The ultimate irony will be that Americans of the future might have to travel to the former U.S.S.R. in order to see free people and see a relatively free economy

In Eastern Europe and Russia, Reminders of Communist Horrors Are Everywhere


by William L. Anderson


As our commuter train stopped at the Riga suburb of Tornakalns, we saw a small railroad boxcar standing by itself on the side. To the passenger from the train, it was a small memorial; to a Latvian nearly 80 years ago, it was at worst a death sentence and at best, transportation to exile in a Siberian labor camp.

Our train was taking us from an afternoon at Jurmala, the resort located by the Gulf of Riga, a place where leading Communist Party members from the old U.S.S.R. went to spend vacations, but today, just another place to enjoy the warm sunshine of the Latvian summer. The horrors of the Soviet invasion of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania in 1940 are long behind, surfacing only in the image of the boxcar and the Museum of the Occupation, now located in the former U.S. embassy in downtown Riga.

(The USA built a new embassy near the Riga International Airport, a beige, boxy construction that contrasts with the lovely embassies on the famed Embassy Row in Riga, featuring some of the world’s most prominent Art Nouveau facades. When the new embassy was being constructed, locals thought it was a new prison, which, given the USA’s penchant for imprisoning people, probably was not far off the mark.)

.............

I recently saw a photograph of American Antifa protesters holding up a communist flag with the hammer-and-sickle and images of Mao, Lenin, and Marx. Perhaps they and the editors of the New York Times want to see the USA embrace a system that others that have lived under it now reject, and reject vehemently. Given that Antifa increasingly is providing shock troops for the causes espoused by prominent members of the Democratic Party like Bernie Sanders, the new drive for communism might not be as fringe as one might hope, and if a century of bloodshed, murder, vast prison systems, and starvation won’t convince the advocates of communism among American millennials, then perhaps nothing will.

Perhaps the ultimate irony will be that Americans of the future might have to travel to the former U.S.S.R. in order to see free people and see a relatively free economy. One hopes not, but the daily onslaught of socialism into our body politic says this no longer is an impossible scenario.

Read more: mises.org

Also in Latin American countries we can see signs of communism ...