Video here:
Story here from Jamie Glazov of Pajamas Media. (H/T ECM)
Excerpt:
The tortures included laying a man naked on a freezing cement floor, forcing his legs apart, and then an interrogator stepping on his testicles, applying increasing pressure until the confession surfaced. Imagine the consequences of no surfacing confession. Indeed, many people refused to confess to a crime they did not commit.
Daughters and sons were raped in front of their fathers and mothers — for the sake of extracting “confessions.”
These are just some of the delicacies that the Stalinist machinery inflicted on its citizenry in the hope of bringing socialism into earthly incarnation. Alexander Solzhenitsyn has shared much of this horror with us in his Gulag Archipelago — a work, mystifyingly enough, that I had never heard mentioned, except with a few exceptions, by one professor in a lecture or seminar in my entire eleven years studying Cold War history in academia. It was a work that I never saw, again with a few exceptions, on any academic syllabus — and many of my courses concerned Soviet history and American foreign policy toward the Soviet Union.
Both of my grandfathers were exterminated by Stalinist terror. Both of my parents, Yuri and Marina Glazov, were dissidents in the former Soviet Union. They risked their lives for freedom; they stood up against Soviet totalitarianism. They barely escaped the gulag, a fortune many of our friends and relatives did not share. I come from a system where a myriad of the closest people to my family simply disappeared, where relatives and family friends died under interrogation and torture for their beliefs — or for simply nothing at all.
Now try to imagine me sitting in the company of left-wing “intellectuals” in the West who think they are oppressed. This is my lifelong experience. I remember one radical feminist, whom I sat next to in a graduate student lounge, lecturing me sternly about how women in the West are oppressed because they wear bikinis on beaches; with a reprimanding tone, she explained to me that this represented the way capitalism objectifies women, marginalizes them from spheres of power, and metaphorically decapitates them as human beings. I remember asking her what she thought of female genital mutilation and honor killings in the Muslim world. To this I received a stone-cold silence and a frightening hateful stare, a stare with which I have become accustomed: I would be confined to a gulag or a psychiatric hospital if this particular individual had the power to place me there. This would be done for the good of society of course. My question was heresy: she could not, naturally, admit that evil adversarial cultures and ideologies existed — under which women truly suffer real oppression — for if she did, then she would have to sacrifice her entire worldview and personal identity.
Another colleague of mine, with great moral indignation and personal angst, once complained to me about how we are being “attacked” by Pepsi commercials. “By trying to tell us that we are not cool if we don’t drink Pepsi,” he agonized, “the capitalist machinery practices the politics of exclusion. By trying to pretend it offers us choice, it actually negates choice.”
My mom’s father was executed by the Soviet secret police. He did not have the luxury of being oppressed by Pepsi commercials.
The article goes on like this, there is a lot more I wanted to excerpt but could not for reasons of space.
These communist regimes get started by promising to the economically-ignorant masses a more equitable distribution of material goods, controlled by the government. The people, including Christians, abdicate their individual liberty and responsibility to the state in order to avoid worrying about having to feed, clothe and support themselves. The end is always the same: tyranny.
There is no Biblical injunction for wealth redistribution by government. The purpose of life is not to make everyone equally wealthy, the purpose of life is to know God and to help others to know God. And a secular government cannot have that same goal. So it needs to be kept as limited as possible to avoid constraining the freedom to do what we ought to do.
The impulse to “spread the wealth” has always led to reduced liberty. You need liberty in order to do your job as a Christian. Don’t vote to expand the power of secular government – vote to expand the power of each individual to make their own way and to give their own wealth to others if they choose. Christians are supposed to use private charity as a too; for taking care of their neighbors so that they have the chance to investigate a relationship with God.
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Canada has a single-payer health care system. Everyone pays the government based on their total earned income, and then the government decides who will be treated, based on special interest groups “need”. So it’s a disdvantage to be hard-working and prudent, since you end up paying taxes but never using any services. For example, politically correct services like taxpayer-funded abortions, in vitro fertilization, and sex changes are provided, but necessary care like MRIs are rationed with waiting lists. For some treatments, you can wait for years. And the government restricts the number of doctors in order to keep costs down, since fewer doctors means fewer claims to pay.
Now you may say to yourself, “Big deal! At least it’s fair! Radical leftist politicians love single-payer health care, and they get in line for health care right behind ordinary guys/gals just like me! We’re all in it together, eh?”
Erm, not so much.
Look at this story from National Post: (H/T Secondhand Smoke via Andrew, ECM)
Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams will undergo heart surgery later this week in the United States.
Deputy premier Kathy Dunderdale confirmed the treatment at a news conference Tuesday, but would not reveal the location of the operation or how it would be paid for.
“He has gone to a renowned expert in the procedure that he needs to have done,” said Ms. Dunderdale, who will become acting premier while Mr. Williams is away for three to 12 weeks.
“In consultation with his own doctors, he’s decided to go that route.”
Mr. Williams’ decision to leave Canada for the surgery has raised eyebrows over his apparent shunning of Canada’s health-care system.
“It was never an option offered to him to have this procedure done in this province,” said Ms. Dunderdale, refusing to answer whether the procedure could be done elsewhere in Canada.
[…]During the 2008 federal election, Mr. Williams vehemently opposed the Conservative government, launching his “Anything But Conservative” — which has been credited with keeping the Tories from winning any seats in the province.
Anything but conservative, indeed, comrade Williams!
But that’s not all. What about former Liberal prime minister of Canada, Jean Chretien?
Jean Chretien takes his own family to private health clinics. In fact, he doesn’t just use U.S.-style private clinics. He actually goes to private clinics in the U.S.
And he flies to those U.S. private clinics on Canadian government jets, paid for by Canadian tax dollars.
According to access-to-information documents obtained by the Canadian Alliance, on Feb. 8, 1999, Chretien and two aides flew from Vancouver to Minnesota, home of the Mayo Clinic. According to air force flight logs, they flew back to Ottawa that afternoon with Chretien’s daughter. And on Dec. 11 of the same year, Chretien went back to the clinic, this time just with his wife and his aide.
These trips were courtesy of the Canadian Forces 412th Squadron, which has flown literally thousands of nautical miles taking Chretien back and forth to the clinic.
And what about former Liberal MP Belinda Stronach?
Liberal MP Belinda Stronach, who is battling breast cancer, travelled to California last June for an operation that was recommended as part of her treatment, says a report.
Stronach’s spokesman, Greg MacEachern… said the decision was made because the U.S. hospital was the best place to have it done due to the type of surgery required.
But these Liberals are just regular leftists. What about the socialist leader Jack Layton? Surely a socialist wouldn’t take advantage of free market capitalism to be treated unequally, would he? That would be so greedy and capitalist!
NDP Leader Jack Layton, who’s campaigning as the defender of public health care, had surgery at a private clinic in the 1990s, The Canadian Press has learned. Layton had hernia surgery at the Shouldice Hospital, a private facility in the Toronto suburb of Thornhill, while he was serving as a Toronto city councillor.
Capitalism for me, but not for thee, eh, comrade?
WINTERY KNIGHT 