Dems: "Socialism is superior!" Boris Yeltsin's visit to a U.S. grocery store said that was a lie
One of the unfortunate blind spots of older Americans is that we often don't actually internalize how much time has passed since some really big event, like the fall of the Berlin wall or the reversion of the former Soviet Union into Russia and 18-odd former soviet states.
This takes on relevance when you realize that both those world-changing events happened over a decade before today's college students were born. Meaning that almost no college student today has even the faintest idea of what caused those events, or what caused them, or what the Cold War was.
By chance, for the past 30-some years my job has given me the opportunity to casually interview 100 or so top-quality college students each week. And I can confirm that so far, not one knows anything about the events above.
For example, Democrats and the Mainstream Media have repeatedly tried to equate building a wall on our southern border with the infamous Berlin Wall. Today's students have no idea that after WW2 the communist regime in East Germany built a virtually impenetrable wall between East and West Germany, complete with minefields, machinegun towers and spotlights. The purpose was to keep oppressed East Germans (and citizens of other communist nations that were allowed to travel to that nation) from fleeing to the west. Our media have equated the two walls despite the crucial difference that the East German wall prevented its own people from leaving, while our southern wall is to keep illegal invaders OUT.
The two can't be rationally equated, and yet our media have repeated done it.
The failure of today's college-age students to know anything of the Cold War is NOT an indictment of today's college students, because with tiny exceptions they only know what they've been taught in school. And with most school systems being run by far-left board members and administrators, U.S. schools just don't teach anything relevant about world politics during that time, preferring to spend precious, limited contact hours teaching about the joys of transgenders, or the joys of gay parents, or the outrageous lie that slavery was a uniquely American institution created by the Founders.
With this in mind I wanted to pass along a vignette that seems to convey the vast gulf between communism and capitalism, which would eventually lead to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the re-unification of Germany and the dissolution of the former Soviet Union.
The former Soviet Union was larger than the U.S., and blessed with virtually identical natural resources. The people were smart and the best schools were very competent. Yet compared to all western nations, the standard of living in the Soviet Union was miserable. They simply didn't have the economic output to let ordinary citizens live well.
The leaders rationalized this vast gap in a number of creative ways, even blaming higher rates of alcoholism for lower productivity. But at least some of the Soviets realized all the excuses didn't account for the discrepancy. And no one in the Soviet Union was brave enough to venture a guess as to the real cause.
Finally, in September of 1989 a newly-elected member of the Soviet parliament--Boris Yeltsin--visited the U.S. as part of a Russian delegation. Returning from a tour of the Johnson Space Center, the group made an unscheduled stop at a fairly small grocery store in a Houston suburb.
Yeltsin was stunned by aisle after aisle stocked with all possible varieties of food-- a sharp contrast to the breadlines and empty shelves that were the rule even in the Soviet capital city. He roamed the aisles in amazement, marveling at free cheese samples, fresh fish and produce, and freezers packed with ice cream. He chatted up customers and store workers: “How much does this cost? Are all American stores like this?”
Yeltsin was a member of the Politburo--the top level of Russia’s government--yet he’d never seen anything like the stocks of this small American grocery store. “Even the Politburo doesn’t have this choice. Not even Mr. Gorbachev,” Yeltsin said.
Young Americans simply can't understand Yeltsin’s astonishment, because they don't know how bleak the Soviet economy was. After all, the Soviets have jet airliners and spacecraft, top-notch military equipment. How could a country do those things but not have the same sort of great food selection western countries have? "It doesn't make sense." So young Americans don't believe it.
Yeltsin’s experience that day ran contrary to everything he knew. A longtime member of the Communist party who had lived his entire life in a one-party system that punished dissent harshly, Yeltsin had been taught since childhood that socialism wasn’t just more fair, but also better at providing the things its citizens needed and wanted.
His visit to the small grocery store left the future Russian president with a severe case of "cognitive dissonance." “When I saw those shelves crammed with thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people,” Yeltsin later wrote. “That such a potentially super-rich country as ours has been brought to a state of such poverty! It is terrible to think of it.”
Yeltsin was hardly the only person who bought the propaganda that communism was better at everything. Thousands of Western intellectuals--academics, media elites and economists--hammered Americans with what they claimed was the superiority of communism. But at least Yeltsin and other soviet leaders had the excuse that their education had forced them to believe. The western elites--who, unlike Yeltsin, didn't live in a state-controlled media environment, had no such excuse.
Paul Samuelson, the first American to win the Nobel Prize in economics and one of the most influential economists of the 20th century, was a longtime enthusiast of Soviet central planning and predicted it would lead to a higher standard of living.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union Samuelson is said to have asked a fellow economist “Who could know that [the data the Soviets published] was all fake?”
Who indeed, eh?
Despite decades of propaganda, the lie that socialism was better was eventually fully exposed with the publication in the 1990s of the archives of the former Soviet Union after it dissolved. No longer could academics claim communism was better at supplying citizens' needs.
Yeltsin deserves credit for laying bare the lie of socialism that so many others had refused to see. “[T]here would be a revolution,” he told his entourage that day in 1989, if the people in the Soviet Union ever saw the vast array of food in American grocery stores.
Unfortunately a "perfect storm" of greedy, power-hungry Democrat presidential candidates, enabled by a corrupt, anti-capitalist mainstream media, are within a hair's breadth of reasserting communism again.
