Blog by Douglas J. Lanzo, Copyright 2026
September 23, 2026
If Socialism followed the famous maxim of victory being claimed by all but failure by none, it would have no fathers. Unfortunately for mankind, though, Socialism has had many fathers, all of whom chose to mask its failure rather than to acknowledge it: from Lenin to Mao to Castro to Chavez to Pol Pot to Kim Jong Un. And not only did these fathers of Communism in Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela, Cambodia and North Korea mask its failure, they double-downed on its deception with propaganda, censorship and indoctrination.
Their shameless tactics mirrored those of Goebel and, as with Goebel’s deplorable Nazi lies, demonstrated that repeated lies, however outrageous, could eventually be believed, or at the very least tacitly accepted, by the majority of the propagandized. Communist leaders became expert at corrupting the majority of the masses by enticing them with political, social and economic incentives, or failing that, coercion, to deprive fellow citizens who were anti-revolutionary of the liberty, property and human dignity (which some, such as Fidel Castro, deceptively espoused using democratic rhetoric until after he was solidly entrenched in power). They spoke like members of the French Revolution, proclaiming liberty, fraternity and equality, while delivering tyranny, a surveillance state and an elite ruling class that oppressed impoverished masses. And further, these Communists ruthlessly followed Machiavelli’s The Prince, looking solely to their ends of supposed economic and social development to justify horrific crimes against their own people, against God and against humanity.
Though Russia and China industrialized, they achieved industrialization at the expense of lives and souls, and in a very real sense, their national souls. Soviet collectivization, the eradication of kulaks, brutal forced labor, famine, starvation, and anti-Semitic pogroms collectively killed millions of Soviet citizens. The Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution in China produced unimaginable famine, political persecution, class violence and catastrophic dam failures that led to tens of millions of deaths of its own citizens. In the process, “wealthy” or “resisting” peasants, landlords, intelligentsia, religious leaders and followers, and countless members of the enslaving bourgeoisie class were murdered.
Not only did these barbaric acts violate human rights and international norms, but as eloquently articulated by adherents of natural law from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy to Pope John Paul II and Ronald Reagan they violated God-given rights of every person to liberty and human dignity which no regime has the right to by fiat or otherwise abolish.
Today in the United States we are confronted by Communists and Democratic Socialists who, deliberately or hopefully, in the vast majority of cases, unwittingly, espouse some of the same ideological goals that led to authoritarian Communist regimes which ravaged these nations and decimated their own citizens. In the case of the DSA, these include abolishing our current democratic constitutional institutions, including the Presidency, Senate and Supreme Court, nationalizing ownership of essential industries and our largest corporations, expanding public housing and establishing universal rent control, providing free pre-K through college education, abolishing the police and eliminating prisons and defunding the Department of War. In measures consistent with the notion of an international proletariat, the DSA platform also calls for open borders, amnesty for all illegal immigrants and granting them the right to vote. The official platform of the Communist Party of the United States is very similar, demanding that housing, education and healthcare be guaranteed as free, fundamental human rights, that large banks be nationalized, that corporate donations be banned, and that worker class representatives be elected across all levels of government.
While free healthcare, housing and education sound appealing to many of our youth given affordability issues across those sectors, they come at a price. The price includes sacrificing choice and quality of services, as national ownership eliminates free market competition and the natural market forces which moderate against excess demand and inadequate supply. This explains the horror stories we hear about degraded health care quality, chronic health care worker and equipment shortage, and excessive waiting times which lead to dangerously late diagnosing of cancer and infectious diseases in many nationalized health care systems.
One other huge drawback to Communism is its attack on alternative bases of authority, as Communist regimes brook no ideological opposition, Instead, they ban independent civic organizations and religious institutions and imprison civic and religious opposition leaders and intellectuals who dare to point out the glaring failures of the regimes to deliver on their utopian promises.
When asked to reduce to one verse the Bible’s key teaching on liberty, Pope John Paul II stated without hesitation: “You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” (John 8:32) Communist nations are notorious for suppressing religious and historical truths, denying fundamental human rights, upending societal norms, destroying cultural heritage, and persecuting philosophies that question their baldfaced lies. This leads to a heavy-handed police state which spies on, harasses and imprisons opposition, tears down cultural landmarks and historical treasures, bans Bibles, destroys classics and replaces history with propaganda. In the process, the corrupt, authoritarian ruling elite secularize and dismantle civic society and undermine even the nuclear family, removing parental control of their children’s education so that the regime can more readily indoctrinate pliable minds. In Communist China during the Cultural Revolution, this included encouraging children to denounce the bourgeois-proclivities of their parents, leading to their public humiliation, imprisonment and even death by firing squad.
I could fill a book with further stark lessons decrying the dangers of Communism and true Socialism in America today, but in the interest of brevity, I’d like to bring some “poetic justice” so to speak by sharing my poem:
Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing
Promising Eden
By Douglas J. Lanzo
Copyright 2026
“Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves.” Matthew 7:15 (NIV)
Tlaib, Mamdani, Sanders, AOC —
socialist leaders in New York and in D.C. —
surging candidates who claim victory
against the establishment, upending primaries.
Promising heaven, pandering to dreams,
making every problem sound simpler than it seems,
they espouse Marxism with Minions and memes
mocking moderates to mask their extremes.
Offering pyrite while speaking of gold,
proposing free programs for the young and the old,
failing to tell us how things will unfold
when their government shapes everyone in its mold;
ending incentives to prosper and grow,
to risk and invest to be the first one to know
how to better our lives, blazing trails that do show
free market innovations and riches they sow.
Everywhere tried, Communism has failed,
with human dignity and divine freedom assailed
by dictators who against the “System” once railed
dismantling culture and religion people hailed.
When the Berlin Wall fell, and free markets did reign,
democracy poured through oppressed lands once strained
under an Iron Curtain whose chains were blood stained
with oppressed workers, who never attained
the riches they were promised, by leaders who feigned
the worker’s paradise whose fate was ordained.
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