To cloak their wicked ideology, many Marxists have resorted to calling themselves “democratic socialists,” to avoid the wrath of an American public that largely sees communism as the diabolical system it is. They tell the American people what they want to hear – that they aren’t going to recreate the murderous regimes of Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, Fidel Castro, Kim Il-Sung, and Mao Zedong. Instead they promise a rosy vision of an American utopia that involves “free education,” “universal health care,” “living wages,”… Read more “liberal democracy,” and “social justice.” They seem oblivious to the fact that the six despots I mentioned did not rise to power for promising gulags, famines, and extermination camps. In fact, they got elected for promising the exact same things modern “democratic socialists,” woo voters with. For instance, in the 1920 German National Socialist (better known as Nazi ) Party Platform, Hitler promised voters many of the same things modern-day leftists do, such as
“demand[ing] that the State shall make it its primary duty to provide a livelihood for its citizens,” “the nationalization of all businesses which have been formed into corporations (trusts),” “profit-sharing in large industrial enterprises,” “the passing of a law for expropriation of land for communal purposes without compensation; the abolition of ground rent, and the prohibition of all speculation in land.” He went on with numerous social program proposals chillingly similar to what modern Democrats advocate: “The State muse consider a thorough reconstruction of national system of education (with the aim of opening up to every able and hard-working German the possibility of higher education and of thus obtaining advancement) … We demand the education of gifted children of poor parents, whatever their class or occupation, at the expense of the State … The State must ensure that the nation’s health standards are raised,” through extensive government control of healthcare.
Hitler promised almost without exception much the same popular policies that today’s “democratic-socialists,” do – heavy regulation of big businesses, equitable wealth redistribution, confiscation of private property for civic benefit, regulating monetary speculation, government-run, government-funded equation through college, a national health care service. Because his arguments were taken at face value by an unsuspecting German public who hated the rich and wanted what they viewed as “social justice,” a ruthless regime was allowed to spring up that would result in the most catastrophic war in human history, the Holocaust, and the pitiless extermination of hundreds of millions of innocent people. The track record of “democratic-socialism,” as any serious scholar must concede, is a far cry from the sunny utopian paradise that Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden promise us. And that’s just one example. Do you think those who rose up in the 1917 Russian Revolution were fighting for starvation, misery, and tyranny? Of course not, no human being with half a brain cell would. They were fighting for the same promises that “democratic” socialists advocate for today. It’s an uncomfortable fact for liberals to reckon with, but it’s not one they can avoid.
