A press release titled “Wash U. Students Build Memorial to Victims of Socialism” landed in my inbox:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
The students of Young Americans for Liberty are hosting a rally to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall at NOON on Monday November 9th, 2009, on the lawn outside the Ann W. Olin Women’s Building.
Students will be constructing a memorial to the victims of socialism as a stark reminder of the horrors of socialism, and of its victims.
“We’re hoping to elevate the thinking of students about the connection between socialism, tyranny, and murder. Too often, we tend to think about state control in the abstract. This event is an opportunity to show the student body what socialism really is,” said junior Dirk Doebler, student leader of Young Americans for Liberty and lead organizer of the event. “We’re just twenty years away from the collapse of the Soviet Union’s despotic enslavement of hundreds of millions of people, yet everyone seems to forget that socialism killed over 150,000,000 people in the 20th century. All that gets lost in the convenient narrative our professors would have us believe. With this event, we’re striking down false notions. We’re speaking truth to power.”
Young Americans for Liberty is a growing student group at Washington University in St. Louis. YAL agrees with Nobel Laureate in economics Frederick Hayek, that socialism leads to totalitarianism. Socialism is a faulty idea that kills. This event aims at showing the horrors of the implementation of that idea.
Could it be that these students are urging others to attempt a certain leap of logic? To wit, that a part of the world that moved from one autocratic system of governance (a tsarist regime) to another (Stalinism) should serve as a warning against the Democrats’ attempt to institute universal health care in this country?
Oh.
Quick. Somebody get on the horn to Europe to warn all those democracies that they’re already thirty years down the road toward becoming Stalinist/Maoist dictatorships. Thank god there’s still time to avoid that fate here.
But I fear that students at that bastion of liberalism, Washington University, will take a look at this piece of theater, roll their eyes, and attend their 1:15 classes, granting all due respect to their left wing professors.
Nothing like a group of middle and upper middle class young people at an elite institution standing up for the status quo. The sheer bravery is overwhelming.
It’s also ironic, since, if they know anything about Hayek whom they cite, they must realize that his concept of freedom was relative to say the least, and mostly confined to the workings of the market if I remember correctly. During his life, he was a supporter of Pinochet in Chile, stating that he preferred dictatorship to the wrong type of democracy, which would, presumably, be a democracy dedicated to social justice, a concept he eschewed.
I have the utmost respect for the world of ideas.Academics and intellectuals enrich our brain trust. They also enjoy the luxury of never having to manage or motivate an organization or other than publishing, produce results. In my opinion, the paradigms of East Coast Intellectuals are either misplaced or extinct and help Conservatives win Independents by default.
if for communism, Stalinism, Maoism, etc. applied to the Soviet Union or China, one substittuted “Statism,” as Michael Harrington suggests in his remarks on the fall of the Soviet Union (I don’t have the reference at hand), one might have a truer idea of what is implied.
In the same way, although the supporting dogma was different Nazism and facism are also statist idelogies. So when conservatives are talking about the similarities between facism and communism they are onto something — although the similarities have nothing to do with the communist tenets per se, but rather with the flawed implementstion of the communist ideology in the two largest communist experiments during the 20th century.