Common Sense Commentary: In 195a0-51 I fought a war with Atheistic Socialism known as Communism, in Korea. First against the North Korean Communists, supplied by the Russian Communists, and then against the Chinese Communists. I saw hundreds of executed civilians in the ditches of the roads leading back to North Korea in the wake of the Communist retreat from South Korea. Later, when the Marine Corps left North Korea, 98,000 North Korean civilians followed us out of North Korea and boarded our ships to South Korea. They had all the Socialism they could take and were starving to death under a dictatorial Socialist Regime. The entire nation was a disaster. Many years later, Socialism had finally bankrupted the Soviet Socialist Union, and Russia declared Perestroika, and opened the door in the Communist wall to outsiders. Buddy Nichols, Fred Good and I took a load of Russian language Bibles through that narrow door into the heart of the beast. We were among the first Westerners allowed in. We flew on Royal Romanian Airlines into the dying USSR where we saw the shabby, unmaintained, broken down airplanes, baggage handling equipment, streets, stores, cars and hotels throughout the several nations of the Soviet Union.... But they had free education.... to the chosen few. You just couldn't buy a coughdrop, toothbrush or practically anything else but 5 squares of toilet paper from a woman in the restroom where there were a row of holes in the floor along the wall. So don't you idiotic smart alec supporters of Bernie Sanders or Hillary tell me about the "Superior Socialist System" of government. You have no idea how utterly stupid you reveal yourselves to be.
Here is the testimony of a man who was raised under that Communist Utopia so many morons believe in and want in America ... Your lunacy is terminal. RB
From The College Fix Paper
Professor raised under communism explains academics’ love of socialism – and why they’re wrong
The difference between ideas and facts is lost on leftist scholars
Today Professor Florin Curta is a professor in medieval history and archaeology at the University of Florida, but his road to the sunny vistas of north-central Florida came by way of communist-controlled Romania, where growing up he grappled with empty grocery stores, power outages, and an oppressive government that discouraged creativity and free enterprise.
Curta grew up under the iron-fisted regime of Romanian President Nicolae Ceau?escu, a dictatorship characterized by unrelenting state-control, extreme poverty and widespread dilapidation and deprivation. Ceau?escu was overthrown and executed by firing squad in 1989, leaving his country in shambles.
Curta, meanwhile, managed to earn his bachelor’s degree from the University of Bucharest in 1988, and left his country in 1993, having been invited to pursue a Ph.D. at Western Michigan University after delivering a speech before the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Mich.
He hasn’t looked back. Discovering academic and personal freedom unlike anything he could have in post-Communist Romania, Curta permanently relocated to America.
“There’s a certain atmosphere in which scholarly thinking can grow in the United States that it cannot grow in any European country,” Curta said. “I left after communism collapsed, but it was a regime that left a deep, deep imprint on people’s minds. Even though there was no official communism in the government, a lot of people continued to think in communist ways, specifically in the academic world.”
Curta is one of the world’s most distinguished scholars in medieval history and archaeology – and is co-founder of the University of Florida’s medieval and early modern studies center, where he directs its certificate program.
He recently shared his experience growing up under a communist regime and discussed the rise of socialism in America during a phone interview with The College Fix:
Tell us about growing up in communist Romania. What was the quality of life?
Curta: Stores were completely empty. There was no food. There was a black market where you could buy some things, but obviously at much higher prices. Besides the fact that there was no food, every now and then electricity would be cut off in the apartment, at a sudden moment in time. You would not know when and for how long. Sometimes there was no running water at all, and there was no warm water at all. We’re talking about life in an urban environment, we’re talking about an apartment, not one or two, but thousands in which people lived in such conditions. I was in college in that time, and I remember actually studying in the library with gloves on my hands because it was so cold. So not a happy place.
Socialism appears to be a popularly embraced ideology in American academia. Why do you think this is? What is so tempting about this mindset?
FlorinCurtaCurta: I think that there’s an idealism that most people in academia, specifically in the humanities, share. We live in an era of ideological morass, especially with the collapse of communism that has left no room for those idealists in the academic world. No matter how you can prove that system doesn’t work, with an inclination to go that way perhaps because most people associate socialism with social justice, while the former is an ideology with concrete ideas and concrete historical experiences, while social justice is a very vague abstract notion.
You have to understand, the difference between ideas and facts is what is of major concern here. As my father used to say, it is so much easier to be a Marxist when you sip your coffee in Rive Gauche, left-bank Paris, than when living in an apartment under Ceau?escu, especially in the 1980s.
Why do you think socialist ideology has been gaining popularity with some Americans? Why do you think Democrat presidential candidate Bernie BernieStudentsSanders, whose platform is based-off of socialist ideas, gained such traction with the electorate, especially millennials?
Curta: First of all, I would not be willing to put a blanket on all of the population that is drawn toward that idea. It’s a matter of certain segments of that population, especially the young ones, and I think that has something to do with two factors, one of which is the distance in time between the real experience, the historical significance of communism. In other words, the parents of those young people who are now very enthusiastic about socialism and Bernie Sanders were those lived during the Cold War. So to them, socialism, or even more so communism, was a real threat. And they could see under their own eyes how that form of living was out there.
posterAlso the lack of historical knowledge. I would say the school system is responsible for that. You get courses at the university on the Holocaust, but you don’t get courses on the history of communism. Last time I checked, [it was estimated] 100 million people were killed under communism by various regimes in various parts of the world. That seems to have passed without a note in the academic world. I think that lack of prominence in the curriculum, in other words, not teaching what really happened, and the sheer ignorance about the disaster in terms of human cost, economic cost, in tragedy in general is responsible for this rosy picture of socialism.
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