What it Was to be a Slave in Joseph Stalin's Communist Russia

How would you like it if you were cruelly punished for making too many mistakes or failing to meet the standards of performance at your job? And no, I am not talking about getting fired. Imagine having to work under horridly perilous conditions with very cumbersome and complex machinery for very many long hours per day while receiving a paltry pay. Your main motivation for soaking yourself in your blood, sweat, and tears in effort to fulfill your duties is not to receive a substantial pay so you can provide for your family 3 course meals per day and a roof over your heads. No! It is in effort to avoid failure in meeting up to the stringent demands of the factory or workplace managers and your nation’s tyrant who will have you publicly executed or imprisoned for your failure. This is precisely what happened to workers in industry in Russia from the late 1920s to the early 1950s under Joseph Stalin and his Five Years Plans.

Absence from work was absolutely prohibited regardless of the circumstances and was punishable by a fine. Each and every worker also had to carry around a labor book in which charted their level of success on the job and identified to what degree they were working hard.

Stalin preached to Russia about other nations being ahead of Russia by 50 years. He pledged to make up for the difference in a matter of 10 years via a centrally planned economy or a command economy and totalitarianism, and by also coercing people to overexert themselves in industrial labor. He made it mandatory that there would be a 250% increase in total industrial output and a 350% increase in heavy industries.

In order to industrially compete with the West, avoid capitulation to the influence of Western capitalism, and build war machines such as tanks, artillery weapons, and airplanes to defend themselves against Western attack, everyone was coerced into focusing on investing in coal, iron, steel, and other industrial materials rather than investing in consumerism or personal products and possessions.

Do you think the people were happy?

No! Shops were completely vacant. Clothing was at a shortage of supply and many household items were unavailable. The lack of consumerism in Russia was a large part of the fall in standard living.

People worked under this communist wage slave economy in hopes that a paradisiacal society would one day be brought to fruition if they followed the rigors of Stalin’s coercive mandates and kept their faith in the promises of Stalin. DO you think Stalinism worked and the communist utopian dream was achieved?

Most definitely not!

When collectivization was implemented in 1928, all factories, machinery, farms, land, crops, labor, private property, and PEOPLE’S HOMES to be turned over to the state so the government could fulfill the utopian dream of communism.

Do you think the peasants and workers acquiesced to Stalin’s demands to make everyone in society EQUAL?

No! All of the industrial workers and peasants destroyed all of their crops, land, homes, machinery and factories and slaughtered their animals so the government could not use them. Afterwards, the government had these people publicly executed in which amounted up to 7 million deaths in response to their refusal of compliance to government demands. Despite the fact that Stalin’s Five Year Plan led to certain economic successes with projects such as the building of roads, railways, dams, and canals and a huge expansion in energy production, it led to massive nationwide social unrest and a huge famine caused by the government’s enormous hoarding of grains. Agriculture suffered greatly and the revival of livestock did not complete itself until 1953.

And now, the most intriguing and horrific part of this whole monstrous turpitude of Stalinism/communism, we have what are referred to as the Great Purges. These are a series of trials and events consisting of the executions of various members of Stalin’s communist party who expressed dissidence to Stalin’s actions and policies or were suspected of being potential rivals or threats to overthrowing him. Any ordinary Russian civilians who spoke any complaints or criticisms of Stalin were trialed and executed also.

Between 1936 and 1938, three different trials were held in contempt of 54 different prominent leaders of Stalin’s communist party and were all charged and executed for some sort of conspiracy, treason, and sabotage. Generals in Russia’s armed forces, one in particular Tuchachevesky, along with 3 out of 5 marshals and about half of the military officials were held on trial and executed for some kind of disobedience against Stalin.

All across the cities, towns, and neighborhoods paranoia permeated the hearts and minds of civilians with fear and terror of Stalin’s punishments being brought against anyone suspicious of dissension or complaints against his actions and policies. Many people would accuse their neighbors and even family members of expressing any criticisms or complaints of Stalin, so as to prove to the government and the rest of society their patriotic allegiance to Stalin and to avoid, at all costs, other people’s suspicion of them disliking and/or not worshipping Stalin.

