Once in a while, a politician says what he really thinks. And sometimes, saying what he really thinks results in an utterance that is so colossally dumb, so unbelievably obtuse, so catastrophically ignorant, that all you can do is go, "Wait, what?"
That's what happened on Thursday, when newly-minted New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani claimed that New York henceforth, under his enlightened rule, will "we will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism."
The trouble is, he really means it. He's been telling the entire nation as much since he first decided to run for office. The real problem here is that enough New York voters bought his horse squeeze to land him in Gracie Mansion. And make no mistake, things in New York will get worse before they get better. We've been covering the staggeringly obtuse mayor-elect, now mayor, since the beginning, right here at RedState, and boy, howdy, it's been a hoot.
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But the laughing is only going to happen outside of the Big Apple, soon enough. History is stacked against Mamdani and the useful idiots who elected him, and that's for sure and for certain. Let's just take a quick look at three examples.
First: The Soviet Union.
The USSR, under Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, and others, was a massive failure. To be fair, at first, they did have some success turning Russia, in 1917, mostly an agricultural nation, into a manufacturing economy. But that's where the successes ended. The Ukrainian Holodomor famine resulted in the deaths of as many as 4 to 7 million Ukrainians in 1932 and 1933, which may explain some of the peevishness many Ukrainians harbor towards Russia's invasion of their territory today. Stalin purged the Red Army's officer corps, replacing many competent men with political cronies, which almost caused them to lose to Germany in 1941. As the Cold War drew to a close, the Soviet Union's economy was moribund. President Reagan had effectively prodded them into an arms race they couldn't afford. Black markets were rampant. The Politburo still had its dachas in the woods outside Moscow and its specialty stores, while the Soviet people were waiting in line for potatoes. The only thing those people had to be grateful for was that they weren't in Siberia, shivering in the snow and counting trees.
Second: Mao's China.
When Mao seized power, he wasted little time. He forced Chinese farmers and peasants into collectives, taking China's agricultural workers into the "warmth of collectivism." Somewhere between 35 and 45 million Chinese died from 1958 to 1962. Mao purged "intellectuals," meaning, "anyone who knew what they were doing." China suffers, still, today, under those stupid ideas; even after the deaths of millions, a Communist still sits in the top chair in Beijing, and we should remember that Xi Jinping has managed to amass more personal power than anyone since Chairman Mao. And yes, China, too, has gulags; a big portion of the country's Uighur minority lives in them, while Western liberals remain silent on the matter.
Third and finally: North Korea. Held by the third generation of a line of stunted little gargoyles with bad hair, North Korea can build nuclear weapons and missiles to carry them, but they can't feed their people. Because the Kim regime has never been able to pass gas and chew gum at the same time, North Korean peasants are starving. In the 1990s, in what was euphemistically called the "Arduous March," hundreds of thousands of North Koreans died of starvation or execution. Kim Jong Un, the current stunted little gargoyle with bad hair, is the only fat guy in the country. Oh, and North Korea has its own labor camps; that seems to be the one constant in socialist/communist nations.
There are plenty of examples from history. Millions dead, billions of dollars/rubles/whatever in productivity lost. Environmental damage beyond belief. From prosperity to penury, in a generation. Venezuela, Cuba, Angola, South Africa; many countries have bought into the phony promises of socialism and communism, and all of them have failed.
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Zohran Mamdani shares a fatal flaw with every other socialist and communist who has ever drawn breath: A fundamental lack of understanding of human nature. He doesn't understand, possibly because he's never done an honest day's work in his own life, that people will always work harder, much harder, for personal gain than for the "collective." The problem is that New York remains a city within the state of New York and the United States. When Mamdani's policies fail, and they will, he can claim that they weren't properly executed, or that outside forces (Republicans) wouldn't allow him to succeed, and he will then demand a bailout. Just wait and see if he doesn't.
One can't sum up socialism - communism - any better than one who lived and suffered under it. One like Russian patriot (Russian, not Soviet) Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, who wrote in his book The Gulag Archipelago:
And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?
Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?
After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat.
But that didn't happen. It didn't happen in the Soviet Union. It didn't happen in Mao's China. It didn't happen in North Korea. And it likely won't happen in New York. We had better not have to find out whether it would happen in the United States as a whole, although I expect it would, in some places, and Americans in those halls wouldn't be wielding axes, hammers, and pokers. But in the blue states? The blue cities? That's the problem with useful idiots: They help these takeovers, thinking they'll be on the Politburo, not waiting in bread lines. When they find out the truth, it's already too late.
Socialism is the ideology of dimwits, conmen, hucksters, and nincompoops. It fails every time it's tried, and will fail in New York, too. And that, in the end, is the problem with Mayor Mamdani's promise: It's cold, very cold, in the gulags.
