By Tim Wood
I often wonder if other folks are feeling nervous, edgy, overly cautious, even distrustful, as I do these days. After all, this insanity within these so-called news cycles have never, as far as my history knowledge goes, ever been so emotional draining since, say, 1930 through the 70’s. Especially since the resurrected dead-horse of “Communism” is again now among us for people to beat upon.
By way of fate, our mother lost our family wealth in the Cuban revolution in 1960 after my father’s death. Ask me, I’ll send you her little book about it. After that traumatic episode my mother and older brother went very far right, seeking communist blood.
By 1966, Chip, before he was 30, had worked his way into the top echelon of white men within the John Birch Society. He was a senior staffer within their propaganda department. Mom had, by then, founded her own OFC (Organization to fight communism) with its little newspaper: “The Organization to Fight Communism.” She had even composed her banner song for her OFC, which I can still sing, flawlessly, even today. Ask me.
Mom had become a player in the anti-communist world often conferring with J. Edgar Hoover, Strom Thurmond, George Wallace and Barry Goldwater. She re-invented herself after 1960 into a type of new-and-improved Joe McCarthy by 1962. I was 12 years old in ’62. Believe me, I’ve never met anyone who has hated communism more than my mother and brother, Chip, to this day.
You know me, back to the dictionary. “Communism: A system in which goods are owned collectively and are available to all members of society.” These ideologies were developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in “The Communist Manifesto.”
Friends, I guarantee you, the five countries that claim to be communistic – China, Vietnam, Laos, North Korea and Cuba – don’t even practice true communism in today’s world. Each of these countries are closer to capitalistic-oligarchist systems presently. These are political systems that I think Trump most admires, although I think of him as more a weird mix of plutocrat and oligarchic.
All I really know is that Trump is not a fan of a true democracy. I do believe Donald Trump’s foreign policy and rhetoric seems to embrace the conceptional “Sphere of Influence” theory in which the U.S., China and Russia divvy up the nations of the world among themselves. A whole different concern.
So I truly believed that old communist-dead-horse would never get life back after, say, 1978, but Trump never ceases to amaze us with his “conning and cunning” magic. After what I experienced dealing with my early home life, I’m hoping you understand my present day edginess. I’ve already woken up from that side of the bed and I never want to see anyone buy into that tired, worn out fear mongering being reinvented now as just another “Red Scare” tactic.
Although I do believe Trump is simply an evil person, I just can’t believe there are people out there that aren’t simply bored and weary from his monotonous and very dangerous leadership. It’s really beyond me.
Castro was more of a socialist than a communist when he first became popular in Cuba. The U.S. actually supported him back then and helped him with overthrowing Batista when Castro stated his movement was not anti-democratic.
That all changed in April 1961 when he formally announced and declared Cuba’s government was socialist and declaring that he himself believed in a pure Marxist-Leninist personal ideology. To this day, America has never forgiven Castro, nor has the U.S. government felt a need to help the Cuban people that still live there.
Since that day American politicians have relished being able to marry socialism with communism without any right to a divorce. If you really want learn some interesting history, read about the Socialist Party of Oklahoma in the early 1900s and with Eugene V. Debs’ run in the 1912 presidential elections. That may quell any nervous conditions dealing with a term like “Democratic Socialist.”
What is really scaring me these days is the endless comparability of the Trump regime to the Hitler regime. Socialism is the least of my concerns. Communism in its original Marxist form does not even exist in our present day world. Those five countries mentioned earlier just don’t have the nerve to put a real, accepted terminology to what their regimes actually are.
So please, don’t grab another whip and join the beating of that old dead horse called communism. Study and learn exactly what democratic socialism is: “A political movement calling for the establishment of a decentralized socialist economic system within a democratically run political system” … period.
Tim and Kristy Wood moved to Beaufort in 1974. He worked as a carpenter in both restoration and new home construction, as well as operating a shop specializing in custom woodwork, Wood on Wood Specs. He is semi-retired, involved with fine woodworking and formerly sat on the City of Beaufort Zoning Board of Appeals.