United Socialist States of America
“If we wish to save the world from barbarism,
we have to refute Socialism.”
– Fatal Conceit by
F.A. Hayek
Associated Press: September 9, 2010 / Arizona Daily Star:
“Fidel Castro told a visiting American journalist that Cuba’s communist economic model doesn’t work, a rare comment on domestic affairs from a man who has conspicuously steered clear of local issues since stepping down four years ago.
The fact that things are not working efficiently on this cash-strapped Caribbean island is hardly news. Fidel’s brother, Raul, the country’s president, has said the same thing repeatedly. But the blunt assessment by the Father of Cuba’s 1959 [Socialist] revolution is sure to raise eyebrows.
Jeffrey Goldberg, a national correspondent for the Atlantic magazine, asked if Cuba’s economic system was still worth exporting to other countries and Castro replied “The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us any more,” Goldberg wrote Wednesday in a post on his Atlantic blog. He said Castro made the comment casually over lunch after a long talk about the Middle East and did not elaborate. The Cuban government had no immediate comment on Goldberg’s account.
Since stepping down from power in 2006, the ex-president has focused almost entirely on international affairs and said very little about Cuba and its politics; perhaps to limit the perception that he’s stepping on his brother’s toes.
Goldberg, who traveled to Cuba at Castro’s invitation last week to discuss a recent Atlantic article he wrote about Iran’s nuclear program, also reported on Tuesday that Castro questioned his own actions during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, including his recommendation to Soviet [Socialist] leaders that they use nuclear weapons against the United States. (see: Dagger in the Heart: American Policy Failures in Cuba by Mario Lazo, 1968)
Even after the fall of the Soviet [Socialist] Union, Cuba has clung to its communist system.
The state controls well over 90 percent of the economy, paying workers salaries of about $20 a month in return for free health care and education, and nearly free transportation and housing.
At least a portion of every citizen’s food needs are sold to them through ration books at heavily subsidized prices.
President Raul Castro and others have instituted a series of limited economic changes, and they’ve warned Cubans that they need to start working harder and expecting less from the government.
But the president also has made clear that he has no desire to depart from Cuba’s socialist system. …”
Examples of Socialism’s Big Lie:
China: “I often heard of peasants talking about the “Great Leap Forward” as though it were some sort of Apocalypse that they by some miracle had escaped. I questioned them in detail until I reached the conclusion the “three years of natural catastrophe” had not been natural but a series of political [Socialist] blunders.
I was walking with a relative who lived a small distance from our village. On the way to his village we passed a deserted village. . . . Among the weeds, rose up one of the scenes I had been told about, one of the banquets at which the village families had swapped children in order to eat them. I could see the worried faces of the families as they chewed the flesh of other people’s children.
In that moment, I understood what a butcher he had been, the man “whose like humanity has not seen in several centuries, and China not for several thousand years.” Mao Zedong [Zoran Mamdani] and his henchmen, with their criminal political system, had driven parents mad with hunger and led them to hand their own children over to others to receive the flesh of others to appease their own hunger.
Mao Zedong, to wash away the crime he had committed in assassinating democracy had launched The Great Leap Forward and obliged thousands and thousands of peasants dazed by hunger to kill one another with hoes, and to save their own lives thanks to the flesh and blood of their childhood companions. They were not the real killers; the real killers were Mao [Mamdani] Zedong and his [Socialist] co-conspirators.” – Black Book of Communism, p. 493-94
Russia (formerly known as The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics):
“A week ago, a special service was set up to try to protect children who have been abandoned. Along with peasants who flock to the towns because there is no hope of survival in the countryside, there are also children who are simply brought here and abandoned by their parents. who then return to their village to die. Their hope is that someone in the town will be able to look after their children. . . . So for a week now, the town has been patrolled by dvorniki, attendants in white uniforms, who collect the children and take them to the nearest police station.
Around midnight they are all transported in trucks to the freight station at Severodonetsk. That’s where all the children who are found in stations and on trains, the peasant families, the old people, and all the peasants who have been picked up during the day are gathered together. A medical team does a sort of selection process. . . Anyone who is not yet swollen up and still has a chance of survival is directed to the Kholodnaya Gora buildings, where a constant population of about 8,000 lies dying on straw beds in the big hangers. Most of them are children. People who are already starting to swell up are moved out in goods trains and abandoned about forty miles out of town so that they can die out of sight. When they arrived at the destination, huge ditches are dug, and the dead are carried out of the wagons.” – Black Book of Communism, pgs. 164-65
“What’s past is prologue.” – William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 2, Scene 1 meaning history sets the context for the present. This line is carved into the stone outside the National Archives Building in Washington, D.C.
See:
On Dealing with the Communist World: The Elihu Root Lectures by George F. Kennan, 1964
The Penkoskiy Papers by Frank Gibney, 1965
Mao and the Chinese Revolution by Jerome Ch’en, 1965
Defeating Communist Insurgency: Experiences from Malaya and Vietnam by Sir Robert K, Thompson, 1970
A Dagger in the Heart: American Policy Failures in Cuba by Mario Lazo, 1970
None Dare Call It Conspiracy by Gary Allan, 1971
How Democracies Perish by Jean-Francois Revel, 1983
A Viet Cong Memoir: An Inside Account of the Vietnam War and Its Aftermath by Truong Nhu Tang, Former Viet Cong Minister of Justice, 1986. The moment his eyes were opened to The Big Lie.
KGB: The Inside Story by Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, 1991
The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism by F.A. Hayek, 1991
The Flight from Truth: The Reign of Deceit in the Age of Information by Jean-Francois Revel, 1992
The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek, 1994
Double Lives: Spies and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas Against the West by Stephen Koch, 1994
A People’s Tragedy: A History of the Russian Revolution by Orlando Figes, 1997
Unrestricted Warfare: Translated from the Original People’s Liberation Army Documents by Col. Qiao Liang and Col. Wang Xiansui, 1999
The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression by Stephanie Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panne’, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartosek, and Jean-Louis Margolin, 1999
Useful Idiots: How Liberals Get It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First by Mona Charen, 2003
Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe: 1958-1962 by Frank Dikotter, 2010
Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life by Jonathan Sperber, 2013
Disinformation: Former Spy Chief Reveals Secret Strategies for Undermining Freedom, Attacking Religion and Promoting Terrorism by Lt.Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, 2013
