Is Communism the goal the left wing in Canada and the United States?
If so, civil war is possible.
On September 23, 1960 Nikita Khrushchev stated:
“It should be clear to everyone that there is no means and no force which can halt this struggle of the peoples for their liberation, for it’s a great historic process, one of ever-growing and invincible power. It may be possible to prolong the dominion of one state over another for a year or two, but just as in the past the bourgeois order of things came to replace feudalism and as, now, socialism is replacing capitalism, so colonial slavery is giving place to freedom. Such are the rules of human development, and only adventurers can believe that mountains of corpses and millions of victims will delay the advent of a radiant future.”
I had just begun studies at the Royal Military College of Canada at that time, and our military history classes took his statement as a serious statement of Russia’s goals. That view was reinforced by the words of President Ronald Reagan delivered before the Orange County Press Club in 1961 entitled “Encroaching Control” where Reagan was reported to have said: “Three months before his last visit to this country, Nikita Khrushchev said “We can’t expect the American people to jump from Capitalism to Communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving them small doses of Socialism, until they awaken one day to find they have Communism”.
A speech attributed to Khrushchev (but whose provenance is unclear) made the rounds of right wing America which stated:
“Your children’s children will live under communism. You Americans are so gullible. No, you won’t accept communism outright; but we will keep feeding you small doses of socialism until you will finally wake up and find you already have Communism. We will not have to fight you; We will so weaken your economy, until you will fall like overripe fruit into our hands.”
“The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those are willing to work and give to those who would not”.
Remember, socialism leads to Communism. How do you create a Socialist State?
There are 8 levels of control:
1. Healthcare – Control healthcare and you control the people.
2. Poverty – Increase the poverty level as high as possible, poor people are easier to control and will not fight back if you are providing everything for them.
3. Debt – Increase the level of debt to an unsustainable level. That way, you are able to increase taxes, and this will produce more poverty.
4. Gun control – Remove the ability to defend themselves from the government. That way you are able to create a police state.
5. Welfare – Take control of every aspect (food, housing, income) of their lives because that will make them fully dependent on the government.
6. Education – Take control of what people read and listen to and take control of what children learn in school.
7. Religion – Remove the belief in God from the government schools because the people need to believe in ONLY the government knowing what is best for them.
8. Class Welfare – Divide the people into the wealthy and the poor. Eliminate the middle class. This will cause more discontent and it will be easier to tax the wealthy with the support of the poor.
No one knows whether Khrushchev actually gave such a speech and it may well be apocryphal, but its content is worth a moment’s pause regardless of its authenticity. Let’s review each of the eight levels of control:
Control healthcare - Both Canada and the United States have a high degree of control over healthcare, in America through Medicare and Medicaid and in Canada through our public health and single payor system.
Poverty - While poverty has been in decline in both Canada and United States since the 1960’s, it remains an intractable problem in both countries with income disparity today at perhaps its greatest point in modern history.
Debt - Recent levels of spending by the Government of Canada under Justin Trudeau are unsustainable, even if our leaders will not admit this is the case. Planned spending by the Democrats in America under Joe Biden are similarly extreme and verge on unsustainable, although the size and scale of the American economy gives that country more room to recover balance. But the radical left wing of the Democratic Party in the U.S. is determined to increase debt by trillions of dollars to implement a left wing agenda with enormous change to public services including public child care, elimination of student debt, universal health care and a massive program to “fight climate change” estimated to cost many trillions of dollars.
Gun control - Canada has effective legislation to ensure firearms are owned only by people who have been trained in their use and safety and who are licensed to purchase or acquire firearms, with licenses limited to five years subject to renewals. The United States has little comparable to Canada’s effective system but there is a strong campaign by the left wing to increase gun control despite the “right to bear arms” provisions of the U.S. Constitution.
Welfare - COVID 19 has given both American and Canadian governments license to increase spending on social welfare in many forms, and there is no doubt that today millions of people are dependent on government programs to subsist.
Education - Recent surveys have found that as many as 30% of University faculty are avowed Communists and teacher’s unions in both Canada and the United States have strong socialist leanings with curricula in both countries now including divisive subjects like “Gender studies” and “Critical Race Theory”. Our children are subjected to programs that emphasize racism, religious differences, equality, diversity, gender identity and sexual orientation from grade school through post-secondary education with social studies degrees now being offered in specialties of these divisive concepts.
Religion - While Canada continues to support a separate school system for Catholics and there are Canadian private schools for several faiths, religion is not taught in most Canadian schools and little religion is permitted to be taught or for that matter discussed in American public schools.
Class Welfare - In both Canada and the United States, income and wealth disparities are widening and the middle class of both countries is shrinking. Main stream media in both countries encourages the envy and jealousy of “tax the rich” policies promoted heavily by the American Democrats and the Canadian New Democratic Party and Liberal Party ignoring the reality that the “rich” already pay the majority of all taxes collected.