Overall, this communist abomination amounted up to 10 million people being sent to labor camps where they died along with a million other people who were seized from their homes and executed on the spot. Because of these purges, militaristic strength became awfully attenuated with the execution of very competent leaders who were then replaced with very incompetent officers. The economic development declined with the executions and demises of industrial workers and high-end employers who were the underpinnings of productivity and morale in the economy.

Stalin used his iron fist to intimidate and brainwash his people into thinking of him as some kind of god. He deployed secret police to run frequent audits on the education system to make sure that communism would remain being taught in schools and indoctrinated into the hearts and minds of all young children. All forms of art, film-making, and literature were used to propagandize about government’s successes. Many poems and books were published to venerate Stalin’s merits, virtuousness, and brilliance. In meetings, the attendees made sure to applaud as boisterously, exuberantly, and lengthily as they possibly could. Usually, the people to stop expressing praise first would be arrested because such a thing represented dishonor and betrayal to Stalin.

Stalin sought out to abrogate the Russian Orthodox Church out of strong aversion for any reverence for something other than himself. But despite his vigorous attempt, strangely, the church was able to survive.

Government totalitarianism can take on many forms and can masquerade itself with very many different appealing faces. It is paramount that Americans know their history, because if we do not, we are bound to repeat it. We cannot allow ourselves to be susceptible to electing officials who will cause us to repeat the atrocities that have taken place in history. Vote out of office the narcissist and vainglorious Barack Hussein Obama in 2012. Let freedom ring! 

The Days of the Industrial Revolution

           The Industrial Revolution began in the year 1750 with Britain’s textile industry. The decade of 1750 - 1760 it is generally known to be as the eve of the Industrial Revolution. The profits of cloth merchants made from exports in wool, linen, and cotton cloth increased through the speedy process of newly invented spinners and weavers which superseded the then outdated slow-making process of manual labor. Of these new textile inventions were the flying shuttle (John Kay), the spinning jenny (James Hargreaves), the water frame (Richard Arkwright), the spinning mule (Samuel Crompton), and the cotton gin (Ely Whitney). Though, in order for such inventions to cause the economic expansion and experience revolution in comprehensiveness, additional industrial augmentations essentially had to be made. The Industrial Revolution needed to spread to the transportation aspect of the economy. The invention of James Watts’ steam engine of the late 1790s is what came on to the scene next. This sufficed for a while until steam energy went to new heights in 1820 with the railroad engine which became most momentous in Britain’s new means of efficiency and facilitation of profit increase. The railroad connected all cities thereby revolutionizing Britain’s way of life and travel. Railroads made transportation of manufactured products and goods much cheaper. Railroads created many new jobs for miners and railroad workers.

            In the agricultural aspect of the Industrial Revolution, it was the massive changes thereof that were constitutive for the sustenance of the then factory work force. Agriculture was the paramount source of raw materials for the textile industry. At first, in early agricultural practices, land was left to lie fallow after being exhausted through cultivation. Agricultural knowledge and practice was improved later through the discovery of clover and other legume cultivation as being the new exceptionally vital form of restoration of fertility in the soil. More newly discovered knowledge and practices of agriculture made the provision of food more plentiful for livestock to ensure their survival through the annual winter months. More herds and livestock were able to be bred giving more provision of meat for families and some surplus of livestock each spring leaving farmers with more than what they had during the spring prior. Farming implements began to be made out of metal instead of wood. The energy of horsepower replaced the use of oxen. Insect control was improved by new formulas of insecticides. Enclosure of common village fields into individual landholdings and the partition of infertile into private property is what led to the concentration of ownership of such land into the hands of the few with the establishment of farming technique improvements being brought onto the scene and being used in greater magnitude.

