OPINION:
One of the most chilling scenes in the 1965 epic film “Doctor Zhivago” is when the good doctor joyfully returns to his Moscow home after the communist Russian Revolution in 1917, only to find his stately house occupied by dozens of government-placed squatters.
Two unctuous Communist Party officials lecture him about why this is more equitable, to which Zhivago quickly agrees, given the circumstances. As he and his wife climb the stairs to the bare-bones living space left to them, the squatters stare with undisguised hatred.
Cea Weaver, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, would fit nicely into this script.
In a since-deleted 2017 social media post, she wrote, “Elect more Communists,” according to USA Today. In an undated X video post, the 37-year-old democratic socialist said: “I think the reality is that, for centuries, we’ve really treated property as an individualized good and not a collective good. And we are going to transition into treating it as a collective good and toward the model of shared equity. This will require that we think about it differently. It will mean that families, especially white families but also some [people of color] families who are homeowners as well, are going to have a different relationship to property than the one that we currently have.”
“A different relationship”? This should send a chill down the backs of the people in America’s 87 million owner-occupied homes, not to mention the owners of businesses, rental buildings and any other tangible property.
Karl Marx wrote in “The Communist Manifesto” that the central tenet of communism is “the abolition of private property,” plus the elimination of the “bourgeoisie” (that is, the middle class). Marx and his co-author, Friedrich Engels, also argued for official atheism, an end to marriage as we know it (or knew it) and the institutional raising of children for the good of the state.
This pretty much matches the end goals of today’s leftist-dominated Democratic Party, but it contrasts sharply with those of America’s Founders, who asserted that individual rights come not from government but from God.
The Declaration of Independence says, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
In Mr. Mandani’s Jan. 1 inaugural address, New York’s first Islamist/socialist mayor phrased his aims thusly: “We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”
Given that people actually voted for this in the nation’s most important financial and cultural city, it won’t hurt to issue a reminder about the horrors inflicted on humanity since this poisonous, satanic doctrine of collectivism was unleashed.
From the Soviet gulags and Ukrainian famine to mass killings in China, Cambodia, Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela, communism’s death toll exceeds 100 million. Along with that “warmth” came dire poverty, children coerced into informing on their parents, and border walls with barbed wire to keep people in, not out. The communists also shot lots of priests and nuns and burned down churches.
Here is a bit more from Comrade Weaver, whose mother, it turns out, owns a $1.6 million home in Nashville, Tennessee, and is a professor at Vanderbilt: “Impoverish the ‘white’ middle class. Homeownership is racist/failed public policy.” Also, from a 2021 online forum, “Our goal is to have housing actually be worthless to some degree.”
Well, that’s what happens under socialism and communism, except among the rich, party-connected elites, such as those upper Fifth Avenue liberals who voted to turn New York communist. Like their counterparts in Havana and Pyongyang, they shrug and figure that any hardships as a result of “warm collectivism” won’t disturb their lifestyles.
Meanwhile, in the city with more Jews than any other outside Israel, several landmarks are lit up green to celebrate January as Muslim American Heritage Month. These include the spire on Freedom Tower at ground zero, where Muslim terrorists took out the World Trade Center towers, killing nearly 3,000 people.
Historically, when Muslim armies conquer cities, they destroy churches and erect mosques on those sites to make the point. On Jan. 2, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, ordered 16 New York state landmarks to be lit up in green, a sacred color to Muslims. Militants everywhere must have cheered.
She may as well have hung a “Kick me” sign on Freedom Tower.
But then, history is not the Democrats’ strong suit. Rewriting it is more their style.
When he was sworn in on two family Qurans, one reportedly dating to the time of the Ottoman Empire, Mr. Mamdani said, “Muslims have been part of New York for centuries.” Sure, and they invented the pastrami sandwich too.
When Keith Ellison was sworn into Congress in 2007 as the first Muslim elected to that body, he used a Quran once owned by Thomas Jefferson, claiming it spoke to America’s commitment to diversity and religious freedom. Mr. Ellison, who went on to become the attorney general of the corrupt Somali province formerly known as Minnesota, didn’t mention that Jefferson acquired the text so he could better strategize against the Barbary pirates, who sank American ships and enslaved American sailors.
When Democrats insist that we all “go green,” it might not mean what you think it means.
• Robert Knight is a columnist for The Washington Times. His website is roberthknight.com.
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