LAS MENTIRAS DE LA REVOLUCIÓN

Los revolucionarios de la izquierda marxista progresista están convencidos de que la transformación hecha por Fidel Castro en Cuba tuvo el apoyo y el objetivo de beneficiar a los campesinos. Es una gran mentira, tal como la atribuída en esa área a Lenin y Stalin en Rusia. 

La colectivización en ambos casos supuso la destrucción de la agricultura y la abolición de las pequeñas y grandes propiedades privadas, a lo que se opusieron los campesinos. La rebelión fue suprimida a sangre y fuego, en el caso cubano con el apoyo de asesores militares soviéticos.La periodista Anastasia O´Grady, del diario The Wall Street Journal, relata documentadamente esta verdad histórica que silencian los panegiristas de la utopía marxista leninista, en su versión castrista chavista de América Latina para Cuba y por lo pronto Venezuela.

Los resultados de la experiencia son siempre los mismos en la URSS, Cuba, Norcorea: control rígido del poder por parte de una elite civil/militar gobernante, supresión de libertades individuales, baja generalizada de la producción y reducción de los niveles de vida a las peores condiciones de miseria.

Pese a las evidencias el anhelo de alcanzar la utopía subsiste. Fidel, Mao, el Che son ídolos y Chávez y Maduro son defendidods por sus logros que tratan de imitar algunos gobernantes ahora en el poder en ciertos países de la región. La “justicia social” con “igualación de resultados” es el credo que guía a millones de “revolucionarios”.

A continuación el artículo esclarecedor de O´Grady:


A Soviet Cleansing in Cuba

The Russians used their experience at home to annihilate dissident peasants.

Mary Anastasia O’Grady Nov. 12, 2017 

By

Mary Anastasia O’Grady

Most Americans have never heard of the anti-Castro uprising in Cuba’s Escambray Mountains, which began in 1959 and took Fidel and the Soviet Union six years to put down. At the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, the episode is worth revisiting. If not for 400 Soviets sent to Cuba under the command of the Red Army and the KGB in 1961, it is unlikely that Castro would have prevailed.

What happened in the Escambray pokes a giant hole in Castro’s narrative that his revolution was a justified power grab supported by working-class and rural Cubans. The fact is that when Cubans began to understand that Fidel planned to replace Fulgencio Batista as the next dictator and to impose communism, many rebelled. None fought harder than central Cuba’s guajiros—small land owners and tenant farmers.

Forty years after Castro took power, a protégé named Hugo Chávez was elected president of Venezuela and allowed to consolidate power. Today that once-rich country is an authoritarian hellhole where toilet paper is a luxury and malnutrition is widespread.

Venezuelans did not see what was coming in part because of the failure of historians, journalists, lawyers, academics and politicians throughout the Americas to expose the atrocities committed in the 1960s against the guajiros and other dissidents.

Castro understood the importance of controlling the press, foreign as well as domestic. He used that control to popularize his version of events. He framed the resistance—those who rejected his communist takeover—as a white, urban aristocracy unhappy because it was losing its privilege under his new justice. Meanwhile, he wiped out whole farming communities with Stalinesque ruthlessness, and he did it with guidance from the Kremlin, which exported its experience in intelligence gathering and repression.

Agapito Rivera was born in 1937 in central Cuba, one of seven children in a poor family that cut sugar cane on a large estate. He told me in an interview in Miami earlier this year that when he first started cutting cane he was so small that his older brother had to throw the shoots onto the cart for him. By the time Castro took power, Mr. Rivera was 22 and married. That year a daughter was born. The young family lived in a small house Mr. Rivera had built himself.

Many peasants opposed Batista. When he fled, they celebrated. But they quickly recognized Castro’s ambitious plan to betray the revolution. Ironically it was the takeover of a large sugar plantation called Sierrita that confirmed their worst suspicions. Sierrita had been an excellent employer. The owners paid well and treated workers with dignity. Yet it was the first property seized in the area.

I wondered why Mr. Rivera had objected, since Castro was promising “social justice” for the poor. “I looked at that,” he said, referring to the confiscation of Sierrita, “and I said to myself, if he can do that to them, what future do I have?”

Mr. Rivera went into combat with other guajiros and alongside former Castro guerrillas who had fought in the Sierra Maestra to restore the constitutional democracy.