===
Source: https://thefederalist.com/2019/11/13/how-a-russians-grocery-store-trip-in-1989-exposed-the-lie-of-socialism/
This takes on relevance when you realize that both those world-changing events happened over a decade before today's college students were born. Meaning that almost no college student today has even the faintest idea of what caused those events, or what caused them, or what the Cold War was.
By chance, for the past 30-some years my job has given me the opportunity to casually interview 100 or so top-quality college students each week. And I can confirm that so far, not one knows anything about the events above.
For example, Democrats and the Mainstream Media have repeatedly tried to equate building a wall on our southern border with the infamous Berlin Wall. Today's students have no idea that after WW2 the communist regime in East Germany built a virtually impenetrable wall between East and West Germany, complete with minefields, machinegun towers and spotlights. The purpose was to keep oppressed East Germans (and citizens of other communist nations that were allowed to travel to that nation) from fleeing to the west. Our media have equated the two walls despite the crucial difference that the East German wall prevented its own people from leaving, while our southern wall is to keep illegal invaders OUT.
The two can't be rationally equated, and yet our media have repeated done it.
The failure of today's college-age students to know anything of the Cold War is NOT an indictment of today's college students, because with tiny exceptions they only know what they've been taught in school. And with most school systems being run by far-left board members and administrators, U.S. schools just don't teach anything relevant about world politics during that time, preferring to spend precious, limited contact hours teaching about the joys of transgenders, or the joys of gay parents, or the outrageous lie that slavery was a uniquely American institution created by the Founders.
With this in mind I wanted to pass along a vignette that seems to convey the vast gulf between communism and capitalism, which would eventually lead to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the re-unification of Germany and the dissolution of the former Soviet Union.
The former Soviet Union was larger than the U.S., and blessed with virtually identical natural resources. The people were smart and the best schools were very competent. Yet compared to all western nations, the standard of living in the Soviet Union was miserable. They simply didn't have the economic output to let ordinary citizens live well.
The leaders rationalized this vast gap in a number of creative ways, even blaming higher rates of alcoholism for lower productivity. But at least some of the Soviets realized all the excuses didn't account for the discrepancy. And no one in the Soviet Union was brave enough to venture a guess as to the real cause.
Finally, in September of 1989 a newly-elected member of the Soviet parliament--Boris Yeltsin--visited the U.S. as part of a Russian delegation. Returning from a tour of the Johnson Space Center, the group made an unscheduled stop at a fairly small grocery store in a Houston suburb.
Yeltsin was stunned by aisle after aisle stocked with all possible varieties of food-- a sharp contrast to the breadlines and empty shelves that were the rule even in the Soviet capital city. He roamed the aisles in amazement, marveling at free cheese samples, fresh fish and produce, and freezers packed with ice cream. He chatted up customers and store workers: “How much does this cost? Are all American stores like this?”
Yeltsin was a member of the Politburo--the top level of Russia’s government--yet he’d never seen anything like the stocks of this small American grocery store. “Even the Politburo doesn’t have this choice. Not even Mr. Gorbachev,” Yeltsin said.
Young Americans simply can't understand Yeltsin’s astonishment, because they don't know how bleak the Soviet economy was. After all, the Soviets have jet airliners and spacecraft, top-notch military equipment. How could a country do those things but not have the same sort of great food selection western countries have? "It doesn't make sense." So young Americans don't believe it.
Yeltsin’s experience that day ran contrary to everything he knew. A longtime member of the Communist party who had lived his entire life in a one-party system that punished dissent harshly, Yeltsin had been taught since childhood that socialism wasn’t just more fair, but also better at providing the things its citizens needed and wanted.
His visit to the small grocery store left the future Russian president with a severe case of "cognitive dissonance." “When I saw those shelves crammed with thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people,” Yeltsin later wrote. “That such a potentially super-rich country as ours has been brought to a state of such poverty! It is terrible to think of it.”
Yeltsin was hardly the only person who bought the propaganda that communism was better at everything. Thousands of Western intellectuals--academics, media elites and economists--hammered Americans with what they claimed was the superiority of communism. But at least Yeltsin and other soviet leaders had the excuse that their education had forced them to believe. The western elites--who, unlike Yeltsin, didn't live in a state-controlled media environment, had no such excuse.
Paul Samuelson, the first American to win the Nobel Prize in economics and one of the most influential economists of the 20th century, was a longtime enthusiast of Soviet central planning and predicted it would lead to a higher standard of living.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union Samuelson is said to have asked a fellow economist “Who could know that [the data the Soviets published] was all fake?”
Who indeed, eh?
Despite decades of propaganda, the lie that socialism was better was eventually fully exposed with the publication in the 1990s of the archives of the former Soviet Union after it dissolved. No longer could academics claim communism was better at supplying citizens' needs.
Yeltsin deserves credit for laying bare the lie of socialism that so many others had refused to see. “[T]here would be a revolution,” he told his entourage that day in 1989, if the people in the Soviet Union ever saw the vast array of food in American grocery stores.
Unfortunately a "perfect storm" of greedy, power-hungry Democrat presidential candidates, enabled by a corrupt, anti-capitalist mainstream media, are within a hair's breadth of reasserting communism again.
===
Source: https://thefederalist.com/2019/11/13/how-a-russians-grocery-store-trip-in-1989-exposed-the-lie-of-socialism/
posted by SF at
5:07 PM
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