Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh, Ileana Writes is a freelance writer, author, radio commentator, and speaker. Her books, “Echoes of Communism", "Liberty on Life Support" and "U.N. Agenda 21: Environmental Piracy," "Communism 2.0: 25 Years Later" are available at Amazon in paperback and Kindle.
The next stop on our cold day tour of D.C. was the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, the place where billions of banknotes, without any backing of gold, or even sufficient goods and services, are printed at the request of the Federal Reserve (the Fed) which engages in fractional reserve banking and controls our money supply and interest rates.
There was a time, sixty years ago to be exact, when people recognized communism as a threat to world peace, stability, and freedom. Works were published in the west that revealed communism and its dark totalitarian philosophy. Today most publishers bring to light anything liberal and progressive, singing lofty praises of socialism and its tougher brother, communism.
A neighbor down the street proudly placed solar panels on his house. He spent $4,000 after government subsidies and whatever deductions he may have taken from his income tax. He is confident that this move will save him tons of money on electricity and will safeguard the planet from global warming Armageddon by reducing his carbon footprint from fossil fuels.
There is one fly in this perfect ointment—solar panels generate “tons of toxic waste” during the production process and during their disposal/replacement.
There was a time when I did not care where I bought my Christmas gifts from. It was in the late 1970s when Sears and J.C. Penney delivered their heavy Christmas catalogs to our rural and urban homes and women spent hours perusing the tome for the latest toys for their kids, home decorations, furniture, clothes, Christmas wreaths and trees, bedding, and other necessities for our homes. Men bought the dependable Craftsman tools. We shopped for our TVs, camera, stoves, refrigerators, microwaves, washers and dryers from Sears. The famous brand, Kenmore, came in special colors like puke green and we could order those for $10 extra.
If you do a Google search of the definition of socialism, you will find a progressive definition of socialism and a progressive definition of socialism in history, both of which are historically incorrect. Both definitions bear a glaring discrepancy to reality and embody the progressives’ utopian dreams.
The first progressive definition of socialism is a “political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.” This could not be further from the truth. No community could regulate or own anything under socialism.
The mainstream media outlets inform us, reading from the daily Democrat Party briefings, that 7 in 10 Millennials are burning to vote Socialist even though they are not sure what Socialism is and 1 in 3 Millennials think Communism is great even though they’ve heard nothing about the millions of victims of communism around the world, many buried in mass graves which are still being discovered.
People still vote based on their own preconceived notions, interests, candidate personal charisma, their philosophy, and misinformation from the MSM they accept as absolute truth, without bothering to check on their own, either because they are either too busy or too lazy. Electioneering by volunteers or by paid individuals further muddies the waters. People know that politics make strange bedfellows.
Another retailer bit the dust and filed for bankruptcy, Forever21. It’s not that people don’t have the money for cheap and disposable clothes with each season and don’t spend. We are a consumerist society and the economy is booming, with the lowest unemployment rate possible, 3.7 percent in August 2019.
But people are spending money more wisely and often from their computer keyboards and the comfort of their own homes, not having to spend precious time, wear and tear on cars, gasoline, or braving public transportation to shop.
I never forget that millions of victims of communism, including my Dad, died fighting tyranny born by a utopian philosophy. They all clashed with the communist party’s Marxist ideology when they opposed the confiscation of their homes, land, guns, and personal property. They objected to the lack of food, heat, water, proper medical care, medications, human rights, personal freedom, and a decent treatment as human beings.
Elementary school students learn their first version of history from their College of Education licensed teachers. Some deliberately change historical facts to match their social engineering agenda or are too ignorant and lazy to research on their own and thus do not care what damage they inflict on their charges as long as nobody gets physically hurt while in their care and everybody has breakfast, preferably at the taxpayer expense. Once their minds are made up, nothing can change their reality - it becomes the solid rock chiseled by water over millennia.
