Remembering Communism by Michael Smith

I'm older than my Facebook friend Michael Smith, but we have some shared memories, except mine would begin with the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and a Chinese college roommate in 1958 whose family had fled Communism and all my East European classmates whose families fled Communism:

"Being that I am that old, I remember the news reports about the Soviets invading Czechoslovakia in 1968. I remember daily Vietnam War body counts on the Huntley-Brinkley Report at 6 pm. I remember East Germany before the Berlin Wall fell. I remember Checkpoint Charlie. I remember the Warsaw Pact and the hard line, pre-“glasnost” Soviet leaders, Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko. I can remember when China was essentially a closed society and a mystery to the West…at least until Richard Nixon visited there in 1972.

I remember the violent suppression carried out by these Marxist/communist governments, something that Americans under the age of 35 only read about in history books. To them, China has always been open, there never was a USSR and they have never seen a communist state roll an army into a neighboring nation because they were insufficiently communist. They have never heard miraculous stories of daring escapes from East Germany and the terrible accounts of the 171 people killed trying to reach freedom.

So spare me the mealy-mouthed excuses for Marxism, the admiration of communist China and how a little socialism is a good thing for America. I saw what it looks like in practice. Socialism is the gateway drug to Marxism and Marxism is the precursor to authoritarian communism."

Lords of Entitlement

WSJ Review and Outlook, Nov. 9, 2009:

"Speaker Nancy Pelosi defied policy logic and public opinion late Saturday night, ramming through the House a nearly 2,000-page health-care leviathan that counts as the biggest expansion of the federal government since the New Deal. As President Obama likes to say, this was a "teachable moment" about our current government.

The vote was 220 to 215, with 39 House Democrats joining all but one Republican in opposition. Mrs. Pelosi had to cajole and bribe her way to the magic 218, and the list of her promises must be stacked to the ceiling. . .

Mrs. Pelosi's craftiest political turn was a last-minute compromise to strip federal funds from insurance plans that cover abortions. The deal—negotiated by Michigan Democrat Bart Stupak and supported by the National Right to Life Committee—gave cover to 40-some Democrats to support the larger bill.

However, as subsidized costs soar, government will have no choice but to ration medical care, starting with the aged and grievously ill. Is pre-natal life more valuable than the elderly? We're reminded of the way pro-lifers supported Anthony Kennedy over Laurence Silberman for the Supreme Court in 1987 merely because Mr. Kennedy was a Catholic who claimed to personally oppose abortion. Mr. Stupak played the right-to-lifers like a Stradavarius."

So while the rest of the world celebrates the fall of the Berlin Wall today (without our president who is just too busy to travel if the celebration isn't all about him), and debates who deserves the credit for bringing down that symbol of Communism and the dictator state, our own elected officials continue to build a wall, law by law, regulation by degree, czar by czar, to keep out freedom, economic prosperity, entreprenuership, and free speech, while opening the gates to every crack pot, old failed European theory of government control we've fought against for 100 years.