In his 1989 book, “And the Russians Stayed: The Sovietization of Cuba,” Cuban-born Nestor Carbonell uses the testimony of a former Castro intelligence officer to describe how the Soviets crushed the Escambray rebellion, which at one point numbered 8,000 insurgents. Castro had sent 12,000 soldiers and 80,000 militia to the region in late 1960, but they’d made no headway. So in January 1961 the Kremlin stepped in. It sent a contingent of Soviet coaches to a military compound near the city of Trinidad. That compound became a “KGB redoubt,” Mr. Carbonell explains. “From there, the Soviets secretly directed a major offensive to quash the insurgency.”

The operation mobilized 70,000 Cuban soldiers and 110,000 militia. They “uprooted most of the peasant families living in the area, and dragged them into concentration camps” in the far western part of the country. More than 1,800 prisoners were executed, according to Mr. Carbonell. “The obsessive goal was total extermination,” so the government forces “destroyed crops, burned huts and contaminated springs as they systematically combed the region for rebels or suspects.”

The U.S. made secretive attempts to get supplies to the resistance, but poor coordination hampered operations. When President John F. Kennedy withdrew support for the Bay of Pigs Invasion in April 1961, the U.S. also abandoned the Escambray. The rebels were outnumbered and outgunned but they did not give up easily. It wasn’t until 1965 that they were entirely defeated.

Mr. Rivera was captured in 1963, spent 25 years in prison, and was exiled in 1988. And the story of the Soviet campaign in Cuba to annihilate farmers and peasants—who rejected the collectivization of agriculture just as they had in Russia—never made it into popular culture.

¿QUÉ ES CAPITALISMO?

El Presidente Donald Trump acaba de concluir una gira de diez días por el Asia  y los principales medios de comunicación y comentaristas silencian los logros alcanzados en beneficio de la consolidación de los Estados Unidos como primera potencia mundial del mundo libre. 

Dialogó y persuadió a los líderes de China, Japón, Sud Corea e inclusive Rusia para que se presione aún más al dictador de Corea del Norte a que renuncie a su demencial programa nuclear y convino con todas las partes en renegociar las relaciones comerciales para eliminar el deficit contrario a los Estados Unidos.

Pero la batalla contra Trump por parte de demócratas y progresistas, que incluye a los republicanos del establishment, es implacable y persistente y no ceja pese a que ello perjudica a los intereses nacionales. Al silencio sobre la gira por Asia, se suma hoy el torpedeo al proyecto de reformar la ley tributaria, para simplificarla y reducir los gravámenes.

El corte de impuestos, dicen, aumentará la deuda pública. Nada dijeron en ocho años de gobierno de Obama, lapso en el cual se duplicó a 20 trillones de dólares dicha deuda. Rehuyen la discusión cuando se les explica que la baja de impuestos impulsará la producción y la riqueza, que es el método más eficaz para amortizar la deuda pública heredada.

A los demócratas progresistas en realidad no les interesa discutir, sino bloquear. Su mira, como lo han confesado, es modificar el capitalismo tal como está entendido e interpretado en la Constitución de la República, en reflejo de los postulados de la Declaración de la Independencia de los Estados Unidos de 1776.

Esos documentos, vienen de decir desde hace varias décadas, han perdido actualidad. Hay que modernizarlos y adaptarlos, afirman, a los postulados de “justicia social”, “igualación de resultados” y similares que, claro está, solo pueden míticamente alcanzarse, sin jamás conseguirse, mediante la supresión de las libertades.

El Diario The Wall Street Journal publica hoy un artículo de Andy Hessler, a quien no identifica, en el cual analiza en qué consiste el capitalismo y por qué es absurdo tratar de modificarlo, enmendarlo o disfrazarlo. Capitalismo es consustancial a la naturaleza humana, al mercado y a la libertad. Toda interferencia no justificada degenera el sistema.

Eso se observa aquí, en Europa, en el orbe entero y es causa del mayor o menor desarrollo de los pueblos. Obama y el progresismo comenzaron a inundar con trabas al sistema y frenaron el crecimiento de la economía al 2% en ocho años. Trump ha comenzado a eliminar dichas trabas y la economía crece ya a más del 3%. Más lo hará al aprobarse la reforma tributaria.

