SEEKING TRUTH
I swore 45 years ago to spend my life making war on the Big Lie, and then, whenever possible, uncovering and embracing Truth. I believe what Jesus said that “The truth shall make you free” (John 8:32).I reject the modern, relativist premise that all truth is contingent, or conditional, and that there are no “absolute truths.” Life has taught me that this is propaganda, an insidious lie designed to deceive.
In my life-quest I’ve been blessed with some truly unique advantages, and life-altering opportunities. I hope the following will be of value to honest seekers after truth.
Since I was in my twenties, I’ve seen much of the world, from the secular-progressive desolation of American Indian Reservations, to a decaying, morally bankrupt Europe, to a chaotic, despotic Turkey. I lived for years in the often proud and dogmatic Middle East and Southwest Asia; I’ve seen the corruption and tragedy of Russia and the Russian Far East, and the oppression and exploitation that is Latin America; and finally, the hopelessness of North Africa and the Sub-Saharan African (highly unnecessary) human fiasco.
And not as a mere tourist, but as someone involved at the highest political, economic, and commercial levels. The longer I live, and the more I experience, convinces me that the political-economic system called socialism is pure poison to the human condition.
“If Socialists understood economics…they wouldn’t be socialists” (Frederich Hayek, Nobel Peace Prize-Winner, 1974).
MAKING WAR ON HUMANKIND
Before my travels and workings abroad I studied diligently, earning a Bachelors, then Master’s Degree, in Anthropology, then Arabic and Middle East Area Studies. Anthropology, the Study of Man, is a wonderful introduction to the world and those who inhabit our planet. Too bad it is taught by many who are in open warfare against the human beings who occupy that same planet.
But that’s a topic for another day.
THE HUMBLING REALITY
In these many excursions, these fact-finding missions, and then working on the ground often in hostile territory for years, I’ve come to realize one fact beyond all others: I truly know very little. And most of those “experts” we often look to for wisdom and skill know even less. In truth the wise person learns to walk in humility at an early age.
KEEP A SHARP EYE!
Sadly, the human mind and heart are poorly, even woefully, equipped for the Biblically-mandated commandment to “multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it.” We as a species, and as I believe, God’s spiritual offspring, are weak and easily distracted, often by self-serving men and women who claim to have all the answers. Keep a sharp eye! These serpents will tip their hand not by what they say, but “by their fruits,” by what they do.
Intentions are meaningless. Actions and outcomes are everything.
With that caveat (and I want you to apply it to me, as well), there are a few important observations I’ve made in the process of my work, observations that with each subsequent trip abroad convince me they are pure truth.
THE SOCIALIST SEDUCTION
Following a recent business trip to Angola, located on the west coast of Sub-Saharan Africa, observations made on this trip, combined with a lifetime of similar experiences, taught me that socialism is, in many peoples’ minds, a panacea, the easy road to eventual economic and social “utopia,” and what many believe as the “inevitable” worldwide “godless government of mankind.” Socialism, in truth, is humanity’s long sought replacement for God.
“The Socialist system will eventually replace the Capitalist system; this is an objective law independent of man’s will. However much the Reactionaries (the opposition) try to hold back the wheel of history, eventually the (Socialist) revolution will take place and will inevitably triumph” (Mao Zedong, Peoples’ Republic of China).
Angola is perhaps the perfect example of why I am more convinced than ever that Socialism, to humankind, is absolutely toxic.
The Republic of Angola today, on the surface, is a paradox wrapped in an enigma and tied up with the bow of human tragedy. This formerly communist dictatorship held national elections in August (2017) for the first time in decades. The former president, Jose Eduardo Dos Santos, has been in office since 1979. That, for the American people, was during the Jimmy Carter Administration. The United States has had SEVEN presidential administrations since then. Angola’s new president is one of the old president’s cronies and allies.
The more things change the more they remain the same.
Worse, for many years Angola was run, perhaps even controlled, by the Cubans, under the direction of the communist revolutionary Fidel Castro and the socialist butcher, Che Guevara. The Cubans propped up, then organized, a totalitarian Angolan police-state, one modeled on their own version of Revolutionary Stalinism.
