Dear America,
I was walking in the parking lot of the supermarket yesterday when I saw a bumper sticker on a pick-up. It read, "I never knew a veteran who fought for socialism." By coincidence, last night I heard a piece on the news about a school for butlers in China, which still considers itself a communist country. One of the financers of the school said, when asked how training butlers to work for wealthy Chinese was consistent with Chairman Mao's little red book, that Mao's ideas were still valid, but they needed to be updated to conform to modern Chinese thought. And when I heard that, it occurred to me that neither Chinese communists nor American capitalists understand what socialism is...what it entails and what it doesn't. It's not that I am an expert on the subject, but I feel comfortable in saying that socialism is predicated on the premise that society functions best when it is collective in its orientation, that is, when society is regarded as an organism of which each member is a part. It has nothing to do with totalitarianism or tyranny, nor does it have to do with how leaders come to power or stay there. Those things do not separate communism from capitalism, which emphasizes individual prosperity and the freedom to achieve it rather than the common good, even at the expense of society if that is what the free market demands. Yet, in China today the United States and the capitalist world continue to be the adversary of the Chinese system of communism because of that emphasis on the free market at all costs while the Chinese themselves are developing the same kind of system as we have, with its casualties among the masses regarded as justifiable sacrifices to prosperity. Simultaneously, we rely on notions like social safety nets and government supervised self-providence in the form of programs like Social Security and Medicare, which are just methods of requiring self-sufficiency, and Medicaid for those who cannot provide for themselves. Not to put too fine a point on it, as time passes we become more and more like our primary adversaries in the world, and they become more and more like us, yet the partisans in both camps never bother to look at the positives and negatives of either where we have come from or where we are going. That's why Chinese plutocrats now need butlers and American veterans don't fight for socialism...because neither understands either the quest for wealth or the quest to eliminate hunger and want.
From its very advent in world politics, communism, which is in theory just pure socialism, has been vilified in non-communist countries as authoritarian and inimical to individual liberty. In the eighties, Ronald Reagan had only to mention communism as the antithesis of what he wanted to do in order to ensure popular support, even if what he wanted to do involved excess in favor of the few or dogmatism in international relations. We facilitated the overthrow of a democratic socialist regime in Chile in the sixties and allowed a tyrannical military junta to take its place just because that junta's central figure, Augusto Pinochet, was a rabid capitalist...some might even say a fascist...and we did the same in Nicaragua with Anistacio Samosa, and in Argentina with the military rulers who ran that country with an iron fist to put it mildly. We stood by while thousands were tortured or "disappeared" for protesting injustice in those countries, but we regarded them as allies because they were not communist. When a benign figure like Salvatore Alliende ascended to power in Chile, we conspired with those who assassinated him just because he favored socialism and an equitable distribution of wealth in a nation that had been corrupted by a rich oligarchy, and we did so only because he opposed the form of capitalism that had led to that corruption and the concomitant predation by the few inside the oligarchy at the expense of the common people of Chile. And that loyalty to capitalism at the expense of all other American values, like personal liberty, due process, and at the core of our newfound and monolithic dedication to free markets without regard for consequence, our dedication to government of and by the people, became the American creed without second thought by virtually anyone. It was a consensus of values in a putatively democratic nation that allowed alliances with non-democratic politicians in other countries who shared our dedication to accretion of wealth, but opposed every other high-minded principle that had inspired the formation of what we deluded ourselves into thinking was still a nation dedicated to the primacy, under God, of liberty and justice for all. And now it appears that the nations that created revolutionary communism have been co-opted by the very things they have heretofore condemned as western excess and affluence without scruple. Our ideological adversaries have become essentially like us, and we more and more like them with the emerging opposition in our electorate to social and economic egalitarianism if it costs those who have.
It's all so mindless, and it has led to so much bloodshed in the service of rabid dogmatism that it is mind-boggling that we never seem to talk about it. Not since the youth movements of the sixties and seventies have these political anomalies been the topic of protest and major political movement, and frankly, I despair of the possibility that such lofty debates will ever again give us pause as a nation.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.
Your friend,
Mike
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