Del artículo de Hessler se destacan los párrafos finales que se reproducen seguidamente, con una versión al español. La nota íntegra está al final. Luego se transcribe el artículo de Anastasia O´Grady sobre la Venezuela a que alude Hessler, país donde el capitalismo no solo está en proceso de modificarse como quieren los demoprogresistas, sino de mutarse a  un capitalismo dictatorial de Estado, como el modelo cubano.  

He aquí los párrafos de Hessler: 

My advice? Drop the modifiers. There is only one type of capitalism that works, and it goes like this: Someone postpones consumption, invests his savings to produce a good or service, delights customers, generates profits, and then consumes and invests what’s left in further production. These profits are pure, generated from price signals between buyers and sellers, without favoritism from experts or elites. It isn’t hard to grasp.

Profit is the ultimate measure of value to consumers—and therefore to society. Consumers benefit from buying stuff, or else they would make it all themselves, and producers benefit from selling, or else business wouldn’t be worth the effort. Of similar value, profits go both ways. “Experts” who poke their noses in only mess with this fine balance. And who needs central planning when there’s the stock market, where theories melt and reality bites? Stock exchanges are the true consiglieres of capitalism, providing capital to ideas deemed worthy of it and starving the rest.

Most of this was once self-evident, but in 2017 capitalism is losing the mind-share game. Where does all this end up? For something scary, skip the next Stephen King clown movie. Instead read up on postcapitalism and progressive mutualism. It sounds like Venezuela.

(¿Mi consejo? Olvídense de los reformistas. Sólo hay un tipo de capitalismo que funciona y así es como opera: alguien posterga el consumo, invierte sus ahorros para producir un bien o un servicio, complace a sus clientes, genera utilidades y así consume e invierte lo que sobra en aumentar la producción. Estas utilidades son puras, generadas por las señales dadas por los precios entre compradores y vendedores, sin el favoritismo de los expertos o las elites. No es difícil de entender. 

La utilidad es la medida definitiva de valor para los consumidores y por ende para la sociedad. Los consumidores se benefician con la compra de objetos pues de otro modo los harían ellos mismos y los productores se benefician con las ventas; o de otro modo los negocios no valdrían el esfuerzo. Con esa medida, las utilidades sirven en las dos vías. Los “expertos” que meten sus narices en este ciclo solo echan a perder este fino equilibrio. ¿Y quién necesita de planeación central cuando hay una bolsa de valores, donde las teorías se funden y muerde la  realidad? Los intercambios de valores de la bolsa son los verdaderos consejeros del capitalismo, que proveen de capital a las ideas que realmente lo merecen y que dejan vacías al resto.

La mayoría de estos conceptos era otrora válida sin necesidad de demostración, pero en el 2017 el capitalismo está perdiendo el juego de las ideas. ¿A dónde irá a parar todo ésto? Para algo tenebroso evite ver la próxima película del payaso hecha por Stephen King. En lugar de ello lea sobre postcapitalismo y mutualismo progresistsa. Se parece mucho a como Venezuela.)

By

Andy Kessler

After the calamitous century between Russia’s October Revolution and Venezuela’s debt default last week, you might think socialism would be dead and buried. You’d be wrong: It’s capitalism that is back on the rack, being tortured and refitted according to the ideologies of its detractors. But be warned, when you modify the word “capitalism,” you are by definition misallocating capital. I call this fill-in-the-blank capitalism. 

Bernie Sanders offers a fine place to start. “Do I consider myself,” he asked at an October 2015 rally, “part of the casino capitalist process by which so few have so much and so many have so little?” (Emphasis mine.) Never mind that it was a progressive hero, Barney Frank, who said in 2003 that he wanted to “roll the dice a little bit more in this situation toward subsidized housing”— which helped lead to the financial crisis. Now Mr. Sanders wants to load the dice: Free college for all. Free Medicare for all. Free rations for all?

Al Gore, an ostensible environmentalist who made millions dealing with oil-rich Qatar, is no stranger to ideological modifications. On these pages in 2011, Mr. Gore co-wrote “A Manifesto for Sustainable Capitalism,” which demanded that markets integrate “environmental, social and governance (ESG) metrics throughout the decision-making process.” Yet messing with critical price signals through “ESG metrics” is exactly what would make capitalism unsustainable. See: Frank, Barney.

