Two Blasts from the Past for local man

John Schaefer got a couple of reminders last week of his late father, Francis, whose death occurred 12 years ago as of Friday.

First, there was photograph of Francis working with fellow Okarche Lions Club members on the annual Okarche Deutchesfest a number of years ago and then he received a letter that Bill Ford of Shawnee Grain had written Francis on May 23, 1967, asking about the wheat picture in Kingfisher County, with Francis’ reply written to Ford’s questions in the margins.

Francis served many years as the manager of the former Okarche Coop Association, which is now part of CHS.

Incidentally, the Okarche Deuchesfest event, a renewal of the event Francis was working on, will be held next Friday.

John thought it highly coincidental that he got the two reminders of his father on the same day.

Is left truly concerned about gun victims?

Are leftists really concerned about children killed in school shootings, or are they using the shootings simply to justify their push to get guns out of the hands of law-abiding Americans so that they will feel safe to ram their left-wing programs down the throats of people who would stop them if they could.

An unarmed people become peons, not citizens, in the world of leftist government. Joseph Stalin considered those Russians who didn’t accept his communist policies as vermin – something to be exterminated.

He was good at it.

Google (not in any way a right wing source) reports:

After the Soviet Union dissolved, evidence from the Soviet archives became available, containing official records of the execution of approximately 800,000 prisoners under Stalin for either political or criminal offenses, around 1.7 million deaths in the Gulags and some 390,000 deaths during kulak forced resettlement.

Mao Zedong, the founder of the People’s Republic of China, is reported to have killed 45 million in four years.

Frank Dikötter, Hong Kong based historian, said in a speech at the Independent (U.K. newspaper) Woodstock Literary Festival, that during the time Mao was enforcing the Great Leap Forward in 1958 in an attempt to catch up with the economy in the Western world, he oversaw, “one of the worst catastrophes the world has ever known .”

The article added:

“Mr Dikötter, who has been studying Chinese rural history from 1958 to 1962, when the nation was facing a famine, compared the systematic torture, brutality, starvation and killing of Chinese peasants to the Second World War in its magnitude. At least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death in China over these four years; the worldwide death toll of the Second World War was 55 million.

The Black Book of Communism estimates that between 15,000 and 17,000 were killed by the state in Cuba’s communist revolution.

The socialist-communist governments, which have always become dictatorial, but which 49.6 percent of younger Americans say they want to live under, has proven exceptionally successful in killing people.

Some will say that Germany was fascist rather than communist.

Here is Google’s report on the German economic system under Hitler.

When Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, he introduced policies aimed at improving the economy. The changes included privatization of state industries, autarky (national economic self-sufficiency), and tariffs on imports.

Doesn’t privatization of industries sound very similar to socialism/communism?

It later added:

Nazi Germany maintained a supply of slave labour, composed of prisoners and concentration camp inmates, which was greatly expanded after the beginning of World War II. In Poland alone, some 5 million citizens (including Polish Jews) were used as slave labour throughout the war. Among the slave laborers in the occupied territories, hundreds of thousands were used by leading German corporations including Thyssen, Krupp, IG Farben, Bosch, Blaupunkt, Daimler-Benz, Demag, Henschel, Junkers, Messerschmitt, Siemens, and Volkswagen, as well as Dutch corporation Philips. By 1944, slave labor made up one quarter of Germany’s entire work force, and the majority of German factories had a contingent of prisoners.”

That sounds a lot like Stalin’s slave labor camps, whose denizens often were worked (and starved) to death.