This is a great read, and completely on the “money”.
I grew up in “social” aka council housing or, as they call in America, the “projects”. I’ve worked in Moscow, East Berlin, Romania and China; I’ve been to all the countries in the Middle East with the exception of Libya; Israel twice, none of them have socialism but I’d rather not live there. The UK even with added “free” Healthcare, a Labor government, at it’s most extreme, the UK never had socialism.
Any discussion of Healthcare or public “welfare” in the USA descends into an argument about socialism within 90-seconds. It almost carries a worse stigma than Nazi Germany.
I can only think it comes from an era, when people were more easily brainwashed by propaganda, unlike now when propaganda comes from social media in the form of bias/prejudice sponsored intelligence attacks.
I assume, since i don’t know, that there a heavy sell to support anti-communism from the 20’s through McCarthy, and through the Soviet era to the destruction of the Berlin wall. You can see the same imagery in any of the ridiculous tea party supporting websites.
My favorite is this Regan poster. I’m not sure what we won, but having been in Russia both before, during and after the 1991 Soviet coup d’état , they’ve made huge changes, huge gains,and Russia doesn’t have the same scale hunger, desolation it had when it was the center of the Soviet Union, it now has arguably as many or more billionaires than America does.
We, with our self prescribed image of rugged individualism, innovation, and capitalist world leadership, on the other hand just have even greater wealth disparity, a completely fscked up Healthcare system, and a collapsing democracy manipulated by the very side that espoused Reagan.
The false dichotomy article linked below encapsulates so much of what we need here, now. I speak as someone who can afford not to work, who is in the 5% but knows America can and must do better.