A 2014 Huffington Post headline declared “Let’s Make Capitalism a Dirty Word.” This was right around the time that “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” the French economist Thomas Piketty’s now largely discredited book, was published in English. Mr. Piketty called for a tax on dynastic wealth because of “a strong comeback of private capital in the rich countries since 1970, or, to put it another way, the emergence of a new patrimonial capitalism.” Tell that to Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page, self-made billionaires who weren’t even alive in 1970.

Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz tried to one-up Mr. Piketty, complaining in a 2014 article for Harper’s magazine about “phony capitalism.” But he offered a remedy! “A well-designed tax system can do more than just raise money—it can be used to improve economic efficiency and reduce inequality.” Messrs. Stiglitz and Piketty and all the modern-day central planners will no doubt gladly make the economic decisions needed to right the ship after they have sunk it.

The conspiracy theorist and occasional filmmaker Oliver Stone was at the July 2016 Comic-Con to promote his film “ Edward Snowden. ” Speaking to the cosplay crowds, he got nervous about the augmented-reality game Pokémon Go. “It’s what some people call surveillance capitalism,” he warned. “You’ll see a new form of, frankly, a robot society, where they will know how you want to behave.” He was borrowing the term from Shoshana Zuboff, a Harvard Business School professor—another strike against getting an M.B.A.

Much of this technocratic tinkering started with the 20th-century economist John Maynard Keynes, who called for government intervention in the economy to end a depression caused by government. He envisioned economists in control, running the economy. In “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money” (1936), his inner socialist comes out. “I conceive, therefore, that a somewhat comprehensive socialisation of investment will prove the only means of securing an approximation to full employment.”

It never ends. In 2012, Britain’s then-Prime Minister David Cameron talked about “socially responsible and genuinely popular capitalism” and blamed Labour for “turbo capitalism.” Whole Foods CEO John Mackey touts “conscious capitalism.” Postdocs in Che T-shirts whine about late capitalism over $6 soy lattes. China practices state-directed capitalism. The jury is still out.

My advice? Drop the modifiers. There is only one type of capitalism that works, and it goes like this: Someone postpones consumption, invests his savings to produce a good or service, delights customers, generates profits, and then consumes and invests what’s left in further production. These profits are pure, generated from price signals between buyers and sellers, without favoritism from experts or elites. It isn’t hard to grasp.

Profit is the ultimate measure of value to consumers—and therefore to society. Consumers benefit from buying stuff, or else they would make it all themselves, and producers benefit from selling, or else business wouldn’t be worth the effort. Of similar value, profits go both ways. “Experts” who poke their noses in only mess with this fine balance. And who needs central planning when there’s the stock market, where theories melt and reality bites? Stock exchanges are the true consiglieres of capitalism, providing capital to ideas deemed worthy of it and starving the rest.

Most of this was once self-evident, but in 2017 capitalism is losing the mind-share game. Where does all this end up? For something scary, skip the next Stephen King clown movie. Instead read up on postcapitalism and progressive mutualism. It sounds like Venezuela.
-------
El artículo de O'Grady:

By

Mary Anastasia O’Grady

There’s something vaguely uplifting about the house arrest of Zimbabwe dictator Robert Mugabe last week. But it’s depressing to think that he hung onto power for 37 years, despite hyperinflation and famine in an African nation that was once a major food producer for the continent. 

Ronald Reagan believed that “what is right will always eventually triumph,” but Zimbabwe is proof that it can take a long time. So too is Venezuela, which is experiencing its own Zimbabwean meltdown with no electoral way out. 

Venezuelan shortages of everything are widely acknowledged. But there is less recognition that strongman Nicolás Maduro is using control of food to stamp out opposition. Hyperinflation has shriveled household budgets and the government has taken over food production and distribution. Most damning is evidence that access to government rations has become conditional on Maduro’s good favor. 

The hardship is killing and deforming children. But Cuba, which runs the Maduro intelligence apparatus, also endorses it. Holding power trumps all. 

Maduro took the helm in Venezuela after the March 2013 death of Hugo Chávez. Over 14 years Chávez had destroyed property rights and civil liberties and greased the monetary printing press. But $100 per barrel oil covered his multitude of sins. 

Now the global crude price has been cut in half and the Chávez mess is exposed. The central bank’s net hard-currency reserves have fallen below $1 billion. Last week Miraflores Palace missed deadlines for interest payments on two sovereign debt issues and one bond issued by the national oil company PdVSA. Triple-digit inflation is spiraling. 

