Andrew L. Urban
In his Mount Rushmore 250th anniversary speech on Friday night US time, Donald Trump said “we can give no quarter to communism”. Over in New York, in Times Square, they dropped the ball in ominous symbolism and ever-smirking mayor Zohran Mamdani must have shrugged. Leading a new gang of communist candidates, he has already started ‘taking quarter’ with his plans to freeze rents for some 1 million New York renters.
Step 2 of his plan is to confiscate apartments owned by landlords who are judged to have neglected their property. You can see how this works … and you can see how this strategy can be extended to businesses large and small. It’s one way to have state owned grocery stores, for example, a policy (along with free buses) he put forward as he campaigned for the Mayoral office.
Behind the property confiscation scheme lies the real threat posed by communism and it’s not just economic. It’s the threat that comes entwined with communism everywhere: oppression of citizens. We can’t name a single society run by communists that does not oppress its citizens, limits or eliminates freedoms and inevitably resorts to force.
The only people who like communism are the people who have privilege and power, which comes exclusively from the party. Party members get benefits no-one else gets. That’s the type of equality communism offers. And that is the benign end of the system; at the malign end, there is coercion and physical threat.
The poison ivy of the communist party strangles freedoms with menace. Citizens no longer feel protected by the state, but endangered by it. Think China, North Korea, the old Soviet Union and its communist clients in Eastern Europe … The communist party is the dictator, demanding allegiance not earning it. New York is the start …