Minnesota's Democrat Governor Tim Walz — one of the contenders reported to be on the short list under consideration for the VP slot with presumptive presidential nominee Kamala Harris — said this week that socialism is merely "neighborliness" by another name.
"Don't ever shy away from our progressive values," Walz admonished the "White Dudes for Harris" call on Monday evening. "One person's socialism is another person's neighborliness," the radical Democrat asserted. "Just do the damn work."
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a top VP contender for Kamala Harris, says socialism is actually just "neighborliness." pic.twitter.com/xISVQSxIUv
— Alpha News (@AlphaNewsMN) July 30, 2024
Walz has done the work of inflicting radical policies on Minnesotans — turning the North Star State into something of a "cold California" with driver licenses and in-state tuition for illegal aliens, for example — but he talks like someone who hasn't done his homework on the reality of socialism. More likely, he knows the truth — but is hoping Americans don't.
In some commentary published by the Heritage Foundation, historian Lee Edwards reminded that socialism "is responsible for the deaths of more than 100 million victims," citing The Black Book of Communism published by Harvard University Press in the late 1990s.
That work, Edwards underscored, documents how "each and every Marxist socialism regime has prevailed by way of a pistol to the back of the head and a death sentence in a forced labor camp." This is what Governor Walz calls "neighborliness."
"There is no exception whether in China under Mao Zedong, North Korea under Kim Il Sung, Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh, Cuba under Fidel Castro, Cambodia under Pol Pot, or Ethiopia under Mengistu Haile Mariam," Edwards continued. "Socialism in all its forms — Marxism-Leninism in the Soviet Union, Maoism in China, 'state socialism' in India, 'democratic socialism' in Sweden, National Socialism in Nazi Germany — has never come close to realizing the classless ideal of its founding father, Karl Marx."
More from Edwards' commentary:
According to Stephane Courtois, the editor in chief of The Black Book of Communism, the leading mass murderer is Pol Pot, whose attempt to communize Cambodia resulted in the deaths of one fourth of the country’s population. His closest rival is Mao, under whom as many as 40 million Chinese died in just one socialist campaign — the grossly misnamed Great Leap Forward. Of the Soviet Union’s first two dictators, Lenin and Stalin, Courtois says, “The blood turns cold at its venture into planned, logical and ‘politically collect’ mass slaughter.”
Sounding neighborly yet?
As Edwards correctly declared, the deadly barbarism inflicted in the name of socialism is the failed theory's reality, "a pseudo-religion grounded in pseudo-science and enforced by political tyranny."
So, who wants to be Governor Walz's neighbor?