Monday, March 5, 2018

Socialism is Not Cool

From USA Today:
My grandmother grew up in Ukraine, which was then a part of the USSR — the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. After waking each morning, she checked to see if any of her family members died during the night. Many of her compatriots were already dead because Joseph Stalin, the Soviet leader, implemented a mass starvation program.

Known as the “Holodomor,” the goal of the policy was to starve Ukrainians into submission. It worked as intended: Stalin murdered perhaps four million Ukrainians. (For this reason and others, Ukrainians are a bit prickly when asked if their accent is Russian.) My grandmother only escaped this torture when she, along with the Russian man who would become my grandfather, were kidnapped by the Nazis and taken to Germany as slave labor. Thus, they stopped living the Soviet Socialist dream and began experiencing the National Socialist dream, instead.

I was reminded of all this last month when CNN celebrated Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday with a tweet that claimed the civil rights hero “was a socialist before it was cool.” There are two substantial problems with this. (Read more.)
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