            It wasn’t until after 50 years of Britain experiencing the Industrial Revolution alone that the United States and other European nations began to experience it as well. Unfortunately for Britain, the next two centuries would involve the United States and Germany surpassing them in imperial and superpower status in 1820. Sophisticated western technology would be applied to artillery and machine guns putting other nations at a gargantuan military disadvantage against the West. With new international markets and access to serious accumulative capital Americans felt valiant and insufferable. With coal powered engines initially reforming energy and later having fossil fuels take the production process to new heights, the speed of manufacturing gained monumental augmentation with automatic processes replacing people and animals. Every newly established form of sophistication in technology, transportation, and communication that took place in Britain was now happening in the new United States. This whole industrialization process not only affected all portions of the economy but also inspired reactionary upheavals and rebellions much like the one of the American colonies rising up against Britain. This involved the United States’ strong desires of the abolishment of a monarchial rule to create a republican rule for them in effort to put more power in the hands of the people. This reactionary upheaval spread into France giving birth to the French Revolution of 1789 thereby launching new Enlightenment principles of equality, religious freedom, inalienable citizenry rights, amendments of republican constitutionalism, and pervasive nationalistic sentiments. It is from this we can say about how the prevalence of secularism and a multi-religiously influenced culture in American and other Western nations was inspired.  It started with the Industrial Revolution and French Revolutions’ political and social reactionary groups spawning gradual increases of apostates and people being desirous to be emancipated from religious hierarchies deciding for them their religious identity.  

            The Industrial Revolution by all means not only drastically advanced people’s medical, agrarian, and industrial knowledge, mechanical apparatuses, and procedures of making things, but it also changed familial life meagerly in the initial phase. Before the Industrial revolution, the members of each family were much closer with each other since farming, the workplace, and home were all on one land and in one place. The change that occurred here within this aspect of the Industrial Revolution was the division of labor; the breaking down in mode of production and separation of everything into smaller units. Since the division of labor led to cheap implements and materials and cheap labor with new farming methods and machinery expediting mass production and profitability, farmers were enabled to buy large masses of land to create super farms employing crop rotation, soil improvements, and better stock. In order to foster the progression of the Industrial Revolution, the farming industry had to make this change in diminishing the number of farmers thenceforth forcing families to move away from rural areas and farm life into suburban areas and cities where they would have to find new jobs.

            Both women and their very young children were forced to work alongside their husbands inside mills and factories. Due to how the industry and the amenities of American life has programmed America’s thinking, it strikes Americans as unimaginable and unconscionable what the children of this era had to endure. When women would go to work they either had to give their infants and toddlers over to some expensive and dangerous wet nurse or bring the infant or toddler with them to work and beforehand drug them with opiates to quiet them for prevention against alerting the foreman of their violation of work rules. Before the year 1870, 50% of the working class in the textile industry was made up of women, and the wages they earned were less than that of the men. It was not until 1844 that the disproportionate number of working hours and greatly minimal time of recess was outlawed by government interventions. From the rural textile mills of 1769 onward, children were made to be pauperized apprentices taken from orphanages and workhouses. They were given housing, clothing, and food but didn’t receive any monetary earnings for their exorbitantly long hours of physically incapacitating workforce tasks. Charles Dickens referred to these work places as the “dark satanic mills.” E.P Thompson said of them as being “places of sexual license, foul language, cruelty, violent accidents, and alien manners.” In the early 1800s, 40% of the children in the British work force in industry were under the age of 15.

            When the end of the 1800s came around, the quality of family life was remarkably and radically changed again, and it can be said that it was for the better this time. Middle class families began to redefine the meaning of the familial unit and the reason for bearing progeny. At this point, women and children were seen as needing to be sheltered from the risky and endangering liabilities of the industrial work force. Women took on a new role being that of wife and a stronghold of security and stability and the primary source of affection, nurturing, and purity for the progeny.

