RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/02/angela_merkel_and_the_destruction_of_german_democracy.html

These thoughts reflect the writer’s concern about the worsening political and social conditions in Germany, a nation whose importance — for America, Europe, and the world — should require no laboring to a readership of politically sophisticated Americans.

What’s happening today in Germany is deeply disturbing.

And it’s not for the reason casual American observers, including many conservatives, might think based on information derived from the mainstream English-language media.  Contrary to these purveyors of globalist, multi-cultural propaganda, the reason for growing unease about Germany is not the presence in the German parliament (Bundestag), and persistent electoral strength, of “Die Alternative für Deutschland” (“The alternative for Germany,” or AFD) — invariably, counterfactually, and ludicrously styled by the Western corporate media as the far-right AFD — as they style all western European political parties committed to preserving national cultures. 

Deep concern about Germany arises because of two different but related phenomena.

First, Angela Merkel’s destruction of the center-right Christian Democrats/Christian Social Union (the Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands, or CDU, and the Christlich Soziale Union in Bayern, or CSU, respectively), and her radical transformation of those allied parties, which together formed most of the post war governments that led Germany out of the physical and moral ruins of World War II.  Through Merkel’s policies, the CDU/CSU have been shorn of their conservative principles and become nearly indistinguishable from Germany’s extremist Die Grünen (“the Greens”) and its dying Sozial Demokratische Partei Deutschlands (the old socialists, or “SPD”).  

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/02/the_crumbling_of_cubas_grand_socialist_experiment.html

John Alpert is an American photojournalist whose work is featured in the Netflix documentary Cuba and the Cameraman.  He first went to the island nation in 1972, a little more than a decade after the Cuban Revolution.  Over the next 45 years, Alpert returned to Cuba, each time taking pictures of its towns and cities and people.  The images he took are a timeline that chronicle how Castro’s socialist revolution played out for the Cuban people in the years that lay ahead.

A disarmingly polite young photojournalist at the time, Alpert was one of the few Americans granted face-to-face meetings with Castro.  With the U.S. media curious about the grand socialist experiment unfolding in Cuba, Alpert was invited to appear on TV programming to discuss his conversations with Cuba’s communist dictator.  Alpert was quite impressed when Castro said he was taking concrete measures to make life better for the Cuban people, citing as evidence a free health care system, free schools, free higher education, and shiny new and rent-free housing projects. When Alpert first visited Cuba, the shelves of grocery stores and other retail establishments were filled with consumer goods of every description.

To a young photojournalist who was idealistic and somewhat naïve at the time, socialism seemed to portend a bright future for Cuba.  With its people happy and well taken care of by a paternalistic government, things were going well.  But as time moved one, Cuba’s house-of-cards communist system fell apart.  The free goods and services given to the Cuban people were funded not by the country’s top-down collectivist economy, but by a massive infusion of hard cash, gasoline, food, and other provisions from the Soviet Union.  When the Soviets eventually pulled the plug as their own socialist economy was crumbling, the day-to-day lives of the Cuban people fell on hard times, a rude reminder of Margaret Thatcher’s observation the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.