Have you ever wondered why so many people around the world hate socialists? There is some real vicious hatred. It’s easy for privileged white liberals to love socialism because they never lived under it, but for those who have, it’s a far different story.

I thought about Tony Montana, the character played by Al Pacino in Scarface “I’ll kill a communist for fun, but for a green card, I gonna carve him up real nice.”

I had to pop up that classic flick and watch it again.  Early on there was this scene in which Tony Montana gives his description of living under communism and he did an excellent job of capturing reality.

We know just how destructive socialism has been historically, destroying industry, denying people their property, and depriving people happiness. Socialists have, throughout history, disrupted people’s lives, forcing them to uproot and seek a better life far away from socialism. In many cases, they’ve left friends and family behind, in many other cases, their friends and family were already killed. Success breeds success and misery loves company. Socialists are the latter: miserable people who seek comfort by forcing misery onto the masses.

Think about Bernie Sanders for a second. First thing that comes to my mind is that strange scent mixture of Butterscotch, Vapo-rub, and really, really old spice. Once you get past that, think about how angry and miserable he is all the time. He’s a hateful man, he’s been a hateful man his whole life and that won’t ever change. He doesn’t offer to make the world better, he offers to take away from people. His whole life is predicated on denying things from people and who he thinks doesn’t deserve what. He promises happiness through misery.

Even the hooded white people group Antifa spends their days dreaming of burning wooded crosses. At night, Antifa rampages through communities destroying what other people built, intimidating others, and practices their lynch mob ways. But what do they contribute? What do they create?

Socialist ideology preys on three types of people, the emotionally unstable, the gullible, and the youth. The first may seem harsh, but it’s not as condemning as you would think. Just look at the three people Kyle Rittenhouse shot amid that Antifa riot in Kenosha. But while the socialist movement does include people with severe emotional issues, it provides comfort to people with minor issues as well. It’s hard to hurt my feelings partly because I’m an adult, but also because I’m not a 8-year-old spoiled brat. Yet, you see the far left preying on people’s emotions, cultivating failure with nefarious intent. Some who believe the world revolves around their feelings and their self-centeredness are lauded for their bravery. Others may simply derive their sense of purpose in the name of the greater good. By giving a sense of relevance to the promise of power to fulfill their emotional needs, socialism fills that emotional instability. The more somebody seeks emotional fulfillment in government, the more dangerous they become.

To the gullible, they will lie and tell them whatever they think they want to hear. Think of the self proclaimed “anarchist” who sides with socialism, when socialism is the exact opposite of anarchism. The socialist knows this, yet he’s willing to lie to the so-called anarchist. A true intellectual anarchist would never fall for such a thing as they would have an understanding as to why society can peacefully co-exist without, or at least with a very minimal, government. A wannabe anarchist is just out for destruction and ends up doing the violent bidding of the totalitarian statist.

As for the youth, they typically want to do good things in their lives and socialism falsely promises them that. As a person gets older, they realize that socialism must absolutely devolve into a despotic state. There is no way around it. You’ll hear people say “real socialism hasn’t been tried,” not realizing that socialism has been tried and worked exactly as it was supposed to work. You turn total control of your life over to people in power, the people in power abuse that authority and demand an increasing amount of control over you in response to the cascading failure of their system. There is no way to avoid it once you go down that road.

It was that way in ancient Rome (yes, socialism existed back then), to the feudalist system of monarchs, and the socialist fiefdoms that keep people in poverty as it is easier to keep them down. Socialism sells the idea of equality but always delivers a system that all rights and all property belong to the royalty, and the peasants get the bread crumbs, if even that.

We were warned about it in Pinocchio (Pleasure Island) of people selling you this idea that you could have a good time all the time only to be turned into a jackass later.  Though Carlo Collodi’s original version is a more mature story than the Disney production. People who are promising you an easy and expedient life that requires you ceding your power to them are not doing it because they care about you, it’s because they are doing for their own interests. As many people who once were true believers of the the cause discovered, socialism demands absolute loyalty, and is quick to betray those who the bosses perceive as not loyal enough. It isn’t enough that these guttersnipes take the foolish, but they weaponize the foolish against the rest of us, turning the citizens of a nation into the property of the elite.

Living in the shadows of socialism is a great unconquerable enemy kept at bay by the ruling class, unseen by the masses, and defined by the elite. To dare question the cruelty of the unseen enemy is to side with the enemy and thus be the enemy. While this unseen enemy can take many forms, it always serves to the benefit of the party and keeps the population in check. Obedience is for your protection, disobedience is unpatriotic. Braving to imagine a better future is seen as selfish, and living in a constant state of fear is seen as a moral duty. Your individualism must be sacrificed— for the good of the nation. It is the use of fear that helps insure that the people can never return to freedom.

Call it what you want, Nazism, Fascism, Communism, Feudalism, or Socialism, but in the end the experience is the same. In the end, it must become tyrannical. The United States has had many defenses that prevented our country from delving into this system. The attack on those protections has been relentless and unending, but it’s held up thus far. It’s for that reason we don’t share that utter disdain for socialism as those who lived through it. We have two ears and one mouth, we’d be wise to spend twice as much time listening people who lived through socialism as we do lecturing them about the virtues of socialism.