From our Ex Soviet Agent in the Field.
Clarissa was kind enough to speak to my original post about why the left wants to eliminate individuality. Nearly all of my (Mises') hunches were correct, especially my belief the family was targeted.
She also strongly recommends reading this book about Stalin and just what a sick twisted and evil man he was.
Radzinsky's biography of Stalin is really good because it traces the origins of the Communist Party and demonstrates that its very nature is deeply terrorist and inhuman. If there are people who still have any illusions at all about communism, they will lose them while reading this book.
ReplyDeleteThank you for the link, friend!
I do wonder about the family angle in the Soviet Union. It would seem to me that living in that kind of forced poverty would make some families closer. Maybe that is one reason communism failed.
ReplyDeleteThanks to the material wealth the system produces here, it seems so much easier to break down the family unit. Thanks to divorce and laws that rape property and privacy, not as many men or women are married.
Actually, poverty is one of the highest predictors of divorce. If you have money issues, you're likely to be very stressed out and often, that stress can erode a marital relationship pretty easily.
ReplyDeletePoverty and the stress it causes makes families more susceptible to drug and alcohol abuse, physical abuse, as well as sexual abuse, and mental illness. The divorce rate is much higher in the lower classes than it is in the upper classes.
To be fair, individualism isn't exactly a good thing. Consumerism is a heavily individualist philosophy, as it preys on people's desires for "self-fulfillment" through ownership.
ReplyDeleteCapitalism isn't exactly pro family either. Women entering the workforce = bigger labor supply = lower wages. Also, divorced households = more demand for housing as well as parents trying to buy junior's love.
"Eliminating Individualism"....seems the Michigan Legislature just struck a blow for freedom.
ReplyDeleteFrom the linked-to article:
ReplyDelete"1. People are forced to share their living space with many different families. The privacy dies, and the annoyance of staying in a very cramped space with the people you are supposed to love grows."
This suggests that the design of Russian apartments -- most importantly with very few rooms -- was actually intentional, in order to eliminate privacy.
Fascinating!
"Court of the Red Tsar" is a fantastic biography of his era in peak power. Stalin was an outright asshole even to his closest associates. It was either his driver or his personal assistant whom he commented how the guy had such a pretty wife, too pretty for him, then he had her sent to a Gulag.
ReplyDeleteFeminism is just the tentacle of the socialist monster that gets between women and their natural, biological urges. Replace all ties between humans with ties to the state.
But I thought our professors had already established that nothing bad actually happened under the Soviets, that it was all a big misunderstanding...?
ReplyDelete