It is plain and obvious that both Americans and Canadians are sharply divided on most if not all of these issues. Historically, both socialist and capitalist systems of government have found middle ground and compromise to build institutions that deal with the problems underlying the eight “levels of control” and balance personal freedoms with sensible policies that protect those most vulnerable without destroying individual incentives or discouraging innovation and a desire to succeed.
That balance is what is threatened today. The threats do no emanate from any major shift in the culture of either country but arise from the emergence of leaders whose objectives include increased government power over individual behaviour and suppression of wealth creation by successful persons. In a nutshell, Horatio Alger seems dead and buried and Karl Marx has been resurrected.
The global socialist movement has gained two allies since the days of Ronald Reagan, both of which are being used with force today.
Climate Change, or more correctly the promotion of global fear of “climate change” based on the specious Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory adopted by the Club of Rome and left wing government agencies at the United Nations. These groups saw climate change as a problem that they argue only a global socialist government is equipped to defeat.
COVID-19, a global pandemic arising from the release of a virus from a Chinese Communist government laboratory in Wuhan, China which now infects millions of persons in every country on the planet.
Both of these comprise problems that left wing leaders gleefully see as wedge issues that dictate a post-national global socialist government egged on by socialist leaders in the United Nations. They coined the term "The Great Reset” to label their 21st century attack on freedom and capitalism. Our Prime Minister is a leading proponent of the Great Reset.
Climate Change
The rhetoric seems incessant, with claims of doom and gloom if the world does not stop the rising atmospheric CO2 levels with threats of melting ice caps, rising sea levels, acidification of oceans, wildfires, floods, droughts, and every extreme weather event being laid at the foot of a miniscule 410 parts per million (ppm) of CO2 in Earth’s atmosphere. Ignore the fact that CO2 levels were as high as 2,000 ppm in Earth’s history or the inconvenient fact that CO2 levels are dangerously close to the 150 ppm level needed to support plant life and the photosynthesis the human race depends on to create the oxygen we consume.
Democratic Vice President Al Gore led the parade of prophets of doom claiming that if mankind did not act quickly New York City would be under water by 2005. George Soros later funded the creation of teenage activist Greta Thunberg to give a child’s face to the alleged threat to the world’s future. Neither Gore nor Thunberg have even the tiniest grasp of the laws of physics which AGW theory simply ignores.
The rhetoric has been supported by massive propaganda campaigns in Western democracies funded by left wing activists, Non-Government Organizations (NGO’s) and political leaders and their parties from the Democrats in the U.S. to the Trudeau Liberal Party and the New Democratic Party in Canada. Major fossil fuel consumers like China and suppliers like the members of OPEC and Russia have been conspicuous by their silence on this issue. But voters in North America, the United Kingdom, the United States, France, Germany, Australia and New Zealand have been convinced that “climate change” is real and can only be stopped by massive investments in costly and unreliable so-called “renewables” like solar and wind (they seem to ignore nuclear) and the suppression of fossil fuel use worldwide, adopting slogans like “Net Zero” to herald their campaigns. In an earlier article I explained why Net Zero is more of a threat to humanity than CO2 could possibly be under anyone’s theory.
Today, the result of this campaign has not been a massive shift to socialism but the natural outcome of market economies at work - that is, a global energy crisis entirely man made. The global energy crisis has 4 possible paths through early 2022, says Bank of America (msn.com). None of those paths is “global socialism” although the Bank continues to spout the climate change rhetoric. The likely path is a few decades of very high energy prices until world leaders abandon the AGW nonsense, embrace the value of fossil fuels, and develop long term alternatives since fossil fuels will be depleted within a century. Nuclear is the most reliable option but is held back by the drive for global socialism since it would defeat the “global warming” narrative in relatively short order regardless of anyone’s belief of the role of CO2 in climate.
COVID-19
Whether the COVID-19 virus emerged from a lab in Wuhan (the likely source) or was serendipity at work, the left wing immediately saw the value - voters would support draconian measures couched in terms that they were “to fight the COVID pandemic” and permit popular support of some of the levels of control attributed to Khrushchev. Personal freedoms would be sacrificed including those protected by both American and Canadian constitutions; massive government debts could be incurred weakening the economy but increasing the population’s dependency on government; businesses could be ordered shuttered; poverty would rise; government health care mandates would be accepted; schools could be closed or controlled; welfare would grow in importance for those disaffected; and, income inequality rhetoric could be used to divide rich and poor. Khrushchev could not have dreamed up a better plan.
