To the editor:
I want to thank the Catholic Herald for running the excellent article on Pope Leo XIII’s assessment of socialism as evil. It truly is.
Socialism, with its tempting allure of equality, has not produced equality, only poverty, repression, and death. Socialism has manifested itself worldwide in many forms and variants, but always with a similar end result of poverty and death.
Whether it was the millions killed in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the genocide of Hitler’s German Socialist Workers Party, or the mass desert graveyards of Saddam Hussein’s Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party in Iraq, the result is always the same.
No movement in world history has caused such genocide. But, despite its history, socialism is now being favorably viewed by our mass media, academia, and many of our current political leaders.
Christians, always a target of socialist repression, should be in the forefront of the fight to educate citizens. No economic system has ever lifted as many millions of people from poverty as capitalism. Yet, it is being bashed daily by the media and undermined at every opportunity by our politicians.
Dictatorships, when they come, do not go away quickly or easily. Just ask the 60,000 dead in Syria, where a current revolution is underway to overthrow Bashar al-Assad’s Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party; or the people who risk their lives daily trying to escape from Fidel Castro’s socialist Cuban paradise.
B.L. Johnson, Madison