Outside the country many are asking why the popular rebellion, which was significant in July, has gone quiet. The answer may be in the government’s skillful use of hunger as much as imprisonment to quash dissent. 

Last week the newspaper El Nacional reported on a “food emergency forum” held by Amnesty International in Caracas. One participant was Maritza Landaeta, coordinator of the Caracas-based nonprofit Bengoa, which has worked to aid Venezuelans in food and nutritional needs since 2000. In describing the crisis, Ms. Landaeta shared the grim reality facing many mothers: “They say their children cry all day and they can only give them water. They are dying.”

Ms. Landaeta said some communities are experiencing undeniable “famine” and that in some parts of the country 50% of the children have left school because of hunger. According to the website El Estímulo Ms. Landaeta also reported that household surveys in the Baruta neighborhood of Caracas found that since the beginning of 2016 residents have lost, on average, more than 30 pounds. In September El Nacional reported that a study in 32 parishes in the states of Vargas, Miranda and Zulia by the Catholic aid organization Caritas Venezuela found that 14.5% of children under five are suffering either from moderate or severe malnutrition. This is no accident. 

Inflation has stripped Venezuelans of purchasing power. The minimum monthly salary is now 456,507 bolivars, which on Nov. 15 was equal to about $8. A year ago the monthly minimum was 90,812 bolivars or about $21. Obviously imported food is unaffordable for most Venezuelan families.

The breakdown of domestic production is not new. But it has worsened in the past two years. Without hard currency, farm equipment cannot be serviced and seeds cannot be imported. Price controls make it hard for local producers to earn a profit. 

The dictatorship increasingly controls what food there is. Dollars from oil exports go only to the state, which uses them to import. It also confiscates, at will, farm production and the output of agricultural processors. It plans to use the capital freed up by a restructuring of $3 billion in debt held by Moscow to buy Russian wheat. The government is forcing the use of debit and credit cards by withholding cash. This allows it to monitor all commerce and it saves on the costly importation of plane loads of new bills. 

Venezuelans face risks if they complain. Last week the government announced that anyone who “incites hatred, discrimination or violence” against another, for their politics, faces 10-20 years in jail. The threat of jail, or worse, has already caused a retreat from the streets. This new law, which includes social media, will further chill speech. 

Hunger has much the same effect because government rations are crucial for survival. Food supplied by the military-run Local Committee for Supply and Production—known by its Spanish initials CLAP—is not enough to live on. But it’s a subsidy that makes a big difference to families. 

To receive the rations, Venezuelans must carry the Carnet de la Patria, a government-issued license only available to those approved by the regime. As Ms. Landaeta bravely explained, “Food is controlled and votes are bought, food is used as a political weapon and is at the center of the hurricane.”

¿SE HARÁ JUSTICIA?

Con un retraso de casi 48 años, hay indicios ahora de que podría iniciarse por fin un enjuiciamiento a los Clinton por violación reiterada de la ley y la Constitución, siempre amparados por el partido demócrata y sus parlantes, los principales medios de comunicación del país.

Eso se desprende del anuncio hecho ayer y ratificado hoy ante el Comité del Senado por el Fiscal General, Jeff Sessions, de que estudiaría la posibilidad de designar un comisionado especial para que investigue independientemente las denuncias de los manejos de Hillary Clinton en la negociación de uranio a Rusia y otros asuntos pendientes.

Las primeras noticias de actos ilícitos de los Clinton datan de cuando Bill era Gobernador de Arkansas y Hillary participó con él en una transacción fraudulenta en la bolsa, que les significó jugosas ganancias. Más tarde Bill llegó a la Casa Blanca y ella optó por dos veces sustituirlo. En el interim, fue senadora por Nueva York.

Como Presidente, Bill Clinton protagonizó el escándalo con una muchacha de 22 años, Monica Lewinsky, que hacía una pasantía y a la que invitó a la Oficina Oval para mantener sexo oral con ella. Lo negó bajo juramento pero hubo pruebas de ello: restos de semen en el traje de la mujer, que se identificaron en el laboratorio.

La interpelación por perjurio fracasó en el Congreso por la oposición de los demócratas y de muchos republicanos del establishment. No obstante, el abogado Clinton perdió el derecho a ejercer su profesión por resolución de la Asociación de Jurisconsultos de Arkansas, debido al delito de perjurio.

