Clinton’s Corruption and Sanders’ Communism
Today, having won the Cold War, Balkans, Iran… capitalism has made us too complacent and unaware of what the treat of communism really means. For Clinton and Sanders alike, everything that is wrong with our society is the fault of the “system:” there is “systemic racism,” “systemic incarceration” of black people, “systemic” police violence, etc. Clinton’s e-mail scandal is a product of systemic hatred and a right-wing conspiracy. This “systemic suspicion” falls on anyone who is not part of the progressive movement: Why not? They must have some secret funds in an offshore account! They must be part of a larger conspiracy! “They” are not “us!”
This “us against them” is the old Marxist motto: “If you are not with us, you are against us!” Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Brezhnev, Khrushchev and others used to say. Clinton’s tepid “Trumpian” take-off “Make America Whole again” means “It’s us against them” – the socialist worker against the capitalist “pig” or, as Sanders says, “the not-haves against the haves.” Property envy is a fundamental building stone of socialism. Socialism is not about striving harder to be better but about destroying what the other one has in order to be equally poor. Here is a joke which used to be traded among the youth when I was growing up in socialism:
“In Germany, when your neighbor buys a sports car, you work harder so that you can buy one too. In America, you work even harder so that you buy a better one. In Russia, you wait till dark and then venture out with a sharp key to scratch the beautiful shiny metal finish on that damned car you can’t afford…”
It is not a joke, it is a way of thinking – the socialist way.
Not many people know that Hillary Clinton knew Mr. Alinsky even better than Bernard Sanders did, although the latter has more in common with him personally, being of similar orthodox Jewish dissent, revolting primarily against his parents and their idiosyncratic doctrine of Jewish allegiance. Clinton spent a whole year seeing Alinsky on a weekly basis. He taught her the fundamentals of community organizing and “establishment baiting” (in Alinsky’s words). In turn, she dedicated a much praised 100-page thesis on his theory of community organizing entitled “There Is Only the Fight” which, frankly, sounds very much like Hitler’s “My Fight…” (Mein Kampf).
That is the problem with revolutionaries: they each feel they are great individuals singled out for slaughter. This is not a doom but a blessing to them: they want to be martyrs or, rather, they need to be seen as martyrs by others. Alinsky’s motto is as follows: bait the establishment, provoke them, and the moment you are attacked, stand up and say you fight for the people! Hitler rose to power in the same fashion. If anyone should dare oppose you, deny the accusations and attack them on your turf!
Hillary Clinton has met her match in Bernard Sanders though, who practiced what Alinsky preached even as she was learning the ropes as Alinsky’s favorite pupil. Obama and Sanders, both active Chicago community organizers, have been on par ideologically from the very start. Hillary Clinton descended to their level of thinking about people and society only upon thorough analysis and as a result of personal disappointment.
As apparent from her autobiography, Clinton prides herself on being “of the people.” Of Welsh descent, daughter of coalminers’ on her father’s side, and Canadian emigres from Bristol on her mother’s side, Hillary Rodham was raised in a conservative household and her first political escapades were on the Republican side. At the age of thirteen, while most of us were occupied doing homework, playing sports or plotting a date, Hillary Rodham was on the streets of Chicago helping canvass for the 1960 U.S. presidential election. Having “detected fraud” in Richard Nixon’s campaign, she turned to Goldwater as a volunteer.
While Sanders has always been an aspiring communist, revolting against his parents’ religious orthodoxy, Hillary Clinton’s socialism is tepid and moderate. Clearly, a la Bill, she is planning to run on a more middle-of-the-road platform in the general election. Hillary Rodham began to lean to the left during the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War. Her mindset has never been 100% socialist and I doubt she even knows what the word really means. When Sanders is attacking her “qualifications” because she is supported by Wall Street and the “big money,” he is doing so from the position of a left-wing communist whose ideology does not permit capitalism at all.
What Sanders fails to see is that corruption is not a systemic failure but stems from the integrity of the individual. The political system either upholds it and holds individuals accountable, as capitalism with its system of checks-and-balances and free speech does, or covers it – as socialism with its conformity and subjugation shall mandate. Now, with the shadow of the Panama Papers hanging over her head, Clinton has swiftly raised doubts whether Senator Sanders is “qualified to be president.” The press instantly focused on this issue, rather than covering the link between Clinton’s campaign manager Podesta and a Siberian bank listed in the Panama Papers.
What the latter yields remains to be seen. However, as to the question Mme. Clinton raised: Sanders is a totalitarian bureaucrat with no experience in the real world; Clinton is a failed Secretary of State whose only qualification is that she lost to a novice Senator in the previous race and he made her his own mercenary minion out of pity and shame. What makes Trump and Cruz popular is their unapologetic American Pride and self-reliance, qualities on which this country was built and which we so sorely need and lack in our public representatives today.
The threat of communism is the threat of ignorance and weakness. The threat of communism is the threat of dependency and desperation. The threat of communism is the threat of family disintegration. Ever since Plato, communists have been fond of abstractions and concepts such as “I am a citizen of the world” and “the state is your family” and “a philosopher is the best king…” The reason why the young are inspired by communism is because they want to make the world better. Alas, they know not how the world works – that making yourself better, furthering yourself through hard work and self-reliance is the only way to make the world a better place. Sanders has never learned it. Clinton knows it but she is too corrupt to mind – she would do anything to “equal” her husband…
Highest hopes and aspirations end in sadness and desperation when one believes his or her own propaganda. America is about idealism and the image of the Self, yes. True Americans – why, we are Walt Whitmans – all of us! Alas, at the same time, we know that our forefathers died for the liberties we enjoy, and that our compassion and empathy is the result the Civil War, and many other wars, and that no “Ism” comes to us as a Savior. We shall never be subdued. We shall never fall prey to an ideology. The only qualification our President must have is our Trust – and his Faith in US.
