Heil Trump Make America Communist Again

Republicans want American voters to believe that the Democrats will bring forth an oppressive future that will mirror the roughshod mistakes of communism'due south past — and so from the offset mean solar day of the Republican National Convention, they tried to revive Cold War-era fears about the "red menace" of communism.

Donald Trump Jr., for case, pledged Monday that a vote for his dad would bring about a world in which "the good guys" persevere over nighttime forces. "Imagine a world where the evils of communism and radical Islamic terrorism are not given a run a risk to spread — where heroes are celebrated and the good guys win. You can have it," he said.

Maximo Alvarez, a Cuban-born immigrant, alternatively suggested that a win for Democrats in November would brand America totalitarian — and he compared Joe Biden to the late Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. "I heard the promises of Fidel Castro," he said, "and I can never forget all those who grew upwards around me, who await like me, who suffered and starved and died because they believed those empty promises. They swallowed the communist poison pill."

The Republicans, though, have it exactly backward: It's Trump's GOP that has facilitated the kinds of oppression that echo the homo rights abuses of the 20th century'south communist regimes. I should know: My family suffered from and fled an authoritarian communist regime.

In 1949, my granddaddy tried to escape communist Bulgaria when it was a satellite state of the Soviet Matrimony. He was caught, arrested and thrown into Belene — a concentration military camp for opponents of the government located on a remote, marshy island on the Danube River chosen Persin. After the gulag opened in 1948, it became known as the Isle of Expiry; the camp was then horrific that another survivor wrote that Alexander Solzhenitsyn's experience in a Soviet gulag sounded like "a dream" in comparison. Inmates were starved, beaten and shot to decease on a whim; some of them had to kill and eat water snakes raw to survive, while others picked through horse manure for undigested barley. The campsite guards liked to hunt them on horseback and whip them every bit if they were livestock.

After his release, my grandfather tried to escape Bulgaria three more times — serving more prison fourth dimension for 2 of the attempts — before he made information technology to the West on his fourth try.

The gulag was officially shut downwardly after Stalin's death in 1953, simply information technology reopened every bit a prison several years later. In the 1980s, Muslim minorities who refused to catechumen to Christianity were sent there.

Disciplinarian communist regimes were brutal — the American left shouldn't deny that, even equally information technology praises programs that led to universal literacy or the universal health care and education systems made bachelor to people nether them. Merely Republicans also take no business cynically exploiting that history to smear liberal Democrats similar Biden and Kamala Harris or autonomous socialists like Bernie Sanders every bit would-be Stalins.

Offset of all, the widely popular policies of democratic socialism —such as universal health care, a living wage and access to quality teaching — aren't inseparable from violence and oppression. You don't demand brutal gulags to send more than kids to college without leaving them in debt or to pay employees a livable wage. Instituting programs to benefit the public good doesn't necessitate trampling private rights and freedoms.

What gulags do represent is a disconnect between crime and advisable punishment, every bit well as an ability to meet all of the members of our lodge as equally human and worthy of handling every bit humans. Trump'southward political party of "law and club" has no right to decry regimes notorious for gulags and unjust imprisonment; many Republicans oppose bones criminal justice reform even as people are serving life without parole in the U.Due south. prison system for the victimless crime of selling marijuana while Blackness.

Meanwhile, during the Autonomous chief season, Sanders had the nigh progressive criminal justice platform. And while Biden and Harris are hardly poster children for a more than moral criminal justice system, thanks to the left flank of the Democratic Party, they're being forced to embrace reform and reckon with their poor records on the effect.

The Republican hypocrisy when information technology comes to its communist smear campaign hardly ends at that place. Trump's signature policy is and has been building a wall to forbid emigrants from coming beyond at the Southwest border. Where does the party of "Build the wall!" get off talking about communist regimes with harsh restrictions on freedom of movement?

For one, Monica Crowley — who would afterwards go a Trump administration official — tweeted a picture of herself in 2015 grinning against the backdrop of the Berlin Wall, which was built by the authoritarian Eastward German language communist regime to prevent E Berliners from fleeing to West Berlin. "At the Berlin Wall concluding week. Walls piece of work," Crowley said.

My grandfather spent four years in a concentration military camp for the victimless law-breaking of attempted emigration — and on his 3rd failed escape attempt, he tried to cross the border into Greece, where he was defenseless past border guards and sent back to prison house.

In addition to building a concrete wall, Trump immigration policy is designed to stem the flow of refugees. Many people who fled the communist regimes that the GOP wants Americans to fear now — including my grandparents — were exactly that: people whose lives were untenable in their home countries. Today, that's truthful of Syrians trying to escape a country pulverized by a dictator and a nightmare civil war, African migrants who risk drowning to brand it to Europe and South American refugees trying to escape violence sparked by America's global drug war.

My parents and I were able to come to the U.Southward. at the end of 1989, when the Soviet Union relaxed its grip on the satellite states, considering my grandparents lived in Southern California, so we qualified under the U.South.'s family reunification policy. Over the past iii years, Trump and his adviser Stephen Miller have been obsessed with catastrophe family reunification; had they been in charge 31 years agone, families like mine might non have escaped the last gasps of the communist regimes they're at present decrying.

It's plainly absurd to pigment the deeply centrist Biden-Harris ticket as a Trojan horse for communism — merely it's absurd and offensive for the party of Donald Trump to cite the oppressive parts of historic communist regimes as potential outcomes of a Democratic administration. The most brutal qualities of a communist government — unaccountable prison systems, militarized borders, the oppression of minorities — are virtually perfectly mirrored in Trump's own policies.

Years later his ordeal, my grandfather wrote in a notebook that his time in the gulag had fabricated him more adamant than e'er to come to the U.S. "Afterwards surviving 4 years and 2 months on the 'Island of Death,' Persin, I was released in April 1953, and I decided that I must become to what's meant to be my habitation: America," he wrote.

The America that people dreamed nearly behind the Iron Curtain was a identify of freedom, prosperity and opportunity for all. That'southward non the vision of America represented by Donald Trump and the GOP, and each night of the RNC, they make that more than and more clear.

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Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/republican-national-convention-wants-you-fear-communism-ignore-authoritarians-ncna1238093

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