A Warning

 The RNC this week brought us a number of good speakers and speeches (and a few mediocre ones). Alice Johnson, who was pardoned by Trump, was very good.  She came across as warm and genuine and I really connected with her.  Tom Cotton, who I generally cotton to (sorry for the bad pun), was stiff and robotic and was not as persuasive as some of the high school debaters I sometimes judge.  Ann Dorn was the most compelling.  Her presentation on the murder of her husband during the riots, and the kind of person he was, choked me up.  Poor Ben Carson followed and I couldn’t even focus on what he was saying because my emotions were still raw from Ann Dorn’s speech.

But probably the most poignant was Maximo Alvarez, the Cuban immigrant warning about the dangers of Communism. 

As we watch Antifa/BLM burn, loot, tear apart our cities and threaten people, roll out a guillotine and pelt police officers with bricks, frozen water bottles and other things, it is apparent that a majority of these people are young white suburban kids in their 20’s.   This begs the question of who parented these beasts and who educated them.

Alvarez offered a first hand account of what the horrors of Communism are all about, the false promises that quickly give way to repression and shortages, followed by beatings, torture, murder and death. 

The reason we have the Marxist Antifa/BLM rearing its ugly head is that there aren’t many guys like Alvarez around anymore.   It is the first hand accounts of the terrors of Communism that have kept it at bay, but as those voices age and die off, the reality of it fades into history.

I saw it first hand with a close friend of mine, who is Ukrainian.   His parents fled Stalin’s starving Ukraine.  His father fought against the Communists and was part of the resistance after his best friend was shot in the head in front of him.  He hid in sewers and ditches as the Communists hunted him like an animal.  He eventually made it over to the U.S. (later requested to be buried with his fellow freedom fighters in New York).  I attended the funeral of my friend’s mother a couple of years ago and was shocked to learn that each and every one of the grandchildren were Bernie Sanders supporters.  Two generations after their grandfather was hunted, his own grandchildren are now comfortable with socialism.

I strongly suspect that this is being played out all over the country.   We are 30 years removed from the fall of the Berlin Wall.  The people that actually experienced the terrors of Communism are fading away and the first hand accounts are now too far removed.  The people in their 20’s didn’t get to hear grandpa’s and grandma’s messages about the beatings, the disappearances, the killings.  So they are once again seduced by the siren song of  Communism and the demonization of “the rich.” 

Mr. Alvarez’s speech is a warning that needs to be heeded.

Likewise, I received this message from a young friend of mine in Venezuela last spring when I told him that there was a Socialist movement brewing in America:

“Incredible.  Someone like Maduro? A socialist? I hope the majority of the American population knows the catastrophe of socialism.”

I’m not sure we do anymore.  I am hoping that people like Mr. Alvarez will wake us up.