I just watched the documentary , which first pissed me off, and then left me sobbing, as the fate of the media team and a congressman and his staff were summarized. Right now, I want to go and slap every liberal professor teaching students how great socialism is and that communist collectivism just hasn't been tried the right way.
was the first and only member of Congress to die in the line of duty, and he was quite a maverick reformer — a real-life . His fact finding missions included living with a black family to understand what caused the Watts riots in 1965, having himself admitted anonymously as an inmate to Folsom Prison for 10 days, and lying down on the ice between fur hunters and baby seals in Newfoundland.
Over the last few decades, I've grown so used to politicians polishing their image, their dialect, their outfit, and have a whole team of public relations experts and lawyers analyze their "target audience" and to mangle their facts. (I am so old I can actually remember politicans and other officials resigning in disgrace over scandals that look trite today; Hillary Clinton still is determined to run for president, while a Nixon actually had the guts to leave. I have a lot more respect for Nixon than most current politicans.)
Leo J. Ryan never needed any of that. He just went out, got the truth, and based his decisions on his exeriences, not on what others had told him.
After watching the documentary, I was pretty upset, and went out to get the mail, and buy some groceries on 9th and First. During the last two years, this intersection has grown popular because of the awesome coffee shop, The Bean, decorated with artwork by Jim Powers, "Mosaic Man", and murals by PaintTheTown NYC (they also painted the pizzaria across the street). NYPD like to grab irritatingly fancy drinks here.
The corner store is not even the best or biggest here, but it offers a greater variety of goods than you'd find in any Eastern block store. Recently renovated, it offers enough varieties of coffee and vegetables to make me happy, and I have to guess the family running this store has to be reasonably happy too, being able to renovate — which means they must be optimistic enough about the future to invest in improvements.
A few decades ago, this same intersection was famous for something else: open drug dealing.
Local resident , who may or may not have been of questionable character otherwise, went out with his friends and interfered with this drug dealing. He'd stand at 9th and First, openly staring at the dealers, and inspiring others to go out and clean up their own neighbourhoods in a similar fashion. You and I might have done similar things to discipline lesser transgressions, like people not cleaning up after their dogs, or hitting their children on the street.
Sliwa inspired neighborhood watches all over the world; I'd first learnt about the Guardian Angels in Berlin. Maybe Curtis Sliwa was inspired by Malcolm X's paramilitary command of his Nation of Islam men; I do not really care where inspiration comes from, or if an idea was first conceived by somebody from whichever side of the political system. I don't care about party lines. Maybe Sliwa's character was sleasy; I don't even care that much, as long as you are not spreading lies, enslaving others, or committing crimes.
Sliwa worked with what he had, where he was, motivated not by fear of his environment, or hatred or lack of respect for it. He saw that drug dealing was damaging for this neighborhood, and helped stop it by encouraging average people to stand up for their neighborhoods. Sliwa understood that in a free society, your freedom depends on your own ability to accept responsibility, and not cry for the police, or the state, or a religious leader.
A few years earlier, on the West Coast, Jim Jones, too, didn't like what he saw. A self-described atheist Marxist, but charismatic and manipulative enough to be a successful preacher, he attracted intimidated people, and manipulated them by scaring, exhausting, enslaving, and lying to them, having them beaten — and finally murdering them. His armed troups were aptly named the Red Brigade. He and his Red Brigade are responsible for murdering 918 people, including 82 children.
Count them towards the death toll of Communist Collectivism.
As a kid, I was grateful to the East German state for rewarding me with a trip to Bulgaria when I was 13. I couldn't thank my parents for letting me travel to see America, which would have made me delirious with joy. My parents couldn't dream of doing that; they were born into the same Communist labour camp as I was.
The older I get the more I see how Socialism destroys families by making kids associate their best gifts with the state, and not their family. It is hard to respect your parents when the state feeds you a free lunch. It's hard to find your place when your parents have nothing to teach or give, and are actually encouraged to be irresponsible like children.
For example, today in the U.S., Common Core might sound all useful and revolutionary, but it kills families: Common Core math leaves parents unable to help their kids with their homework.