Students of history know that the 1919 Spanish Flu pandemic was far worse than COVID infecting one third of the world’s population with a death rate of 10% of those infected. But there was no vaccine and no drive for socialism amongst Western leaders who were still rejoicing at winning the First World War and reveling in the success of the cooperation of democracies to protect themselves against an actual threat. What history also taught us from that pandemic is that two thirds of the world’s population did not become infected and the pandemic ended without any vaccine. Medical experts today seem to ignore the key question from the 1919 pandemic - why did two third of the world avoid infection and why did the virus fade into history? It is a key question because the answer does not support the left wing rhetoric of lockdowns, vaccine mandates, mask mandates, orders prohibiting crowds (despite freedom of assembly protections of the Constitutions of Canada and the United States).
Government power is a narcotic for politicians and the opportunity to issue edicts with wide public support is rarely ignored. Every time Parliament or a Legislature in Canada met since the pandemic began, or Congress in the United States, citizens were deprived of one or more freedoms and became more dependent on government for food and shelter. Even more conservative groups jumped on the bandwagon, not wanting to miss out on the power grabs.
The relatively few Canadians or Americans willing to stand up for the freedoms our parents fought and died for in the two world wars were immediately labeled “anti-vaxxers” and subjected to the heavy arm of law enforcement officers of the state. The freedom to choose whether to undergo vaccination or risk infection and the natural immunity so acquired (if the disease was not fatal) was abandoned. Privacy of medical records and the right to refuse treatment was dismissed as anti-social and punished through “vaccine passports” that limited freedom for those who would not acquiesce to government mandated vaccine programs. Businesses were subject to an endless litany of lockdowns, edicts, capacity limits, and other “public health” orders, causing many of them to fail and putting more people on the dole.
In an earlier article I explained why I believe “vaccine passports” are divisive, counter productive and an unwarranted assault on freedom.
THE RISK OF CIVIL WAR
The return of Justin Trudeau as Prime Minister in his “vanity election” ordered in the hopes of a majority government heralds renewed efforts to limit freedoms. Minister Steven Guilbeault is already working on censorship laws to police what Canadians say on social media. Trudeau is promising continued high levels of spending on social programs and dismisses the enormous deficits as problems that he thinks will solve themselves, stating he doesn’t even think about monetary policy, just about families. Marx could not have drafted better rhetoric.
As the Liberals continue to pretend Canada suffers “systemic racism” despite its Constitution, Charter of Rights, Human Rights Tribunal and Hate Laws that evidence a system that is the antithesis of “racist”, our leaders seek to divide us into groups and pit those groups against one another. Group identity becomes paramount as people are classified by race, gender, sexual orientation, religion or ideology and the pretense that “diversity is our strength” is turned on its ear by using the group identities to foment hatred.
There is in Canada and I think in America, a quiet middle of society that avoids the headlines and talking points but values individual freedom, economic opportunity, small government, and merit as the foundations of social status and individual success. They are quiet, ignored and powerful. When leaders go too far and cross the line into outright tyranny, they are likely to find this group does not quietly whimper and accede to the authoritarian rule but takes up arms and fills the streets.
Think in can’t happen? Think again. It has happened many times throughout history as tyrants found their subjects unwilling to continue to live under tyranny, with leaders such as Louis XVI of France and his wife Marie Antoinette losing their heads; Russian Tsars overthrown; and, Mussolini hung from his heels in the streets of Italy. The leaders of those revolutions overturning tyrants were virtually unknowns until they emerged and simply spoke out in meaningful terms about the tyranny they were suffering and found immediate support from a populace underestimated by the despots in power. Today Maximilien Robespierre and Vladimir Lenin are familiar to historians (perhaps because they also became tyrants as soon as they gained power) but Georges Danton and Dino Grandi remain relative unknowns.
Venezuela is the canary in the coal mine in respect of left wing socialist governments. Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves and went from being the third richest country in Latin America to socialist chaos in one generation. Here is the timeline and the list of policies that destroyed their country. Sound familiar?
1992 Became the third richest country in the Southern hemisphere
1997 Became the largest market for Ford F-150 pickup trucks
2001 Vote for Socialist President promising “income equality”
2004 Socialized healthcare abolishing private healthcare
2007 Introduced free higher education
2009 Banned private ownership of guns
2012 Praised by Bernie Sanders for its “American Dream”
2014 Opposition leader imprisoned
2017 Constitution and elections suspended
2019 Unarmed citizens massacred by their own government
Violent uprisings can happen here. If Canada does not find ways:
to embrace its natural resources as a strength and not a threat;
to recognize that we are a country of citizens who respect one another regardless of race, religion, sexual orientation, gender or ideology;
to quit pitting Western provinces against Central Canada but unite all Provinces with roads, railroads, pipelines, open borders and a common desire for shared prosperity; and,
to apply common sense and science to public health policies and abandon nonsense like AGW,
we face growing discontent that will not be resolved at the ballot box but at the point of a gun. As one pundit said: “You can vote yourself into socialism but you have to shoot yourself out”.