The Smear Campaign Against Socialism:

One of the apparent failings in American education is the lack of understanding on the differences between socialism, fascism, Marxism, and Communism. Or else there is now a concerted effort to smear socialism by linking it to fascism.

Here’s a prime example from Facebook (at this point I am not going to include names but I reserve the right to change my mind):

This image started the conversation…with the poster concluding because the Nazi’s official name was National Socialists…that this was the same as the socialism espoused by Senator Bernie Sanders.

Ugh, do you even know the definition of “Nazi”?

Nazi Party: National Socialist German Workers’ Party, which controlled Germany from 1933 to 1945

But, yeah, the Nazis incorporated the word socialism because the didn’t believe in it. Ugh, some of you are just a bunch of sheep that listen to liberal talking points….

and an opposing viewpoint:

That was fascism and theocracy, cloaked as socialism

and the original poster (in the face of any number of posters explaining the obvious and less than subtle differences between Nazis and socialists):

And SOLD as socialism

What did the people buy? Socialism or Facism? Socialism is soft tyranny just as facism is hard tyranny

So that might be one isolated aberrant right winger without a clue…but in today’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel we have another (since this is public record already I am not hiding any names…and MJS vets their letters to the editor) political equation that doesn’t balance:

Socialism is never the cure

Those of us who grew up laughing at “Trabi” jokes that contrasted stunningly junky Trabants, built by East German socialists, with well-engineered BMWs, built by West German capitalists, didn’t find the victory of an old socialist in the New Hampshire primary too funny.

Those of us whose fathers fought the National Socialists to the death and then turned around to battle the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the People’s Republic of China in the Cold War weren’t laughing much either.

Some of us still remember the delirious days when the “evil empire” collapsed, the wall came down and people on both sides of the iron curtain could breathe free. We were so happy that we didn’t pay much attention to the bitter old Marxists who retreated to America’s ivory towers to propagandize a new generation with old platitudes about class warfare, redistribution of wealth, hatred for the family and Chairman Mao’s blather that everything, even truth itself, must be sacrificed for a politically correct revolution.

It is no accident that the young people feeling the Bern today are blissfully unaware of the hundred million lives more or less (What’s a million or two for a good cause?) that the old socialists sacrificed to usher in their one world Utopia.

It is, therefore, ironic that it is the youngest presidential candidates who best understand that the battle has never been between the socialists on the left and the crony capitalists on the right but between individual liberty and the tyranny of both the right and the left. The fact that both families of these two candidates experienced the grim reality of socialism in Cuba seems to have inoculated them against the socialist delusions of America’s ivory tower.

These two young candidates understand that this election is not about whether Republicans or Democrats control the levers of power. Like the generations of Americans before them, they know that socialism, which sacrifices the individual to the collective, is both a symptom and cause of our malaise, never its cure.

Art DeJong
Sheboygan

This is starting to become a trend…and if I were a conspiracy theorist…this would smell like elephant dung and rotting tea bags.