Check Your Socialist Privilege

Image Credits: AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite

The word “privilege” gets thrown around a lot by the modern left. From “white privilege” to “male privilege,” they work hard to ensure that every demographic of people feel guilty for being lucky or well off. What they don’t work hard to do is to look at their own privilege – the privilege of being a socialist in modern day America. 

If there was ever a more entitled or privileged group out there, it would be the one that looks at generations of victims of socialism and thinks “Well they just didn’t do it right, I can do this better.” One that would rather ignore the immorality and flaws of their own ideology than give the respect and attention to victims of socialism throughout history. 

Unfortunately, socialism is no longer a “far-left” ideology. It has seeped into the mainstream media and political stances. In fact, it continues to gain support from college students across the country. You wouldn’t be surprised to see a sea of Che Guevara t-shirt wearing students walking around their campus, ignoring that the man on their shirt once admitted “We executed many people by firing squad without knowing if they were fully guilty. At times, the Revolution cannot stop to conduct much investigation; it has the obligation to triumph.”

These student activists hold up their hammer and sickle posters, privileged enough to live in a country where they rarely will have to face the families of the millions of victims that were killed, starved, or forcefully sterilized under the same symbol. 

Bernie Sanders once had an article on his website that said, “These days, the American dream is more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina…” What a privilege it must be for a millionaire Senator in the United States of America to have ever thought that the American dream was what the citizens of these countries were finding. As he continued to eat luxury meals, own multiple houses, and accumulate his million dollars’ worth of wealth, the Venezuelan people were losing 24 pounds in a year and having 90% of their population living in poverty last year. 

When modern day socialists have these facts and statistics thrown their way, they are quick to say that it wasn’t “real socialism.” A statement that reeks of entitlement and privilege. History has shown that millions rose up to create these socialists regimes, they fought and died to put them into power. They all thought that this ideology would work, that it would be their saving grace, and for all of them, it didn’t work out that way. 

What makes the socialists of today think that they are different than the revolutionaries before them? Do they think they are smarter? More passionate? Better than the generations of men and women that suffered before them? I don’t know about you, but to me that sounds like entitlement and privilege. 

These individuals that support socialism live in the greatest country that the world has ever known. They can take to their Twitter accounts or print editorials in their school newspapers, propping up the socialist regimes and ideologies of the past, because of their First Amendment right here in the U.S, blinded by their own privilege to how those suffering under their ideology aren’t able to do the same.

In 2017, the socialist dictatorship of Venezuela closed 40 radio stations. The Venezuelan dictator Maduro himself said on National Journalists’ Day in 2018 that, “only the debris of the bourgeois media is left.” This outlook on the free press is so tied to the socialist ideology that Che Guevara once said, “We must eliminate all newspapers; we cannot make a revolution with free press.”

Only in the U.S.A could you openly support an ideology that has starved, killed, and stolen property from millions of people, under the safety and prosperity of a capitalist republic. The only reason why these modern day socialists are able to pick the careers they have, are able to tweet out their “Twitter for iPhone” branded tweets, and are able to march in the streets with their posters and questionable fashion choices, is because they are privileged to live in a country that allows for that kind of freedom. The kind of freedom that the ideology they support would bring to an end. I think it’s time socialists start checking their own privilege.