Can you imagine the pain of who took this picture of her daughter trying to wrap her mind around Common Core math? With rote memorization, even a less than average kid would be capable of easily doing basic math. This girl, probably smart and otherwise usually happy, feels stupid and is crying over homework, while her mother is unable to help her.
By manipulating both children and their families, Common Core puts the collectivist experience of being in school over the responsibility parents have for their children.
Back in the antifascist Democratic Republic Of Germany, school children were taken to former National Socialist concentration camps, and given talks by communists who had survived the Hitler era. These people had an .
Even more popular, though very rare, were defectors and spies from capitalist — well, democratic — countries, like , or . I read a number of Grossman's books, like Sohn aus gutem Hause. He and Dean Reed were my heroes back then, but I still wanted to see America. None of their horror stories changed that.
(My parents seemed to think Dean Reed was a stooge for leaving a free country, but they were unable to help me understand why Socialism was a miserable system, having never experienced anything else, and being intimidated by this monolithic apparatus, but scared to death by what the communist media told them about capitalism. They were generally lousy at communicating with me, though, so I was easy prey for the professional propagandists, and then, at the age of about 8, becoming an agitator myself.)
After the end of communism in Europe, those who were tortured by the Stasi, or whose children were murdered when they tried to leave the Socialist paradise, were a short blip on the local scene, before they were overrun by the more ambitious turncoats of the Angela Merkel sort. (Merkel's father, by the way, was a defector from West Germany to East Germany. She grew up privileged in the "empire of equality".)
There are very few movies about what communism did to people. Looking at Oscar nominations, or your TV program, you'd think The Third Reich lasted 90 years and communism lasted about three. Where is the victim card for those who resisted Communist collectivism? It's 25 years since the Soviet system collapsed, and while Hitler's National Socialism is burnt into people's awareness in countless new movies and books each year, the horrors of Communism are essentially forgotten. Young people still believe Marxism is the answer, and just hasn't been done right. College professors warn endlessly of the dangers of fascism, while being in love with what caused the rise of Hitler in the first place. They love the Weimar Republic while being blind to the fact we are living in it right now: We have the same shitty art, the same glorification of perversity, and similar street fights.
How many more millions of people have to be enslaved, tortured, and murdered for this anti-human experiment, until those leftists understand that collectivism is the worst idea anybody ever came up with, right after usury? Seems everybody understands that freedom is more important than anything else — everybody but the professors our children are listening to for 8 hours a day.
There are a lot of things I do not like, and I hope to help change these things. But I strive to do that by appealing to the best in human nature, not by intimidating, seducing, isolating people. New York needs a paid shower, restroom and napping station at every other corner, the way you can get a coffee and a table at Starbucks on every other corner. Somebody should start a chain. New York needs better recycling for cardboard; it really hurts to see all this paper put out on the street at night, and not being used properly. New York needs better recycling for furniture and clothes. New York needs more trees and green backyards for birds and better bike lanes and pedestrian safety and rodent control and a lot less university dorms and cleaner windows. Oh, and something needs to be done over rents and homelessness.
None of these issues will get fixed by communist methods. They will get fixed by kids who love entrepreneurship, love designing Android apps, and love connecting with other designers. They will get fixed by normal people listening to each other about their dreams and hopes.
They are getting fixed by volunteers, who turned The Ramble in Central Park from the gay toilet it was in the 1980 to a family-friendly park for birding. Volunteers are educating cyclists on bike safety, and running book clubs and thousands of other meetups on all kinds of interests.
I am extremely optimistic about all these things because that's what I see happening around me. No need for a Jim Jones, but there is a bit of Curtis Silwa in most of us.
Maybe you were born into some kind of slavery. Maybe there are drug dealers on your street, or all your teachers are evangelical Marxist preachers, or you have a hard time respecting your family because welfare is a more rational strategy for them than freedom. Maybe you need to free yourself first, by living in the world, with real people, to understand human nature.
Before you go and try to remold it, go live in the world for a few years, once you are done with your formal education. And before you decide whether anything needs to be changed, first go on a Leo Ryan fact finding mission.