Mom! Dad! Can We Go See The Mass Graves?
I’ll file this under my “originally thought it was a joke” category. However, it appears that Commie Travel is indeed real, and offers practical information for those who wish to visit important Communist sites around the world. For instance, they recommend making an informative, pleasant trip to beautiful…North Korea. As they put it, “Visits to Korea are always very luxury. It's only possible to visit the country by organized tours. Day and night you will be accompanied by two guides and a driver. They take care of everything you can think of. A very comfortable and easy way of traveling.” Right. The site promises to add a section on Cambodia, which should be interesting. It’s difficult to believe that there are still people out there who think Communism worked really well. From a political standpoint, it’s kind of like running into a Tyrannosaurs Rex in a national forest. Although I must admit that visiting such places would hold a certain morbid appeal, I would be just as interested in seeing areas that were important to the history of the Third Reich, and for the same reason.
posted by Henry Garfield at 12:16 AM
4 Comments:
Determining whether or not capitalism “works” is I think a matter of personal opinion. Capitalism certainly has succeeded in its stated purpose: To generate profits for the owner class and provide the working class with a plethora of consumer goods (like for instance computers). Communism’s stated goal was to create an egalitarian society free from want and oppression. In those respects, it undeniably failed.
Well, yes. Given how materialistic and self-centered most Americans are, they seem to be quite happy with their “meaningless consumerism”. The almost complete lack of support working class Americans show towards leftist ideologies like communism and anarchism confirm this. Ironically, just about the only people in the U.S. who still express support for such doctrines are privileged middle-class white people.
Yeah, having consumer goods available to either buy or buy not is just as bad as the forced famines of North Korea. America is a horrible place.
I was on Union Square, where the New York leftists put on their protests while surrounded by such horrible displays of consumerism such as The Strand (18 miles of used books at low prices available, from Noam Chomsky to Pat Buchanan ... what an opressive consumerist hellhole!). I saw one protest booth with a t-shirt that read "Keep Shopping America! Everything is Fine!" Of course, the t-shirt was for sale, which is soooo funny that I had to stop and point and laugh.
But yeah, I'd rather be in North Korea.
It isn't a straw argument. The topic at hand is the idea of tourists visiting hellholes like North Korea. You left a response that clearly states that the idea of the US working well is as silly. I'm attacking your clearly stated inability to tell the difference between the two.
Taking refuge in anarchism is simply a dodge. It's like saying that oil is bad compared to cold fusion, or that Boise sucks compared to heaven. Sure, cold fusion provides cheap, pollution-free energy and heaven is eternal paradise. But, like anarchy, they don't exist.
The entire point of Henry Garfield's blog (the way I see it, I don't speak for him) is to point out how silly people are who refuse to see the world as anything but an inferior version of the world inside their head ... a world that will never have to be defended because it will never actually exist.
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