The nation was collectivized and forced into a command economy where a cadre of Angolan communist intellectuals (educated in Europe and the former USSR), operated under the MPLA (Peoples’ Movement for the Liberation of Angola), following their Cuban “advisors” to control all major, and many minor, businesses and industries. But when Angola launched a totalitarian economy the nation faltered, in spite of being rich in oil, gas, gold, diamonds, copper and other metals, and some of the finest, richest agricultural lands, and potential hydroelectrically-exploitable rivers in Africa.
Angola should be a land of milk and honey and one of the world’s most prosperous nations. It’s not. Not even close. On the worldwide corruption scale Angola ranks 161 out of 179 countries (Heritage Foundation Study). Pathetic, and tragic, gifting misery to millions.
Thank you Karl Marx and the Socialist fantasy.
“There are only two places where Socialism will work. In Heaven where it is not needed, and Hell where they already have it” (Winston Churchill).
Many claim Angola’s economic failure was due to the civil war that ravaged the country for decades. Yes, to some degree. War tore the country apart for many years, as anti-communist movements, such as the FNLA and UNITA, under the command of Jonas Savimbi, struggled to oust the communist (Soviet and Cuban)-backed MPLA. A million and a half, mostly civilians, perished. Finally, the MPLA, with Cuban troops in the hundreds of thousands, was able to gain control of Angola and drive their freedom-fighting enemies back…
…just in time for the ignominious collapse of the Soviet Union and the discrediting of worldwide communism/socialism.
So, in the early 1990s, Angola’s leaders realizing that the totalitarian-socialist ideal offered little and demanded much, sent the Cubans packing and turned to the West (Europe and the U.S.) hoping to finally, once and for all, join the prosperity of the Free World.
“The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other peoples’ money” (Margaret Thatcher).
The only trouble with that hope and desire is that Angola, though rich in natural resources, remains plagued with the most insidious elements of the Legacy of Communism: Moral Corruption. The nation is morally and ethically compromised and remaining so absolutely nepotistic that it will likely take generations to eliminate the venality and instill in the leaders, and population, those principles of honesty, equality, and hard-working entrepreneurism that will bring security, peace and prosperity to the highest number of Angolans. For now, they are a very long way from such a blessed, and proven, entrepreneurial path.
“Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery” (Winston Churchill).
This, in essence, is the tragedy of the Legacy of Communism or Socialism, particularly for Angola. This is why the more I see the more I am convinced that socialism and the socialist mindset not only destroys peoples’ economic wealth, impoverishing nearly all in its wake, but more importantly, it desolates the moral fiber of individuals, of families, of the youth of a nation, engraining cynicism and despair. It teaches that God is dead (or never existed to begin with) and has abandoned mankind to poverty and hopelessness, leaving only the Almighty State to which to turn.
“The equal sharing of misery.” This is the socialist’s creed, in truth, and as valuable as any phrase you will ever read or hear.
Fortunately today, thanks to the spread of information technologies, these truths are now being shouted from the rooftops. They are available on social media, they are there for our education and our enlightenment. No longer do the nation’s Elites control exclusively what people see and hear and think. The truths you should have been taught in school are now available to all who honestly seek.
“Therefore whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light; and that which ye have spoken in the ear in closets shall be proclaimed upon the rooftops” (Holy Bible, Luke 12:3).
Socialist regimes always turn totalitarian. They have to in order to survive. Further in their endemic corruption they always end up cursing the poorest, the struggling masses, far more than their own controlling Elites. For proof look at what’s happening in socialist Venezuela, or Cuba. Chaos, crime, death, destruction, and always among the poorest and most vulnerable.
Closer to home, look at how we’ve savaged the American Indians living on America’s Reservations. I’ve seen this personally, up-close, secular-progressivism gone mad. The Tyranny of “Equality,” and the soft bigotry of low expectations. Also the struggling masses of the Middle East, Latin America, Russia, Southwest Asia, and now Africa, many who’ve been unfortunate enough to be caught inside these socialist “utopias.”
