{"id":1881,"date":"2019-02-12T06:55:25","date_gmt":"2019-02-12T14:55:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.paulmcelligott.com\/blog\/?p=1881"},"modified":"2019-02-11T16:25:07","modified_gmt":"2019-02-12T00:25:07","slug":"can-you-see-the-blatant-lie-in-this-cartoon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.paulmcelligott.com\/blog\/post\/can-you-see-the-blatant-lie-in-this-cartoon\/","title":{"rendered":"Can You See the Blatant Lie in this Cartoon?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"
Can you?<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The cartoon above showed up in my Texas cousin\u2019s Facebook\nfeed. Now, I love my cousin from Texas dearly, and she\u2019s one of my favorite\npeople, but we do see the world from very different perspectives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

I would describe my cousin as a walking bundle of\nright-leaning contradictions. She clearly has no love for any elected officials\nwith a \u201c(D)\u201d next to their names. She dismisses Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with\nblithe contempt while simultaneously hero-worshiping Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She is\nequally dismissive of Donald Trump and his most strident critics at the same\ntime. At her core, and why I love her, she is a smart and fundamentally decent\nhuman being, with nary a bigoted bone in her little toe. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But she also posts cartoons like the one above, and there\nhasn\u2019t been a right-wing attack on AOC that she doesn\u2019t gleefully swallow,\nhook, line, and sinker. I hope you can spot the lie in the cartoon. It\u2019s obvious\nwhen you look for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If for some reason you can\u2019t see the image, it is by Pat Cross, a conservative editorial cartoonist whose work is, to be kind, short on intellectual honesty. This particular cartoon shows a history class where the instructor is discussing the \u201cmillions of lives destroyed by socialism\u201d while a young Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is sound asleep in class, suggesting that the insurgent legislator is ignorant of the atrocities committed in the name of \u201csocialism\u201d and that her political philosophy is indistinguishable from those of Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Spotted the blatant, grotesque lie yet?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The cartoon perpetuates the falsehood that, because the full\nname for the Soviet Union was the \u201cUnion of Soviet Socialist Republics,\u201d\neveryone who considers themselves a socialist is equally accountable for the excesses\ncommitted under their rule.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If socialists are to be held accountable for the actions\nof the Soviet Union under Stalin, just because they claim the word \u201csocialist,\u201d\nthen every country we consider a democracy is accountable for the crimes of the\nGerman Democratic<\/strong> Republic (East\nGermany) and the Democratic<\/strong> Republic\nof Korea (North Korea) because they call themselves democratic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have previously written about how socialism and capitalism are not only compatible but also mutually dependent<\/a> upon each other. Capitalism needs a degree of socialism to mitigate its worst excesses, while socialism requires some form of market economy to create the wealth necessary for the state to improve the lives of the largest possible number of people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Communism, or Marxist-Leninist-style socialism, was a\nmisguided attempt to have a socialist state without a free market to fuel the\neconomy. It failed miserably. Literally miserably, causing untold misery and\nclaiming millions of innocent lives. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is nothing like the policies that Ms. Ocasio-Cortez,\nor anyone else who would call themselves a democratic socialist, is proposing\nfor the United States. Social Democracy is a mainstream, centrist school of\nthought in most other Western democracies, where it is not at all controversial\nto harness the strengths of a market economy to fund programs aimed at raising\nthe standard of living for the entire country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The next time you hear or see anything that equates\ndemocratic socialism with communism, just remember that the person repeating that\nclaim is either lying or gullible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The cartoon above showed up in my Texas cousin\u2019s Facebook feed. Now, I love my cousin from Texas dearly, and she\u2019s one of my favorite people, but we do see the world from very different perspectives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[351,352,348,286,349,350,285,233],"class_list":["post-1881","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-venting","tag-alexandria-ocasio-cortez","tag-aoc","tag-communism","tag-east-germany","tag-josef-stalin","tag-mao-zedong","tag-north-korea","tag-socialism"],"yoast_head":"\nCan You See the Blatant Lie in this Cartoon? - Paul McElligott Dot Com<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.paulmcelligott.com\/blog\/post\/can-you-see-the-blatant-lie-in-this-cartoon\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Can You See the Blatant Lie in this Cartoon? - Paul McElligott Dot Com\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The cartoon above showed up in my Texas cousin\u2019s Facebook feed. 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