Bill Clinton no solo fue perdonado sino que fue doblemente adorado por los medios por lo que dijeron fue un “desliz” sin importancia, su encuentro con Monica en la Oficina Oval. Desde entonces y hasta ahora es una figura estelar, modelo a imitar y hasta la dinastía Bush se cuenta entre sus fanáticos. 

(¿Con ese antecedente, sorprende a alguien la ola de “escándalos sexuales” que ha salido a luz en estos días? Bien puede interpretarse como fruto de las palmadas  de solidaridad dadas a Bill por lo de Monica y antes por el silencio frente a la debilidad por las faldas de John F. Kennedy, que todos sabían, pero todos callaban comenzando por sus cónyuges.)

Hillary compitió con Obama por la Presidencia, pero perdió. Pero Obama la nombró Secretaria de Estado y desde allí, junto con su marido, dirigió la Fundación Clinton para colectar multimillonarias sumas de dinero con el pretexto de destinarlas a obras benéficas, que en realidad eran para financiar su nuevo intento de llegar a la Casa Blanca.

Aprovechó de su cargo para presionar a gobiernos extranjeros así como a corporaciones del país y del exterior para que asignen cuantiosos fondos a la Fundación a cambio de audiencias, votos favorables y similares acciones quid pro quo. Para mejor ocultar sus actos fraudulentos, Hillary se las ingenió para montar un servidor en su domicilio privado.

Desde allí intercambiaba mensajes, muchos de alta seguridad, con gente a la cual pesionaba por dinero e influencias. Cuando fue soprendida optó por destruír 33.000 emails, varios smartphones y toda otra información que le comprometiera, aduciendo que contenían asuntos familiares.

Más tarde hubo un simulacro de investigación conducida por el director del FBI, James Comey. Sin tener atribuciones para ello, la absolvió de toda culpa, afirmando que el uso ilegal del servidor a domicilio y el cruce con él de mensaje de seguridad, fueron actos “sin mala intención”. Su papel debió limitarse a entregar el resultado de su investigación, para que sea el Fiscal quien determine si hay o no culpabilidad.

Pero las órdenes de exculpación fueron dadas con anticipación por Obama y la Fiscalía, de lo cual hay documentos. El objetivo era poner a Hillary en la Casa Blanca para continar con la agenda “progresista” de debilitar la vigencia de la Constitución y su basamento, un gobierno por consenso y el fraccionamiento del poder en tres ramas que se controlen mutuamente.

Si triunfaba Hillary todas las infracciones del clan Clinton habrían quedado sepultadas para siempre. Las recientes y las previas, como aquella venta del 20% de las reservas de uranio a Rusia, por lo cual ella recibió 145 millones de dólares para la Fundación y 500.000 para que su marido de una charla de 20 minutos en Moscú.

Para tormento del “progresismo”, Hillary perdió y ganó Trump. Trataron de anular a Trump diciendo que su victoria se debió a Putin de Rusia, pero resulta que la “colusión” nunca se dió entre Trump y Vladimir, pero si entre Putin y Obama/Clinton. Si la investigación toma cuerpo, aflorarán de la cloaca muchas, pero muchas noticias que ojalá terminen con pulverizar a la mafia Clinton. Sus cuentas bancarias personales y de la Fundación, por ejemplo.

¿Se hará justicia esta vez?

A 100 AÑO Y 100 MILLONES

Una encuesta revela que casi un 60% de los milenios en este país, o sea quienes tiene menos de 30 años de edad, quisiera que el capitalismo fuera sustituido por el socialismo marxista, para “sentirse más seguros” y para que “desparezca la inequidad”.

Tal pronunciamiento refleja ignorancia, que se explica por el deterioro de  los sistemas educativos públicos que han terminado por imponerse en los Estados Unidos, tanto a nivel escolar y de colegios secundarios como en el académico de las universidades.

El control de lo que se enseña ha caído en manos de la izquierda radical desde hace varios decenios atrás y se ha vuelto irreversible gracias al contubernio entre los sindicatos de profesores, la burocracia demócrata y los gobiernos de esa tendencia, que transan votos por intocabilidad.

A partir de la II Guerra Mundial y con énfasis a raíz de la de Vietnam, se ha impuesto el criterio en los centros educativos de que el belicismo nace con el “capitalismo explotador”. Los Estados Unidos, dicen, pelearon en Corea y Vietnam, no para repeler al comunismo sino en plan de conquista.