In Socialist and Communist economies you always end up with just two classes of people: those benighted Party Elites at the top, and everyone else—the poor, struggling, cynical masses on the bottom, living in misery and resenting (silently) those elite leaders who coldly exploit them. You get, as in the case of Angola, leaders who hold power indefinitely. Leaders you can’t vote out because elections are rigged and more often than not there’s only one party you can choose from, anyway, the Communist/Socialist Party, the eternal party of the corrupt elites, though always titled something wretched like “The National Woke Party” or the “National Socialist Party” (which is precisely what the Nazis named themselves), or “The Peoples’ Equality Party.”
And they do it with a straight face.
I’ve seen this on the Indian Reservations, in the U.S., where the Left, to further ensure its political power and control, perpetuates the Reservation system designed from the beginning of the Progressive Era to keep the American Indians, or so-called “Native Americans,” in perpetual dependence upon “Wash-in-doon,” (in Navajo) upon the Nanny State. In the process these wards of the state promise the American Left their political allegiance.
Nearly all, if not all, “Reservation Indians” vote Democrat. They are, in effect, “good little socialists,” willing to remain in perpetual misery just as long as their elitist overlords continue to keep the meager checks and bennies flowing. Yet today in these hellish, mostly rural and underdeveloped prisons, you find the highest rates of suicide, alcoholism, drug abuse, and generationally-engrained poverty and despair. I know. I spent 2 years of my life living and working with these struggling peoples, pulling their young men and women out of snowbanks in the winter keeping them from freezing to death, finding them passed out in their own filth from alcohol and drugs, and burying them in tragically high numbers from suicide, overdose, and accidents.
“The equal sharing of misery”—couldn’t say it better myself!
The legacy of corruption, perpetuated by the “intellectual” mindset that thinks that peoples’ lives, hearts, and minds will be actually improved by offering their eternal fealty to the Nanny State.
When we travel for business in Angola, or in Southwest Asia, or the former Soviet Union (any one of many former Soviet “republics”), we are always accosted at the airport, officials shaking us down, unbelievable graft and corruption, while driving on the insane streets, and then when attempting to leave at the airport or at the frontier. For government officials, as for cab drivers, or even those working the hotels, stores, and restaurants, the theft and venality permeates: Shakedowns, overcharging, theft, and general suspicion and mistrust at every level.
The Legacy of Collectivism, the Socialist Shakedown.
“We are socialists. We are enemies of the capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak…we are all determined to destroy this system (capitalism) under all conditions” (Adolph Hitler).
SOCIALISM’S ECONOMIC RUIN NEVER EXCEEDS ITS MORAL DESOLATION
The economic and political evil which infests this hellish form of government is bad enough. What’s worse—far worse—and much harder to correct and overcome, is the moral impact Secular-Progressive systems have on a society, from the elderly to the very young, creating a culture of mistrust, debilitating dependence, and moral degeneration. Families are broken apart, marriage is savaged, and personal incentive is gutted. People lose their critical entrepreneurial spirit, independence and the street-smarts to survive. Those who want to succeed fear that their successes will become a target of the Socialist State and those controlling, always parasitic, oligarchy or elites. The children are dumbed-down and morally crippled. Individual incentive and hard work is ridiculed and undermined. As in Europe today its jaded people become primarily interested in their vacation time and when they can retire. Productivity declines. The future is in doubt.
The young are taught to look to the Government for sustenance, for education, for housing, for medical care. Those who express a desire to be independent or personally creative are criticized, or worse, removed. The incentive to innovate, to build, to improve, is cut off at the knees and decisively, for such people are always an existential threat to the Socialist Elites. The inevitable outcome of Socialist practices are so blatantly obvious from even a cursory look at history, it’s amazing that anyone would advocate such policies, particularly in America, a land that was built to greatness on the tried and true concepts of individuality, personal freedom, entrepreneurial spirit, and the philosophy of the Judeo-Christian moral ethic.
America’s miracle of success, and its willingness to bless, prosper, and free others, is so absolutely clear historically it baffles me why so many today are willingly discarding this heritage for what is proven to shackle, impoverish, and corrupt.
“The goal of Socialism is Communism” (Vladimir Lenin).
Okay, that’s it. But for those of you stalwarts who were willing to read this far, tell me, please: Where have I missed the truth?
Tell me. I will listen.
–Richard Parker Robison