Kulak is the Russian Word for 'Deplorable'
Article by Yaacov ben Moshe in "The American Thinker":
In
1929 in an edict that seemed both impossibly savage and
self-destructive, Stalin announced the "liquidation of the kulaks as a
class.” The people he called kulaks were the relatively wealthy peasants
in the countryside.
For
much of the eighteenth, nineteenth and into the early twentieth
century, they were the most important single economic sector of the
Russian empire. They were also the cultural center. They preserved
Russian traditions and honored religious faith. They grew more than
enough food to feed the nation. The excess they produced created more
wealth in international trade and hard currency for Russia than any
other group.
That
is why it seems, at first thought, that it was counter to his own
interests when Stalin enlisted 25,000 urban factory workers to go and
dispossess the agrarian peasants. He trained them, gave them revolvers
and ordered them to drive the kulak families off their land, outright
murder many of them, send more of them off to prison camps, and enslave
the rest. The resulting famine killed tens of millions of kulaks and
others in the most painful and pitiless way.
The
atrocity of the de-kulakization -- the heartless butchery and wanton
waste of life, the inhumane genocide of a culture, the destruction of
the productive economic heart of Russia -- seems a brutal insanity
unless you understand the real motivation behind it. As Stephen Kotkin
has revealed in his biography of the man, Stalin was tough and cold, but
he was not a madman. He did what he did, as Kotkin, proves, not out of
murderous insanity but, even more chillingly, simply because he was a
communist.
Stalin
had studied and subscribed to Marxist theory and would now apply that
theory, by force, to the entire Russian Empire. He saw with clarity,
more so than any of his Soviet contemporaries, that the farmers as a
class within Russian society were the most formidable obstacle (both
economic and cultural) to his efforts to "build socialism" and pave the
way to the communist utopia he believed in. Stalin was right; their
interests, their traditions, their hearts and their independence were
bulwarks against socialism and collectivization.
Their
knowledge of how to farm the land seemed to guarantee them exemption
from collectivization. Stalin’s answer was brutal and direct. His goal
was communism, so the kulaks had to go no matter the cost.
The
only thing Stalin was mistaken about was that he did not understand
that the kulaks were not just a stubborn problem, they were the
embodiment of human nature in its immutable unsuitability for socialism.
He could not see that even though he could murder them he could not
change human nature and that he and the socialist/communist project was
(and is!) destined always to fail. It must fail because its promise of
utopian equality of results is not just opposed to human nature, it
defies the laws of nature and God. The tens of millions of people
tortured, lives wasted, and the vast suffering were a great, horrible
futility.
Why
do I dwell on this now? Because it has become clear to me that the
project of globalization by the Progressive
administrative/political/intellectual elite, is, if not a twin brother,
at least a blood relation to the Stalinist project. Globalization is a
collectivist ideological movement, as is communism. It manifests itself
as incremental (we might as well say progressive) socialism. Solzhenitsyn, who saw it first hand, said this about socialism:
“Socialism of any type leads to a total destruction of the human spirit
and to a leveling of mankind into death..” Still, various national and
international elites have been pushing it along for several decades. It
is the goal for most of the powerful, intellectual and political leaders
in the world. It is the raison d'être for the European Union and
the underlying rationale behind multiculturalism, the rise of
pan-national corporations and open borders. Like Stalinism it is a
secular ideology callous to the well-being, liberty, and even, when
necessary, the life of anyone who stands in its way.
When
Barack Obama promised his “fundamental transformation of America,” he
was acknowledging the undeclared war on America’s kulaks. Not that Obama
was globalization’s, leader, he was just its least subtle, most
prominent ideologue. If that war appears more benign here than Stalin’s
de-kulakization, at least at the present stage, it poses comparable
dangers if allowed to progress. The only mystery about why the
progressive “gun control” efforts alarm many people is why it does not
alarm everyone.