Los males del mundo, prosiguen, se derivan de los Estados Unidos y de su forma de vida brotada con la Declaración de la Independencia de 1776 y la Constitutución de 1778, no de las fuerzas externas, ni siquiera fascistas o comunistas a las que pretenden justificar como que fueron respuestas a la explotación.

Por cierto que no todo el sistema educativo está absorbido por el gobierno pues hay escuelas, colegios y universidades que se autosustentan y liberan de la obligatoriedad de sujetarse al curriculum sesgado que viene impuesto desde Washington. Pero son minoría y el daño del sistema prevaleciente es inmenso.

Porque quienes egresan ignoran la verdad de la historia de los Estados Unidos y la verdad del socialismo marxista, que este mes celebra 100 años de llegar al poder con Lenin y la difunden como profesores y periodistas. La dictadura comunista fue atroz y causó la muerte en la URSS, satélites y países seguidores de la doctrina, de más de 100 millones de seres humanos.

La utopía del paraíso terrenal sin desigualdades significó pérdida de las libertades individuales, prisión y muerte a los disidentes, destrucción del sistema productivo con hambrunas, más muertes y un deseo imparable de  poder más allá de las fronteras. Jrushov llegó a extender el imperio soviético a 90 kilómetros de la Florida, en Cuba.

El mito o utopía marxista no se ha desvanecido con la fracturación de la URSS en 1989. Sigue viva, estimulada en este país por un sistema de educación adulterado y por un partido demócrata cada vez más atenazado por una izquierda radical, que se cierra al diálogo, intolerante con quienes discrepan,  iracunda y violenta.

Cooperan con ellos los denominados republicanos del establishment, que vacilan en confrontar a los demócratas diciendo las cosas como son, o sea como las dice Donald Trump. Cuando no lo hacen, fracasan. Prueba de ello son las elecciones parciales de ayer en algunos Estados, en los cuales los candidatos republicanos “anti Trump” perdieron aparatosamente.

Trump no es un caudillo populista, como se lo quiere aparecer. Es alguien que quiere restablecer la plena vigencia de la Constitución, que se basa en la Declaración de la Independencia la cual presupone la existencia de un gobierno elegido por consenso, alternativo y fraccionado en tres ramas que se auto vigilan para evitar excesos de poder.

Con el socialismo eso no ocurre. La meta de la igualdad de resultados no es dable pretender sin eliminación de libertades. El colectivismo, por otro lado, mata la iniciativa privada, el incentivo del lucro y la competencia de mercado, por lo que se destruye la productividad e innovación. La división de poderes se sustituye por un Ejecutivo autárquico.

El capitalismo, a partir de la revolución industrial del siglo XIX, ha hecho más por mejorar las condiciones de vida de la humanidad que cualquier otro sistema en la Historia. Unido al sistema político instaurado aquí en 1776, la ruta hacia la prosperidad está garantizada porque todas las imperfecciones son posibles de corregirse sin alterar el sistema, sin abolir las libertades.

El comunismo y todas las formas clónicas de dictaduras fascistas, nazis y neonazis que se han registrado antes y después de la Revolución Americana, es todo lo contrario. A continuación se reproduce un artículo en el que se narran los hechos logrados por la Revolución Bolchevique de hace 100 años, publicado por The Wall Street Journal.

By

David Satter

Nov. 6, 2017 6:43 p.m. ET

Armed Bolsheviks seized the Winter Palace in Petrograd—now St. Petersburg—100 years ago this week and arrested ministers of Russia’s provisional government. They set in motion a chain of events that would kill millions and inflict a near-fatal wound on Western civilization. 

The revolutionaries’ capture of train stations, post offices and telegraphs took place as the city slept and resembled a changing of the guard. But when residents of the Russian capital awoke, they found they were living in a different universe.

Bolshevik fighters pose with a captured vehicle in Petrograd, Nov. 7, 1917. PHOTO: AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Although the Bolsheviks called for the abolition of private property, their real goal was spiritual: to translate Marxist- Lenin ist ideology into reality. For the first time, a state was created that was based explicitly on atheism and claimed infallibility. This was totally incompatible with Western civilization, which presumes the existence of a higher power over and above society and the state.

