As a young lad, The Railer often zero-beat his shortwave transceiver on the biggest, loudest radio station the world has ever heard, Radio Moscow. You could hear it in the Midwest on a wet noodle at 7150 KHz, from early evening to about midnight. The propaganda was amazing, a Potemkin recitation of all the wonderful advancements in the Worker’s Paradise, and the contrasting imperialistic and capitalist evils of the poor, racist, hegemonic United States.
Even then, pre middle school mustache, The Railer knew truth. Russian store shelves were bare sans a few rotten foods or low-quality goods. Millions would have starved if Nixon hadn’t made a controversial deal to sell them our wheat. Famine is a natural and necessary feature of socialist regimes.
Today, thanks to an invasive communist virus, our supermarkets have become fashionably Venezuelan. We’ve also, temporarily we hope, adopted many of the same government practices that made/make socialist utopias like Russia, Cuba, North Korea, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, …, such hellholes. Here are a few scary similarities:
- No toilet paper
- No meat or fresh food items
- Centrally planned economy, government making top down decisions
- Medical care is rationed, and most services are unavailable
- Government decides when we can leave our homes and for what purposes
- Churches are closed, and you’re arrested if you try to worship
- Liberty seeking citizens may not congregate, those who do will be arrested
- Leftists are encouraged to protest, march, damage property, commit crimes
- Government decides which businesses can open, which must close
- Gun stores closed
- Jails emptied, criminals go free to reoffend
- Government approved violent predators immune to arrest or incarceration
- Police ordered to stand down, unless it involves the home of a government official
- Certain citizen classes protected, others targeted. Orwell: “… all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others…”
- Government pits citizen against citizen, “snitches get rewards”
- Government decides what products you’re allowed to buy
- Government employees and their pensions are paid, no matter what
- Private enterprise going bankrupt, the government is indifferent
- Oligarchs (Amazon, Alibaba, Walmart) reaping windfalls
- Many “earn” more by sitting on their arse, more than they reaped through work
- Beautiful roads, but no cars
- Travel restrictions, quarantines, documents, fines, diktats
- People riding bicycles
- Leftist pols fan racial division to divert attention away from government failure
- Overbearing, arbitrary, non-sensical government dictums at all levels
- Mountains of printed money – will ours defy history or become worthless?
- Like the Soviets, our czars have wisely kept the liquor stores stocked and open
Now that I look at this album mirabilia, I’m reminded that the Democrat Party and socialists (a distinction without a difference) in fact support most of these policies today – excepting perhaps lack of toilet paper. But the Railer’s hope is that this too shall pass, that we will soon return to our profligate, global warming, dino-juice burning, Trumpian MAGA hat swaggering lifestyle.
Look around Komrades, if the True Believers find their way to power under Bernie Ocasio Biden, then Covid Life is just a preview.