Can America Turn Socialist?
Submission:
Dexter Liu 52 Windy Ct Oriental, NC 28571
Can America Turn Socialist?
I am a 1st generation American of Chinese descent. My mother and father escaped Communist China in 1949 just as the iron curtain fell. Their story is profound and shares striking parallels to refugees escaping the rise of socialist Nazi Germany. My mother's family was wealthy, they lived in a large brown stone in the city of Shanghai. With Joseph Stalin’s aid, Mao Zedong occupied China. His young communist revolutionaries became what was known as the Red Guards or China's version of Hitler’s Youth Corp (better known as the Brown Shirts). On Mao’s orders, the Red Guards purged the country putting the Communist Party before all else including family. They went from house to house, confiscated guns, took anything of value and burned books and Bibles. They arrested those deemed disloyal to the teachings of Mao Zedong (all of China mandated to study Mao’s Little Red Book) even if it included their own parents or siblings. The Red Guards arrested wealthy landowners, intellectuals, Buddhist monks, priests, people of faith and hauled them all off to "re-education camps." Those who refused to go either disappeared or were summarily executed, often after a public mock trial. Mother’s childhood home was confiscated. Grandfather who had passed, left the home to mom's older siblings and their families. They were relocated to communes whilst Communist Party elites moved in. Within the first decade of Communist occupation, it has been estimated between 60 to 80 million citizens were murdered or died of starvation. Believe it or not, Mao Zedong’s legacy of terror continues. Even today there remains concentration camps in Communist China where horrific human rights abused continue under the current Xi Jinping’s regime.
God forbid anything remotely like that could happen in the United States of America. None of us want to believe it, but the political realities of recent years do not instill confidence that we might not go the way of socialist Venezuela. I was visiting a friend, a student at Columbia University in 1968 and was on campus during the anti-war protests. Even back then those anti-war protestors unabashedly proclaimed the virtues of communism. They were trashing our own military, calling them murderers, and accusing America of being an ‘evil tyrannical power’ seeking world dominance.
As a teenager growing up during the Vietnam War era, I rolled my eyes when my folks warned of the evils of socialism and communism. They suggested even back then that those protesters must have been infiltrated by communist agitators ginning up anti-American sentiment. My father said, this is because their goal is to ultimately take America down from within. Fast forward to our current political landscape where Democrats have launched a barrage of Social-Justice battles across the nation. It is clear that between the Woke Movement, Cancel Culture, Black Lives Matters and Antifa, America’s political discourse has gone to a very dark place indeed. With anti-American riots in our cities, BLM founders proclaiming to be trained Marxist revolutionaries, and openly Communist Antifa attacking our American institutions and terrorizing citizens ~ I’m not rolling my eyes anymore.
I’m an American, not a partisan with a vested interest in any political party. Quite frankly, both parties share much of the blame for many of the problems we continue to face as a nation. But the radical direction of the current Democrat Party is beyond troubling. Unless one has been living under a rock, it is abundantly clear taking America socialist is where the Democrat Party has pledged to do when they’re back in power. I will never forget when Barack Obama was confronted by a voter during his first election bid and he quipped, “don’t you want to spread the wealth around?” The very concept of the “redistribution of wealth,” however, is Marxism. It was Karl Marx who said, “from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs.” Sadly, so many still buy into that idea which is provably antithetical to basic human nature. Socialism has a long and disastrous record of delivering human misery. Wherever it has been tried the results have been predictably devastating. The most current example is playing out in our own hemisphere. But don’t take my word for it, ask any Venezuelan who has managed to escape the tyrannical grips of the current socialist regime. America has always been a beacon of light for those who cherish liberty and as President Reagan once reminded us, “freedom is but one generation away from extinction…,” fellow citizens, friends and neighbors, please do not allow that light to be extinguished.
Attached are photos of my mother and father’s wedding and my mother as a young woman in 1940s Shanghai. She brought it back from the only trip she made to China since leaving in 1949. She hadn't seen her brothers and their families for more than 47 years, or as long as Biden had been in Washington D.C. As you can well imagine, her family reunion was very emotional and bittersweet. My father, as the youngest of 13, passed in 1995 never having ever seen any members of his family again. Such is the devastating human cost of dictatorial Marxist socialism and communism.
A piece of mom’s Shanghai home (in ruins when she visited in ‘97).
