A SOCIALIST!!
Now I agree that Hillary Clinton is terrifying, though really no more so than any of the other sociopaths contending for the most powerful job in the history of humanity, but I'd never identify a desire for wealth and production to be distributed more in line with popular interests as her most glaring flaw. In fact I have a hard time attributing that characteristic to her at all. I can't imagine that an objective assessment of her positions and voting history, compared to that of any of the other presidential contenders, or compared to just the Democratic field, or hell even just to Obama, would find her to be the most socialist. And I can't imagine any meaningful reason to label her candidacy as a socialist one, overall. She's conservative on economic issues, hawkish on foreign policy, and authoritarian on domestic policy, though slightly less so than the ultra-lunatic incumbents. In the parlance of our time...
SOCIALIST!!
So, evil she-devil aside, what is so overwhelmingly wrong with socialism anyway? They never have a good answer to that question though that doesn't slow them down. They end up muttering something about how all the people from socialist countries are trying to move here for our medicine. (Huh?) Or how socialism basically just makes the whole government a huge corporation that inevitably collapses. (Isn't that what is happening here?) Their heads are full of nonsensical cartoons of history and political theory, but they know that sure as the sweet baby Jesus was born of a virgin, socialism is really fucking bad.
How did this instantaneous and intense negative association come to be? Noam Chomsky explains:
One notable doctrine of Soviet propaganda is that the elimination by Lenin and Trotsky of any vestige of control over production by producers and of popular involvement in determining social policy constitutes a triumph of socialism. The purpose of this exercise in Newspeak is to exploit the moral appeal of the ideals that were being successfully demolished. Western propaganda leaped to the same opportunity, identifying the dismantling of socialist forms as the establishment of socialism, so as to undermine left-libertarian ideals by associating them with the practices of the grim Red bureaucracy. To this day, both systems of propaganda adopt the terminology, for their different purposes. When both major world systems of propaganda are in accord, it is unusually difficult for the individual to escape their tentacles. The blow to freedom and democracy throughout the world has been immense.
7 comments:
OK, so my #1 biggest pet peeve about living in Louisville is that people refer to Universal Health Care as SOCIALIST MEDICINE.
WHAT?!?!!?!?!?
We are not living in the USSR! Allowing everyone access to quality medical care is not socialism!!!!!
Oh yeah, did I mention that these are fellow MEDICAL STUDENTS accusing me of wanting to institute some sort of evil dictatorship through medical care (not that I wouldn't necessarily mind being the next great dictator...)? And these same medical students are very fed up with the state of the healthcare system they are learning to work in, but refuse to believe that anything could possibly be better?
The best (or worst?) part is that I have convinced quite a few of them to see the flaw in their logic. Wouldn't a plan in which everyone could just get the healthcare they needed (need a vaccine? here you go!; need an antibiotic for your infection? here it is!) be better? Yes! It's not socialism, it's good practice!
I don't know where this socialist propaganda crap came from. I've never heard it referred to as socialist health care when I lived on the east coast. Then again, there's probably a reason they don't let us Kentuckians have a primary until the END OF MAY, when it probably doesn't matter anymore anyway (although my vote on May 20 might still be worth something, the way this election is going).
I acknowledge that you and I probably actually disagree on the utility of universal health care, but my point is that I DESPISE the use of the word "socialist" to describe it!
Why do you think universal health care isn't socialist? It seems to me quite consistent with socialist ideals (which I don't think is a bad thing).
Well, good point. But nobody says, "Ooh, socialist health care!" They say, "SO-cialist health care??" and scowl. So I disapprove of the term being used perjoratively and in a way that makes people think universal health care is bad. I think the term is probably associated with enough bad propaganda that it would be easier to call it universal health care, rather than explaining to people that I approve of socialism.
Republicans are great at selecting scary names for things their wealthy supporters don't approve of. Socialism is one of their favorite, but they usually save it for the things the REALLY don't like.
But, if socialism is so bad, why is Social Security so popular? Shall we jettison Medicare? And public schools, want to do away with those? Police and fire departments? All that creeping socialism...if people only knew!
FLIGHT OF THE CONCHORDS!!!! RHYMENOCEROS!!! who cares about anything else!
Socialism aside, universal health care has plenty of problems.
Every system has problems.
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