photo #9279382

Daniel KleymanI made a post yesterday about socialism and naturally every highly educated progressive, mostly from California (shocker) showed up to tell me that I don’t know what real socialism or communism is. First of all, I really don’t know where we would be without all of you college educated geniuses that have never left America or lived anywhere else. Thank you all for your wisdom. That third tier community college degree from San Bernardino is really paying off for you.While I may not have the benefit of your incredible educations (actually I do) what I do have the benefit of is having actually lived under communism for close to 12 years. I’ve experienced the “warmth of collectivism”. As a 10 year-old, I regularly stood in lines for 4 to 5 hours to govt owned grocery stores simply waiting for a food truck to arrive so they could stock the fully empty shelves with bread and milk. I am talking 1920-s Great Depression style food lines, in the dead of winter, freezing my balls off. The picture you see here is of a food ration card issued to my mother and food coupons which we had to exchange along with money for food at these incredible government owned grocery stores. (Yes I saved these when we came here in 1992) I've lived in crappy government built housing tenements because that's literally all that was available as no private enterprise existed to build/offer alternatives. I've experienced a society that was in decay because, despite promises of equality and a good standard of living, all the wealth and power was amassed at the top by communist party leaders and their cronies. (Yes - in this way communism is no different than capitalism in that power still gets accumulated at the top. Just by different means). So maybe before you start lecturing others about what socialism really is or being arrogant enough to think that even though it’s failed every single time it’s ever been tried in real life…. It can work this time because you are smarter and it “just hasn’t been done correctly” maybe listen to the people who have actually experienced it first hand. I’m talking real socialism/communism. Not the fake shit from Scandinavia.Oh and I don't want to hear anything about how socialism isn't same as communism blah blah blah. Yes - they're the same thing. Even your idol Marx didn't hold any real distinction between the two.