Tag Archives: Marxism

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Friday night movie: Animal Farm (1954)

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Here’s tonight’s movie:

IMDB mean rating: [7.3/10]

IMDB median rating: [7/10]

Description:

Britain’s first animated feature, which, despite the title and Disney-esque animal animation, is in fact a no-holds-barred adaptation of George Orwell’s classic satire on Stalinism, with the animals taking over their farm by means of a revolutionary coup, but then discovering that although all animals are supposed to be equal, some are more equal than others.

I chose this movie because of the DNC convention and Barack Obama’s new campaign slogan “Forward”, which appears in this movie.

Here’s the background on that slogan from Washington Times:

The Obama campaign apparently didn’t look backwards into history when selecting its new campaign slogan, “Forward” — a word with a long and rich association with European Marxism.

Many Communist and radical publications and entities throughout the 19th and 20th centuries had the name “Forward!” or its foreign cognates. Wikipedia has an entire section called “Forward (generic name of socialist publications).”

“The name Forward carries a special meaning in socialist political terminology. It has been frequently used as a name for socialist, communist and other left-wing newspapers and publications,” the online encyclopedia explains.

The slogan “Forward!” reflected the conviction of European Marxists and radicals that their movements reflected the march of history, which would move forward past capitalism and into socialism and communism.

[…]There have been at least two radical-left publications named “Vorwaerts” (the German word for “Forward”). One was the daily newspaper of the Social Democratic Party of Germany whose writers included Friedrich Engels and Leon Trotsky. It still publishes as the organ of Germany’s SDP, though that party has changed considerably since World War II. Another was the 1844 biweekly reader of the Communist League. Karl Marx, Engels and Mikhail Bakunin are among the names associated with that publication.

East Germany named its Army soccer club ASK Vorwaerts Berlin (later FC Vorwaerts Frankfort).

Vladimir Lenin founded the publication “Vpered” (the Russian word for “forward”) in 1905. Soviet propaganda film-maker Dziga Vertov made a documentary whose title is sometimes translated as “Forward, Soviet” (though also and more literally as “Stride, Soviet”).

Conservative critics of the Obama administration have noted numerous ties to radicalism and socialists throughout Mr. Obama’s history, from his first political campaign being launched from the living room of two former Weather Underground members, to appointing as green jobs czar Van Jones, a self-described communist.

When you watch the movie, pay close attention to the communist pig Napoleon, whose slogan is also “forward”. What does the communist pig mean by “forward”?

Happy Friday!

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2016 movie reveals some of the radical influences on Barack Obama

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This is the most popular editorial at Investors Business Daily right now. It goes over what we know about Barack Obama influences and background.

Excerpt:

Obama’s father was so anti-West that British intelligence warned the U.S. not to grant him and a group of Kenyan students visas to study in the U.S. They were flagged in a 1959 diplomatic cable as radicals with an “anti-American and anti-white” political agenda.

When Obama Sr. returned to Kenya with a Harvard economics degree, he joined the newly independent Kenyan government as a Marxian economist. AP never mentions the July 1965 policy paper he wrote advising Nairobi to wring all vestiges of Western “neocolonialism” out of the Kenyan economy and replace them with Soviet-style communism, including industrial nationalization.

In the eight-page tract, he proposed economic tonics strikingly similar to ones now being pushed by his son, including: taxing the “rich” to “redistribute economic gains” and “economic power,” funding public works projects and other government “investments,” and forcing “people to do things they would not do otherwise,” such as joining government-run cooperatives to discourage “individual” choices not in the “public interest.” He railed against “free enterprise,” arguing it creates wealth “disparities” and benefits “only a few individuals.”

And more:

It’s plain from Obama’s memoir that he worshipped his father. Obama devotes more than 130 pages, or roughly a third, of “Dreams” to covering his father’s life and his colonized ancestry in Kenya. This is purposeful. Obama sympathizes with the idea that “neocolonial wealth,” held even by Asian business owners in Nairobi, should be “redistributed to the people.” (Neocolonialism is the alleged economic exploitation that remains even after political independence.)

Obama says he realized who he is and what he really cares about when he visited his father’s grave. He describes breaking down and weeping, whereupon he reflects: “The pain that I felt was my father’s pain.”

D’Souza says Obama sought out paternal surrogates who shared his father’s anti-colonial, anti-capitalist beliefs, including:

Frank Marshall Davis, a Communist Party member investigated by the FBI for un-American activities. As a teenager, Obama sat at Davis’ knee in his Waikiki bungalow, where he was brainwashed into hating America while romanticizing Soviet Russia. Interestingly, Davis put Churchill at the center of Anglo-American “imperialism.”

Rev. Jeremiah Wright, moreover, baptized Obama into “liberation theology,” which emerged from the communist movement in Central America. Wright’s church “stood in solidarity” with the Sandinista dictators of Nicaragua while Obama attended there.

