Whenever a new way of organizing society and our economic
system opens up, one of the comments that comes to the surface is :"But
isn't that communism?"
Now, communism in itself as a word has become a word of
Terror. It is used specifically to instigate fear reactions within people,
where you do not want to be linked or involved in anything that may be deemed
'communistic'. But what is communism really? Nobody knows anymore. It's one of
those terms -- just like the Inflation concept -- that has taken on a life of
its own. In the case of communism, it's become a boogieman story. I mean, when
people talk about communism and 'fighting communism' it is done from an
assumption that communism is 'one clearly defined thing' and ‘it’s clearly evil’.
Truth is, there were many various different concepts that developed that could
be deemed 'communistic'. It's the same with Religion, you can talk about for
instance 'Christianity' but then within that you have various variations and
adaptations of Christianity. Forms of communism were adopted in Spain in the
1930s which were highly effective, yet you don’t hear about it anywhere.
So when you talk to people and ask why they are against
anything that could closely be related to communism, they go "oh but just
look at Russia, and all those people that died it was a total failure, it’s never
going to work". What is not being done is putting communism that took
place in Russia (or what actually would be more correct is to say 'the
communism that DIDN'T take place in Russia) into context.
What must be understood is that Communism as an idea and
Communism as ‘what happened in Russia’ are two different things. You see,
people were angry, people then had an idea and then they went into a Revolution
to try and implement that idea. The thing is that once they were in power –
they had no practical plan or way of implementing their idea in a way that
would actually work. They had no knowledge of things like politics and
economics and were completely inadequate and incompetent to actually run a
country. So, they tried things out, it failed, they went into fear and
established a form of authoritarianism and all in all the story did not have a
happy ending.
To go back to the Christianity example – the way Communism
is treated is the same way the Jesus message and Christianity is being treated
today. We have what Jesus said, being one thing – as principles of ‘Love thy
neighbour’ and ‘Give as you would like to receive’, which is very much a
principle of Equality and Harmonious Living. And then you have Christianity in
all its various ways as what is ‘supposedly the Jesus message’ – but when you
look at what is actually being lived out, is a message of fear, hate and
inequality. So just like ‘what Jesus said’ and what ‘Christianity does’ are two
completely different things – you can’t say that ‘Communism as an idea’ and ‘How
communism took place’ are the exact same thing.
If you look at what happened in Russia, this is exactly one
of the reasons why we never promoted any type of ‘Revolution’ to bring about
change within any of our proposals, because they are impulsive and
short-sighted. So yes, communism in Russia failed because there was no
practical common sense reasoning or research that had gone into what they were
doing. And because they failed big time, communism now has forevermore been
branded by the mark of the Devil, and we should fight it in any way we can.
So now, each time something comes up that even in the
slightest way could disturb the way things currently are and can in the slightest way be interpreted as ‘communistic': fear rises and it gets
boxed away. All communism has been reduced to in this day and age is a form of
fear induced superstition to keep people from actually thinking for themselves,
kind of the same way Parents will tell their children that the boogieman’s
gonna come for them if they don’t eat their veggies. Come up with any idea that
will bring about a change in the way the current system works and people will
come at you with the big C-Word to scare you into shutting up and
conforming.
It’s come to a point that anything that doesn’t fit and
support the status quo is labelled ‘communism’ and ‘socialism’ and anything
that does support the current system is called ‘democratic’ and ‘free’. It’s
just a word used as one pleases – if you don’t like it, call it communistic –
if you do like something, call it ‘democratic and free’. I mean, you can have
two countries who both to some extent operate within a form of Nationalization –
but depending on how much they threaten the status quo the one will be called
Communistic and the other one won’t. It’s just a word of convenience. Take
Chile for instance whose economy is based on the nationalization of copper, copper
being one of their main exports. They nationalized it and they did it
effectively – and yet Chile is not deemed communistic. In fact, the World Bank
will tell you that they are very proud of Chile and that Chile is an example
for other South American countries in terms of adopting the Free Market System.
But if you’re a different country and you nationalize say your oil and you
adopt policies that are unfavorable to the United States = now you’re
communistic = You are evil, your president is the Devil, you must be stopped.
It should actually become a rule that you can’t use the word
‘Communism’ in any form of argument or way to make a point, because the word
has gotten abused so much that it’s just a joke. If you can’t make a point without
resorting to terms like Communism as a form of Propaganda to terrorize people,
then you just shouldn’t bother.