            Instead of being an extension of the work force for their entire lives, children spent the majority of the time of their childhood and partially of their adolescence in the educational system developing the compulsory coping mechanisms, skills, and integrity for withstanding against the asperities of the business and professional life. Furthermore, it was at this time that a certain level of educative training was becoming requisite for employment. Males, especially, were very much expected to follow in the footsteps of their father’s consistent diligence and the successful honing of skills of a largely laborious life style.  In the midst of such high standardizations of immensity in masculinity, children experienced pressures and acerbities from their parents, especially the father. This often likely led to bitterness, resentment, and in some aspects emotional disconnection on the part of the child.

            Women eventually became exasperated by being perpetually confined to the boundaries of tending to the home-life and all of the domestic affairs thereof. At this time, marital infidelity committed on the man’s part was culturally acceptable and condoned to a certain extent so long as the man went about this type of doing discreetly, and in the meantime, the woman was still expected to still uphold familial stability, devoutness, and hallowedness. 

America Being Downgraded as a Superpower

A new survey shows that the majority of peoples in 15 out of 22 nations surveyed believe the United States has been replaced or will be replaced as a superpower by China. 76% of Japanese and 53% percent of Chinese agree to the disfavoring odds being stacked against the United States. With Chinese, Indian, and Latin American emerging-market firms doubling and tripling in size and having their stocks become more popular and costly, investors are being forced into more exotic places which are being less appealed to by the United States.

With this being just another issue to add to the list of America's innumerable staggering issues, does this give us another reason to believe our praiseworthy superpower figure is destined for total demolition? Should we resort to giving up, settle for a defeatist attitude, and discontinue investing at least a small amount of energy and time into having a political stance and opinion? In speaking of defeatism, there are serious thoughts to consider especially since there is too much of an increasing number of people losing faith in America’s superpower status.

Ostensibly, to the chagrin of America, its people's disloyalty and lack of fervidness in being politically involved in any facet that is its greatest enemy in conjunction with all societal, congressional, and media corruption. Government has gotten away with such avarice and subterfuge in the past century because the honor of having a populace truly educated in American history and politics and the practice of accurate interpretation and consistent fidelity to the Constitution has fallen to the wayside. The lack thereof has disabled the masses, after so many generations of malpractice, in being able to distinguish between what has been and is dependable congressional choices and what is government abusiveness. 

Too many years have gone by in not galvanizing, even minutely, any potential beneficial change from the politicians who proclaim their desire to upkeep the society's substantial health and well being. Voter fraud and enormously tampered-with electoral outcomes have influenced a nation to discontinue believing in the ballot box. The term “politician” calls to the paternalistically democratized American mind nothing more than an image of a leader who is lackadaisical, judicially and lawfully disoriented, intellectually shorthanded, monetarily parasitical, and a giver unabridged in giving promises that is full of nothing but hot air. And sadly enough, this still doesn’t seem to impassion people to exercise their constitutional duties to abolish abusive government. The masses are atrophied in their constitutional defensiveness by their own inaction, indifference, and the influence of their partial self-inducing stubborn belief of America being in an irreversible gradual disintegration. They are therefore allowing themselves to remain moribund in ever regaining their rightful spot of a unified republic and poised stature.

Democracy and majoritarianism does not give America what so the liberty, peace, and strength everyone thinks it has had. It has rather rendered us a fissured republic where minorities' rights go so very unprotected. 

In clarifying who we are, who we have been, and where we want to go, let us begin with asking 'what does it mean to be a superpower?' The term was first coined in 1944 and was ascribed to the British Empire, the Soviet Union, and the United States. Since then a superpower has been conceived of as a nation positioned in having predominant influence within all systemic designs and events in internationality. In being a superpower a nation is to effectively project such influence in a way for the betterment of all of its interests and goals.

 After World War 2, and while the British Empire became the Commonwealth with independent territories, the Soviet Union and the United States were the only ones left to go head to head with each other in the Cold War. Since the Cold War, it has been debated amongst scholars as to whether or not the United States should or should not be condoned as a superpower. With the influence of the ideas in China emerging as a second superpower to go on par with the United States and with Brazil, the European Union, India, and Russia being thought of as potentially achieving a superpower status, it is difficult to keep an optimistic attitude of America remaining imperishable. Certainly, as far as being a fiscal superpower is concerned, no help has been brought to our American reputation in the past 100 plus years with the Federal Reserve dismally failing at forestalling every single recessional and fiscal ignominy of each decade. 