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The Bolshevik coup had two consequences. In countries where communism came to hold sway, it hollowed out society’s moral core, degrading the individual and turning him into a cog in the machinery of the state. Communists committed murder on such a scale as to all but eliminate the value of life and to destroy the individual conscience in survivors.

But the Bolsheviks’ influence was not limited to these countries. In the West, communism inverted society’s understanding of the source of its values, creating political confusion that persists to this day. 

In a 1920 speech to the Komsomol, Lenin said that communists subordinate morality to the class struggle. Good was anything that destroyed “the old exploiting society” and helped to build a “new communist society.” 

This approach separated guilt from responsibility. Martyn Latsis, an official of the Cheka, Lenin’s secret police, in a 1918 instruction to interrogators, wrote: “We are not waging war against individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. . . . Do not look for evidence that the accused acted in word or deed against Soviet power. The first question should be to what class does he belong. . . . It is this that should determine his fate.”

Such convictions set the stage for decades of murder on an industrial scale. In total, no fewer than 20 million Soviet citizens were put to death by the regime or died as a direct result of its repressive policies. This does not include the millions who died in the wars, epidemics and famines that were predictable consequences of Bolshevik policies, if not directly caused by them. 

The victims include 200,000 killed during the Red Terror (1918-22); 11 million dead from famine and dekulakization; 700,000 executed during the Great Terror (1937-38); 400,000 more executed between 1929 and 1953; 1.6 million dead during forced population transfers; and a minimum 2.7 million dead in the Gulag, labor colonies and special settlements.

To this list should be added nearly a million Gulag prisoners released during World War II into Red Army penal battalions, where they faced almost certain death; the partisans and civilians killed in the postwar revolts against Soviet rule in Ukraine and the Baltics; and dying Gulag inmates freed so that their deaths would not count in official statistics. 

If we add to this list the deaths caused by communist regimes that the Soviet Union created and supported—including those in Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia—the total number of victims is closer to 100 million. That makes communism the greatest catastrophe in human history.

The effect of murder on this scale was to create a “new man” supposedly influenced by nothing but the good of the Soviet cause. The meaning of this was demonstrated during the battle of Stalingrad, when Red Army blocking units shot thousands of their fellow soldiers who tried to flee. Soviet forces also shot civilians who sought shelter on the German side, children who filled German water bottles in the Volga, and civilians forced at gunpoint to recover the bodies of German soldiers. Gen. Vasily Chuikov, the army commander in Stalingrad, justified these tactics in his memoirs by saying “a Soviet citizen cannot conceive of his life apart from his Soviet country.” 

That these sentiments were neither accidental nor ephemeral was made clear in 2008, when the Russian Parliament, the Duma, for the first time adopted a resolution regarding the 1932-33 famine that had killed millions. The famine was caused by draconian grain requisition undertaken to finance Soviet industrialization. Although the Duma acknowledged the tragedy, it added that “the industrial giants of the Soviet Union,” the Magnitogorsk steel mill and the Dnieper dam, would be “eternal monuments” to the victims.

While the Soviet Union redefined human nature, it also spread intellectual chaos. The term “political correctness” has its origin in the assumption that socialism, a system of collective ownership, was virtuous in itself, without need to evaluate its operations in light of transcendent moral criteria. 

When the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, Western intellectuals, influenced by the same lack of an ethical point of reference that led to Bolshevism in the first place, closed their eyes to the atrocities. When the killing became too obvious to deny, sympathizers excused what was happening because of the Soviets’ supposed noble intentions.

Many in the West were deeply indifferent. They used Russia to settle their own quarrels. Their reasoning, as the historian Robert Conquest wrote, was simple: Capitalism was unjust; socialism would end this injustice; so socialism had to be supported unconditionally, notwithstanding any amount of its own injustice.

Today the Soviet Union and the international communist system that once ruled a third of the world’s territory are things of the past. But the need to keep higher moral values pre-eminent is as important now as it was in the early 19th century when they first began to be seriously challenged. 

In 1909, the Russian religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev wrote that “our educated youth cannot admit the independent significance of scholarship, philosophy, enlightenment and universities. To this day, they subordinate them to the interests of politics, parties, movements and circles.”

If there is one lesson the communist century should have taught, it is that the independent authority of universal moral principles cannot be an afterthought, since it is the conviction on which all of civilization depends.

Mr. Satter is the author of “Age of Delirium: the Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union” (Yale).