“Because 44 percent of Americans believe the Communist Manifesto is better than the Declaration of Independence,” Salazar said.
Salazar represents Miami, the world capital of communist refugees fleeing from the socialist systems of Cuba, Venezuela, and others in the Southern Hemisphere. She grew up in Fidel Castro’s Cuba, where she experienced the deprivation of basic essentials that has historically been part and parcel of socialist states.
Republicans pointed to the atrocities and human rights violations historically common to socialist states such as the Soviet Union, the Chinese communist regime, and North Korea.
Founded in the political philosophy of Karl Marx, socialism and its offshoot communism push for state ownership of the means of production—meaning capital goods such as factories, machinery, and other equipment for production.
In Marx’s formulation, a communist country in its final form has no need for a state; however, as a transitionary device, Marx called for a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” a nominally short-lived body meant to transition a society from capitalism to communism.
Thus far, however, no communist state has moved beyond this first conceptual stage.
‘The Greatest Crimes in History’
“[Socialist] ideology necessitates a concentration of power that has time and time again collapsed into Communist regimes, totalitarian rule, and brutal dictatorships,” Salazar wrote in the bill.Socialism, she continued, “has repeatedly led to famine and mass murders, and the killing of over 100,000,000 people worldwide.”
“Many of the greatest crimes in history were committed by socialist ideologues,” Salazar wrote, pointing to figures such as Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, Pol Pot, Kim Jong Il, Kim Jong Un, and others.
Salazar then listed examples of rights violations under socialist regimes including the horrors of Stalin’s dictatorship in the USSR, which killed tens of millions and sent millions more to terrifying gulag labor camps, and the destruction brought to China’s inhabitants by Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward,” which killed upward of 55 million people in China. She pointed to Pol Pot’s “killing fields” in Cambodia, which left more than 1 million people dead; and she noted the mass starvation that continues to this day in North Korea under Kim Jong Un.
Socialism, Salzar argued in the bill, is contrary to the founding principles of the United States.
“The author of the Declaration of Independence, President Thomas Jefferson, wrote, ‘To take from one, because it is thought that his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry, and the fruits acquired by it.’”
She also cited a quote from President James Madison, known in American history as the “Father of the U.S. Constitution.”
Madison wrote: “[It] is not a just government, nor is property secure under it, where the property which a man has in his personal safety and personal liberty, is violated by arbitrary seizures of one class of citizens for the service of the rest.
Democrats’ Response
In floor responses to the resolution, Democrats argued that Republicans were making false equivalencies between the policies pushed for by Democrats and those supported by communists.Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), one of the most prominent left-wing progressives in the lower chamber, said: “No Democrat believes there should be government gas stations or government car companies.
“So what does the Democratic Party believe? We believe every person in America should have child care; Republicans’ answer: ‘Look at how many people Stalin killed.’
“We say ‘Let’s give everyone health care.’ Republicans say, ‘We can’t do that, look at how many people Pol Pot killed!’
“Give me a break. The American people are catching on.”
Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) echoed the sentiments.
“This resolution ... equates Medicare with the Great Leap Forward,” Sherman said.
Sherman then pointed to so-called capitalist authoritarians, under which label he placed historical figures such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Spain’s Francisco Franco, and Chile’s Augusto Pinochet.
Notably, the Russian economy as it exists today is more of an oligarchy, controlled by those who benefitted most from the collapse of the Soviet Union, than a capitalist economy.
Likewise, in Spain, Franco was an adherent of fascist ideology, which is at a core level opposed to capitalism. The most well-known proponent of the fascist ideology, Adolf Hitler, often made it clear that he considered capitalism as much an enemy as socialism and communism.
With the passage of the resolution through the House, it could now be taken up in the Senate.
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