PrintMarch 15, 2009
My Socialist Past
"Socialism, a luxury of the wealthy. To the poor, a suicidal creed ..." --David Hare, A Map of the WorldAnyone who has lived inside the demoralized, unproductive, gray prison of a communist state, as I did in the mid-1980s, knows to what depths of impoverishment the egalitarian fantasies of socialism inevitably lead. They lead to decades of frustrated poverty and lifetimes of untreated illness culminating in early death. I remember the columns of death notices for men and women in their forties and fifties that appeared in the local newspaper. Gradually I learned to associate those death notices with the lack of fresh foodstuffs, the travesty of state health care, and the pervasive demoralization of an enslaved population drowning itself in cheap alcohol and cigarettes. Gradually I came to understand that the condition of life under communism, so filled with repression, suspicion, and hopelessness, dragged one down into an early grave. Gradually I saw that within the...(Read Full Article)
