist “imperialists” are hiding on a remote island in the south Pacific, where they test a prohibited meson weapon, accidentally destroying themselves and the island. The explosion disrupts weather around the world, creating massive tornadoes and hurricanes. Soviet scientists, including Igor’s dad, dispatch the flying weather-control stations to stop the storms, save the planet, and preserve the socialist paradise of 2017!

Of course, the biggest miscalculation of all was the filmstrip’s implicit assumption that the Soviet Union would still exist in 2017. In reality, of course, the USSR dissolved in 1991, more than 25 years ago.

The filmstrip, and the Soviet Union itself, created a façade of success to hide its lack of scientific progress and economic prosperity. The bigger lesson of the filmstrip is that the most significant changes are likely to be unanticipated shocks, like the collapse of the USSR.

Hopefully, the next unanticipated shock will be the replacement of many, if not all, government activities with private, contractual, voluntary arrangements, made increasingly possible with advances in smart technology.

* * *

Lawrence J. McQuillan is Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for Entrepreneurial Innovation at the Independent Institute and the author of the Independent book, California Dreaming: Lessons on How to Resolve America’s Public Pension Crisis.

The post How Soviets in 1960 Imagined 2017, and the Biggest Changes They Missed appeared first on The Beacon.