"Don't hurt people and don't take their stuff" - Matt Kibbe

4/2/20

The Redefinition of Socialism



By Grant Davies

"Redefinition: the action or process of defining something again or differently. - Oxford"

I'll begin this post with a little background in order to set the stage for my main point. Let's start with one recent redefinition of the term in question. 

In order to make the detestable, murderous ideology of socialism more palatable to the gullible, Bernie Sanders and others attempted to redefine the term. They re-branded it as "Democratic Socialism" and claimed that some Scandinavian countries were socialist and also held democratic elections. Ergo, the name.

They then extolled the alleged virtues of government programs common to some of those countries. Doing so, they thought, would allow them to sell the idea to people in this country. It would also garner them the power to transform the US into the actual socialist nightmare they desired without that pesky democratic part.

The trouble was that those countries (Sweden comes to mind) aren't socialist. The lie was exposed and the ruse failed. At least it failed with enough Democrat voters to send Bernie packing in the primaries. (For the time being anyway. If funny uncle Joe starts wearing the paper slippers before the election, who knows?)

Let's recall for a moment the initial stage of the redefinition. It started long ago when socialists  finally had to admit the horrors that the USSR, Red China, and Nazi Germany unleashed on the world. More modern-day horror stories like Cuba, North Korea, Cambodia, and Venezuela only added to their problem. In that stage they explained it away by saying the system was good but the wrong people were in charge.

But this isn't about that nonsense. It's about the much more preposterous and maybe dangerous redefinition of the term being made on social media today via various memes posted by people who proudly call themselves "lefties" or "progressives" as a way of virtue signaling to each other.

Having failed in both of the earlier attempts to sanitize the definition, they have now decided that they might convince the gullible by saying that ALL government programs are actually forms of socialism.

This won't work either. But it only has to convince the people who buy into "envy politics" until November when selecting a new government might occur.

Here is one of those memes. There are others but this will give you the gist of it.





P.S.  If everyone gets a check from the government because of the shutdown, it's just another program, but not necessarily socialism. If however, the Trump government's trial balloon of taking ownership of part of the businesses they bailout (with our grand-childern's money) comes to pass, that would fundamentally be socialism. Because that's the actual Un-redefined definition of that vile system. 



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