The
damage it has already done is easy to see once you know what to look
for. Think back to the original NAFTA, when the nation started to
hemorrhage manufacturing jobs. All the while we were lulled by promises
that the “new economy” would require adjustment but everything would be
great. Exactly what “new economy” that was, was never made entirely
clear. It had something to do with “knowledge work,” financial services
and technology. Real jobs went to Mexico, China, Indonesia, anywhere but
Illinois. China began taking our technology away. It wasn’t difficult
theft, it was like taking candy from a baby because corporate leaders
and Republicans and Democrats alike in national office got rich from
facilitating it. The industrial workforce decayed until the only ones
left to object to the socialization and globalization were the trades
people (remember Joe the Plumber?) and the farmers. Just like the
Kulaks.
And
they are so arrogant they don’t bother to disguise their animosity and
cold disdain. Hillary Clinton, campaigning in Pennsylvania, promised to
their faces to make coal miners’ jobs disappear. Joe Biden told miners
to “learn to code.” Mike Bloomberg despises farmers and factory workers.
What did he say?
“I can teach anybody – even people in this room, so no offense intended – to be a farmer. It’s a process. You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, you add water, up comes corn. You can learn that. Then you had 300 years of the industrial society. You put the piece of metal on the lathe, you turn the crank in direction of arrow and you can have a job. And we created a lot of jobs. At one point, 98% of the world worked in agriculture. Today it’s 2% of the United States.”
This is the attitude of our “elite.” Bernie Sanders has been even more blunt. In Peter Schweitzer’s book, Profiles in Corruption,
he is quoted as calling working class jobs “moron work, monotonous
work.” The progressive elite who claim to be the champions of the
workers are really an incipient aristocracy intent on slamming the
doorway to wealth and position behind them so that only their children
and those of their friends will rule in perpetuity. This is not yet the
brutal fist of communism, but it is wholly analogous, it's a
collectivist impulse that dignified independent people will not
support.
President
Donald Trump stands out among our political leaders as a man who has
made his wealth out of the hard world of building buildings and trading
real estate, not manipulating financial instruments, feeding at the
public trough, or spinning theories. It is he who truly respects work
and the self-reliant people who live independently outside of corporate,
academic and government sinecures.
Candidate Obama could see early on that the people in working class America whom he would later demean as “tea-baggers”
would not accept his stated contentions that the country must change,
that their jobs are going away and they’re not coming back, and that
open borders (not protecting our own citizens) was, in his words “who we
are as a people.” Obama the candidate opined
at one point, "And it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they
cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or
anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain
their frustrations.” This is truly the American version of
de-kulakization. Not as obvious and dramatic as the Stalinist one (yet)
but it is no less Machiavellian. Urban hipsters and university
intellectuals sneer at the heartland now, while the opioid epidemic
rages and suicide rates are climbing. When an elite class is no longer
interested in being the steward of the public it serves and the public
no longer feels cared for by its elites, trouble is not far away.
It
is axiomatic that it is easier for a public to rid itself of its elite
and recruit another more suitable one than it is for an elite to find
another public to rule over. But then, the establishment politicians of
both parties and the chamber of commerce want open borders -- not just
for cheap labor but in order to import a more pliable and socialist
public. This is the tripwire of American de-kulakization -- the
replacement by immigration of the working public, trades and farmers.
Not with murder and labor camps but with ill-will, condescension, loss
of occupations and ultimately, replacement. It is murder, really -- just
a slow and indirect kind. They just intend to make us sink and then to
hold us under the economic waterline until we stop squirming. In it, I
hear the echo of a story from Stalinist times. In a video on YouTube,
Anton Antonov Ovseyenko tells the story of how Stalin’s friend and
publisher of Isvestia, Ivan Mikailovich Gronsky, was traveling with
Stalin by train through the countryside surrounded on all sides by
starving Kulak families. Gronsky said to Stalin, “You know, Iosif
Vissarionovich, our farmers are dying here -- millions of them.”
Stalin replied, “Let them die, they’re just trying to sabotage us.”
Think
of that the next time you see Maxine Waters, Eric Swalwell, Adam
Schiff, Don Lemon, Rachel Maddow or any of the other demagogues,
miscreants, windbags and lickspittles of Progressivism calling for
Donald Trump to be brought down and destroyed. Is it any wonder they
hate President Trump with such relentless venom? He is our best, perhaps
even our last, hope to sabotage them. The Progressives appear crazy but
are not mad -- they are just Progressives.
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