We drove one overcast and pleasant day to Antietam National Battlefield in Sharpsburg, MD, 157 years since the bloodiest battle took place. We stopped on the way to see the Washington Monument Park, taking the minor Zittelstown Road. The paved road narrowed to one lane, flanked by old buildings leaning from age, rust, and neglect and surrounded by so much collected junk overcome by wild vegetation that I expected rabbits to jump from the tall grasses and weeds.
Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, once a bustling government factory town with over 3,000 inhabitants in its heyday, is nestled in Jefferson County, at the confluence of the Shenandoah and the Potomac Rivers. It exists today because the U.S. Armory (located here by George Washington) manufactured small arms here for sixty years, muskets, rifles, and pistols (more than 600,000) from 1801 until the opening days of the Civil War in 1861. With less than 300 inhabitants today, Harpers Ferry was the location of the incipient U.S. military industrial complex. The factory’s 400 workers produced more than 10,000 weapons a year.
I am always perplexed how naïve and easily duped humans are--not just those who are ill informed, but also those who were given a heavy dose of manufactured history in school. Perhaps they contributed to the textbooks that rewrote history in the first place, to fit their agenda.
Can anyone really argue with facts and reality? Apparently, supporters of Democrat Socialists do argue with those who fled tyranny from their own countries and defected to the “land of the free, home of the brave.”
As more high school and college students are indoctrinated by their teachers and professors into accepting socialism as the only solution to their future, the country seems to fall deeper into anomie. Anomie is “the social instability resulting from a breakdown of standards and values.”
They are so lacking in knowledge of their own country’s history that they believe what the Marxist professors and the MSM have been repeating ad nauseam, that we are a democracy when we are a constitutional republic. Lies, when repeated enough times, become reality.
“The trouble with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money” – Margaret Thatcher
I don’t put much value in polls. They can often be skewed by the composition of those polled and the honesty with which they answer questions, however, I paid attention to a Gallup poll which claimed that 4 in 10 Americans want socialism, the precursor to communism. If this poll is correct, then Khrushchev’s “conquest without war” would have come to pass decades after his death.
America is burning with repulsive Marxist fever which has reached a scorching level. Like sharks circling mad in bloody waters, the mainstream media, academia, the Democrat Party, and its American supporters are engulfed by Marxist fever and stirred into a daily frenzy devoid of logic and truth, ready to impeach our president and deport anybody who is not a Democrat Socialist.
The social/racial justice warrior activists are determined to replace the "evil capitalism" they suddenly detest and reject, with "equitable, classless, non-racist, and socially just socialism/communism." They have no idea what socialism and communism really are but that is of no consequence--they just want their promised "free stuff."
It is inconceivable for those born after 1989 who never experienced want of anything, that at one time, the proletariat of the communist dear leader Ceausescu had to survive on a decreed daily rations of food and standing in line from the middle of the night until stores opened and people fought for the food delivered in the morning.
Standing in food lines had become a method of survival and a national sport. Families involved their children, as young as five, to stand in lines to keep the place for a relative waiting in another line, always carrying an expanding string shopping bag reminiscent of a fishing net and extra cash.
A photograph came across my desk depicting an arch of triumph of sorts which declared 1965-1985 “The Ceausescu Epoch – The Golden Epoch of Romania.”
If you ask any Romanian, this twenty-year period was one of the most tyrannical and oppressive regimes in its known history. It was a painful period of dark and repressive communist dictatorship maintained and characterized by brute force, fear, mental control, and constant food rationing.
Conservatives used to believe in the true liberation of people from the enslavement by big and encroaching governments. You could hardly tell that today judging by the huge national debt they’ve escalated under a Republican president and a Republican Senate. They have been as profligate spenders as the Democrats, yet we still don’t have a wall to stop the invasion of illegals through the southern border.
Leesylvania State Park, named after the Lee family and their homestead in the bluffs covered with lush green trees, is located by the Potomac River. A swampy area, rich with fauna and flora, surrounds the banks and extend into tributaries in Prince William County, 24 miles south of the political swamp of Washington, D.C. and 24 miles north of Fredericksburg, Virginia.