Not surprisingly, Obama protested U.S. support for the Contra rebels. Wright also lionized Hamas and called for divestment in Israel, which he accused of having “illegally occupied Palestinian territories” for decades.

Derrick Bell, the late Harvard law professor, taught Obama “critical race theory” and “postcolonial theory,” which argues that Western imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism. Obama remained close to Bell until his death last year.

All three of these surrogate fathers of Obama, along with Obama Sr. himself, were heavily influenced by Frantz Fanon, a Marxist revolutionary who didn’t look or sound like one. Rarely seen without a suit and tie, the handsome and cerebral Fanon nonetheless described capitalists as “wretched” and the United States as “a monster.”

He called for “a planned economy, for outlawing profiteers,” and for wringing neocolonialism and capitalism out of every institution of society. In “The Wretched of the Earth,” the late Fanon wrote, “What matters today is the need for a redistribution of wealth,” adding “humanity will have to address this question, no matter how devastating the consequences may be.”

If you’ve never heard about any of the facts from Obama’s background, then I really recommend you go and check out “2016: Obama’s America” in theaters now.

News

Who pays the bill for handing out $2.2 trillion of entitlements per year?

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This article by Nicholas Eberstadt is the most popular article on the Wall Street Journal right now. I found it through Doug Ross’ links.

First, a quick review of the entitlement situation:

What is monumentally new about the American state today is the vast empire of entitlement payments that it protects, manages and finances. Within living memory, the federal government has become an entitlements machine. As a day-to-day operation, it devotes more attention and resources to the public transfer of money, goods and services to individual citizens than to any other objective, spending more than for all other ends combined.

The growth of entitlement payments over the past half-century has been breathtaking. In 1960, U.S. government transfers to individuals totaled about $24 billion in current dollars, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. By 2010 that total was almost 100 times as large. Even after adjusting for inflation and population growth, entitlement transfers to individuals have grown 727% over the past half-century, rising at an average rate of about 4% a year.

In 2010 alone, government at all levels oversaw a transfer of over $2.2 trillion in money, goods and services. The burden of these entitlements came to slightly more than $7,200 for every person in America. Scaled against a notional family of four, the average entitlements burden for that year alone approached $29,000.

Government’s job used to be to handle responsibilities like roads and bridges or like defending us at home and to defending our national interests abroad. But now government seems to be more interested in redistributing money taken from job creating businesses and their workers to those don’t create jobs and those who don’t work. What happens when you punish people for trying to succeed and reward people who don’t even try?

This is the result of wealth redistribution:

The proud self-reliance that struck Alexis de Tocqueville in his visit to the U.S. in the early 1830s extended to personal finances. The American “individualism” about which he wrote did not exclude social cooperation—the young nation was a hotbed of civic associations and voluntary organizations. But in an environment bursting with opportunity, American men and women viewed themselves as accountable for their own situation through their own achievements—a novel outlook at that time, markedly different from the prevailing attitudes of the Old World (or at least the Continent).

The corollaries of this American ethos were, on the one hand, an affinity for personal enterprise and industry and, on the other, a horror of dependency and contempt for anything that smacked of a mendicant mentality. Although many Americans in earlier times were poor, even people in fairly desperate circumstances were known to refuse help or handouts as an affront to their dignity and independence. People who subsisted on public resources were known as “paupers,” and provision for them was a local undertaking. Neither beneficiaries nor recipients held the condition of pauperism in high regard.

Overcoming America’s historic cultural resistance to government entitlements has been a long and formidable endeavor. But as we know today, this resistance did not ultimately prove an insurmountable obstacle to establishing mass public entitlements and normalizing the entitlement lifestyle. The U.S. is now on the verge of a symbolic threshold: the point at which more than half of all American households receive and accept transfer benefits from the government. From cradle to grave, a treasure chest of government-supplied benefits is there for the taking for every American citizen—and exercising one’s legal rights to these many blandishments is now part of the American way of life.

As Americans opt to reward themselves ever more lavishly with entitlement benefits, the question of how to pay for these government transfers inescapably comes to the fore. Citizens have become ever more broad-minded about the propriety of tapping new sources of finance for supporting their appetite for more entitlements. The taker mentality has thus ineluctably gravitated toward taking from a pool of citizens who can offer no resistance to such schemes: the unborn descendants of today’s entitlement-seeking population.

We used to want to earn our own success. Now we want to live on the backs of children not yet born. Slavery is a horrible crime, no matter where it is practiced. Isn’t it a kind of slavery to live it up now and then pass the bill for it on to generations not even born yet? It strikes me as a kind of slavery – taking an unfair portion of the income of others so that we can live at a higher standard than what we can afford through our own choices and labor.