David Horowitz on Socialism

David Horowitz on Socialism **

What my family longed for was an impossible fantasy: that mankind would be released from history, which included individual success and failure; their ambition is that poverty and inequality would disappear from the earth. To realize this fantasy they dedicated themselves to the Communist cause.

In 1956, as a result of the Krushchev Report, Communism was exposed even to them – as a system that had produced human catastrophe beyond anyone’s imagination. Yet they (my parents) could not give up their socialist hope. Their own son (me) then joined others in a movement to revive the dream that until then had produced only grief.

We even said that the first revolution would take place in Russia, where the dream failed. This is because Russia had a planned economy, and in our eyes lacked only political freedom to realize the socialist dream.

We did not appreciate was that without private property there was no freedom? The political freedom never came, and – just as Hayek and Von Mises had predicted – the planned economy didn’t work.

In 1989, the Soviet superpower was an impoverished Third World nation, and the average Soviet citizen had a daily ration of meat that was smaller than the ration in 1913, under the czar. A nation the size of a continent had been left out of the Twentieth Century and the munificence available to the least of its capitalistic neighbors. The lesson to me was clear:

“Socialism makes men poor beyond their wildest dreams. The average Polish citizen is poorer today, in 1989, than my grandfather was in America, fifty years ago, when I was born.” And then I concluded:

For myself, my family tradition of socialist dreams is over. Socialism is no longer a dream of the revolutionary future. It is only a nightmare of the past. But for you the nightmare is not a dream. It is a reality that is happening. My dream for the people of socialist Poland is that someday soon you will wake up from the nightmare and be free.

Just before our conference at the Jagiellonian, we marched over to the cobblestone streets at Cracow in a May Day demonstration organized by Solidarity, the anti-Communist opposition. Watched by Polish police and Soviet troops we chanted in unison:

“COMMUNISTS GET OUT! SOVIETS GO HOME!”

Peter and I were happy. We were marching again, like Joshua, as we had in the Sixties, and this time we felt at last we had got it right.

Months later, the Polish regime was toppled and the Berlin Wall came down; in Nicaragua, the Sandinistas were force to hold elections, which the democratic opposition (and La Prensa’s editor) won; and during the following August, the counterrevolution reached the Kremlin itself and brought the dictatorship to its knees. The long, unhappy experiment with socialist tyranny was over at last. p. 390

** David Horowitz, Radical Son – A Touchstone Book – Touchstone Edition - 1998
George H. Kubeck, President Obama, “Down with your Socialist Health Care Bill.”