Soviet supermarket blues

Communist shortages are back, comrades!

If your family was working class in the 80s, you watched a lot of TV. Weekdays was the news. Saturday night was Hey Hey it’s Saturday. Sunday night was 60 Minutes. All of it rotted your brain, and we all watched the same things. At least where I grew up.

You saw a lot of starving Ethiopians, without any explanation of why their government was withholding food from the Tigray people as part of an ethnic cleansing campaign. Instead you were just made to feel bad for the smiling, skinny black kids running down the street with a goat. Like it was your fault, you entitled 7-year-old capitalist pig.

You saw a lot about the disappearing ozone layer too, which was also our fault because of the frizzy 80s hair-dos people wore. Hair spray was going to burn the planet to a crisp, and it was all your fault.

You also saw empty Russian supermarkets. That was the stuff that made you feel good about being a capitalist pig. “Look at those starving Russkies. That’s what you get when you don’t have freedom, son.” That kind of thing.

Which turned out to be true. As events would have it, we started to get shortages right about the time we lost the last shreds of our freedom.

No mince for you, reactionary bourgeois scum!

At least Russians could leave their house to go get some cabbage soup if they liked. We’ve been stuck at home on and off where I live for two years now and it’s looking like cabbage soup might be all we’re getting pretty soon.

That photo was taken in northern NSW last week. We weren’t willing to risk booking a trip to Queensland lest Comrade Annastacia order the border guards to shoot on sight. I’d definitely be on their list. So we went to Coffs.

Mini Prepper Anon particularly liked the Big Banana, of course. I particularly liked the story about the place. How a pioneering family of banana farmers came up with the outrageous idea of making their plantation a tourist attraction and thereby created a cultural icon which has given joy to millions. How greedy and selfish these profit-seeking entrepreneurs are, creating things that enable civilisation to flourish. Don’t they know there are starving Africans!

All of these thoughts were most likely prompted by my listening to Atlas Shrugged throughout our trip. It put everyone to sleep in the car, but not me. I was astonished at the foresight Ayn Rand showed throughout the book. Although the book was woefully over-written and her Objectivist ideology is Godless foolishness, Ayn Rand (real name Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum) absolutely nailed the self-serving fake moralism of the Marxist journalists and academics we see ruling the minds of the masses in the West today. It was almost spooky that a novel written over 50 years ago would describe our current cultural, political and economic trends so accurately. How’d she do it?

The reason, of course, that Ayn Rand was able to articulate what we’re experiencing today is because she’d lived through it as a child. Her family had experienced poverty and hardship after the Bolsheviks took over Russia and waged war against all things good and noble and true in the society. She’d seen the utopian political cult in action throughout her formative years, and she wanted to warn Americans that the same spirit of envy and destruction was coming for them. She wanted America to avoid what Russia had gone through. Unfortunately, I think she failed.

Communism in the West, of course, wears a different mask than it did in Russia and elsewhere in Eurasia during the twentieth century. It has had to mutate, and being an ideological virus it was able to do that in order to infect its host. Talk about the proletariat and the bourgeoisie wasn’t going to work in the West, where people had cars and microwaves and TVs. We were too pacified watching Murder She Wrote to rise up and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Instead, the Marxists shifted their narrative from class to identity and after their takeover of the universities in 1968 have preached their religion of envy and hate to every undergraduate student since. Instead of the wealthy oppressing the poor, in the West the problem was straight white men oppressing everybody else. The Marxists turned the class war into a race war, and we can see the bitter fruit of that Satanic agenda everywhere today.

It was all a ruse. A trick. Just like in Russia a century ago, the elitist Marxist intellectuals don’t care about the ‘marginalised’ or the poor or the oppressed in the West today. They use them, and once they have power they oppress them just as hard as everyone else. Women will not be better off under the rising cultural communist tyranny. Neither will black people or disabled people or gay people or any other group.

We’ll all be doing what we’re told so that maybe, if we’re lucky, we can get some cabbage soup this month.