Mostly everyone is aware of the $14 trillion national debt. If the envelope continues to be pushed like this, many people are going to be blindsided by the eventual national deficit exceeding beyond our GDP. Not enough people are aware that this current debt ceiling raise is the 75th time in American history that the debt ceiling has been raised. By government saying it is insured that a “default on loans” would have occurred is an asinine excuse and cunning way to coax the public into allowing government to continue in unwarranted borrowing and loan-taking. This is government's deceptive way of trying to keep Americans asleep and unaware of the notion that the government is intentionally trying to fiscally degenerate America. Americans need to awaken to the true severity and reality of our government’s premeditated and preplanned activities of degeneracy and deliberate wastefulness. 

                If they really cared government would allow businesses, corporations, manufacturing, and industry go back to work making its own products rather than continue over-reliance on Chinese imports and consumer goods. Such imports have been proven to be paltry in too many areas thus negating the necessity of continuance. As in additional Chinese expense, China is lending their money back to America only to charge us interest, and our American government knows very darn well of it! Most Americans are no strangers to the large amounts of money we owe to Japan and the inimical Opec nations, however, in addition, we startlingly owe money to the Bahamas, the Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, the Netherlands Antilles, Panama, and the British Virgin Islands all of which barely own any money themselves.

While a large percentage of the American citizenry remains so uniformly uninformed and ignorant, another large percentage remains so divided in opinions refusing disillusionment; and of course, who is to blame for it? The media! In a country where one side is saying one thing and the other saying something completely opposite, a nation is nowhere near to attaining togetherness. Massive confusion and conversational mayhem in television broadcasts, documentaries, and magazines rather than having actual informants is what the media thrives on and feeds off of in order to keep their mammoth influx of wealth, elitism, and subjugation over the truth of reality. We have Time Magazine telling us in an August 8^th 2011 article called Big Questions, saying, “Despite a few fissures over entitlement spending, Democrats largely are united behind Obama’s vision of a balanced approach to deficit reduction, which has substantial support.” Then we have in a July 30^th speech given on the Senate floor by Senator of Florida Marco Rubio saying Republicans and very many Democrats are in accord with each other that Obama has done very little to almost nothing in devising a budgetary plan to cut spending and reduce deficit and debt.

 Leftist magazines, such as Time, are utilizing the Keynesian theory to postulate that in an economic fray such as this it is most opportune for government to spend and borrow. How can a country spend their way out of a recession and destroy deficits and debt by spending and borrowing more money that only creates more deficits and debt? How will a balanced budget rule with $424 billion in spending cuts reduce economic output by 4.2% and create extra 5 million more lost jobs and a 10% increase in unemployment? Time magazine is so appealingly persuasive to the many naive liberalized American minds who are so fixated on having the lower classes gain retribution against the wealthy for being so successful. Though, such rash statements made by Time Magazine are made without adequate intellectual, informative, and factual support as to how such downturn would occur as a result of a balanced budget amendment?

It is quite dangerous when we have an American media left telling the public that rules in a balanced-budget amendment are silly and the most irresponsible action imaginable to take. Things have become so contradictory enough, that, while liberal magazines are making ludicrous statements in one article about balanced budgets being silly, they are, in another article of the same magazine, having the nerve to make complaints that “In the immediate postwar years, federal spending consumed only 15% of GDP, but today it has ballooned to more than 24%.” They should know already, but clearly have been too stubborn to discover or admit, that the only way to put an end to such large portions of American GDP being exhausted by federal expenditures is to create a balanced budget plan with a reasonable and equitable approach. Are they that dumb enough to believe in such radically faulty economic assessments? To answer the question, in actuality, we should know better that such organizations who are spreading such propaganda are not really that dumb, but instead know very well they are spelling out one of the most starkest of all stark lies every to be made in history.