Many of us grew up watching movies about Dracula — Nosferatu, the Undead. Fearful of the sunlight that could burn him into cinders, Dracula lived in a coffin filled with his native Transylvanian soil by day, only to come out at night to live off the life-giving blood of the living. But to continue his unnatural existence, this human-like vampire had to kill his victims by draining them of their own blood, in the process turning them into creatures of the night, like himself.
Almost every Dracula movie ended with his nemesis, usually Dr. Van Helsing, the determined vampire hunter, finding Dracula in his coffin as the dawn was beginning to appear. He would drive a stake through the vampire’s heart or open a nearby window so sunlight could fall upon the sleeping bloodsucker. Dracula’s centuries-old body usually would rapidly decay into dust. The undead had now died, and the world was freed from this unholy aberration.
But, invariably, in the next film the life-destroying monster, in fact, turned out to have not been truly killed, or one of the poor humans he had turned into a vampire had taken his place to plague the living.
Sometimes Dracula initially would be portrayed as an attractive gentleman, appealing to the ladies (such as in the 1979 movie Dracula, starring a young Frank Langella). But soon his true, evil nature showed itself as he fell upon his human prey and made them into ungodly creatures.
Welcome to the seemingly unending cycle of resurrections of the socialist idea in renewed appealing forms.
(...)
Civil liberties were abolished, with no speaking or writing permitted other than the official line of the ruling Communist Party. Central planning meant that the government determined what was produced, where, by whom, and in what quantities. Every person’s educational opportunities, living quarters, and employment were assigned and commanded by the state in the name of the collective good.
Dissent, disagreement, or even suspected lack of enthusiasm for the advancement of the bright, beautiful socialist future (as defined and dictated by those at the helm of the “people’s state”) was met with arrest, imprisonment, banishment to slave-labor camps, or death by torture, starvation, or execution.
Human life was stripped of privacy, with everything anyone did or said being potentially reported by informers and everyone potentially under surveillance by agents of the secret police. Fear and suspicion were inseparably intertwined with any interpersonal relationship or association, whether in the government-assigned workplace or with neighbors in government-owned apartment complexes.
Friendships, therefore, were precarious relationships that could end up in betrayal and a knock on the door in the middle of the night from the secret police that could result in an individual or an entire family disappearing without a trace.
It was not enough for the socialist state to command and control your public words and deeds. Propaganda and indoctrination were used in an attempt to manipulate and mold how people thought about the world and themselves. The contents of the individual’s mind were to be a product of the central plan as much as the types and quantities of the physical goods produced at “the people’s” factories.
The human cost of the great socialist experiment to remake humanity for a new, collectivist heaven on earth did not come cheap. Historians of the communist experience around the world have estimated that as many as 200 million people — innocent men, women, and children — have been killed in the socialist meat grinders: 64 million in the Soviet Union and up to 80 million in China, with millions more in the other socialist societies around the globe.
(...)
The only opportunities for a better life came from being one of the Communist Party bloodsuckers of the ruling elite. They had special stores, special medical clinics, special holiday resorts, special living accommodations, special opportunities to travel abroad to other socialist countries or even “the enemy” West from which forbidden goodies could be brought back home. The rest of the society was truly the exploited masses from whose meager and government-misdirected labor those limited privileges and prosperity came for the ruling Red Draculas of the communist state.
(...)
But, like Dracula rising once more from the grave, socialism has been making a comeback among academics, a growing number of other intellectuals, and college students. It is reflected most recently in the Democratic Party primary win of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (who was a Bernie Sanders activist in 2016) over an established Democratic incumbent in a New York City congressional district. She hails as a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
(...)
The newly fashionable idea of democratic socialism is nothing less than the same tyranny of all the earlier forms of socialism experienced over the last 100 years in more explicitly brutal forms, just more rhetorically enveloped in the appeal of participatory democracy than the earlier cries for a dictatorship of the proletariat.
It remains the same life-draining Dracula returned once more from the dead.
|
