Control

 The biggest challenge to total control of any populace is in the implementation phase. Once you have control, it’s easy to maintain it, especially if those you seek to control have no way of resisting. As is the case with anything, if you have a monopoly, have done away with any competition, and are the sole purveyor of whatever the masses demand, you can set your price, set your rules, and ration to your heart’s content.

It’s hard to make three hundred million plus people come to heel when they can go to a dozen different places to get what you’re threatening to withhold from them. When you’re the only one, and no one can get what you’ve got except through you because you’re the only one who’s got it, it’s a whole new ballgame with new rules.

The first eureka moment the communists of old had was the idea that the more centralized something is, the easier it is to control. Decentralization is the enemy of control, and if a society is decentralized enough, controlling it is nearly impossible.

We saw this recently when the governor of New Mexico woke up one morning and decided to ignore the Constitution and the Second Amendment and create new laws for everyone on a whim. Sheriffs throughout her state put the kibosh on her proclamations by refusing to enforce her unconstitutional edicts. She jumped the gun. She was too excited at the prospect of playing queen and began to decree before control was acquired.

It’s hard to effectively control when you have too many brains trying to think. Not that they’re good at it, but dumb people will offer an opinion far quicker than a smart one because the smart one takes the time to think things through and consider consequences before letting something they can’t take back spill out of their face. The fewer individuals in the command and control structure, the better for them. Ideally, if you have one geriatric diaper wearer who doesn’t know who or where he is half the time to rule them all, that’s all you need, or at least a puppet to do your bidding while you pull strings in shadows. That is when control becomes achievable.

 Their second eureka moment was that to make the people compliant, you had to eliminate every source of hope they could run to. They couldn’t have people getting ideas. They couldn’t have people hope for something more than waiting to die and dreaming their children’s children may glimpse better days. The reason the old communist regimes detested religion was because it provided hope. The reason they hated Christianity worst of all was because it offered hope not in this life only but also in the life to come. If your hope is anchored in eternity, then there isn’t much the godless can do to rob you of your peace.  

It wasn’t an issue of principle or dogma. Christianity impeded their control, so it needed to be eliminated. You could be a drunkard, a wife beater, a liar, a cheater, or even a politician, but being a Christian was unacceptable. Being a Christian meant you had morals and principles. It meant that you had character and enough dignity that you wouldn’t sell out your neighbor for a half loaf of bread or a sack of flour. They were a constant reminder to everyone around them that you could be better, decent, moral, upright, and joyful even in a gray, grim place such as a Communist-run nation.

The third thing they realized was self-evident, so no lightbulb moment was necessary. It was also the hardest to implement, especially with people living in the villages or the rural areas. The third thing was scarcity. They had to have scarcity, whether real or contrived, so the people depended on the system, the government, and the selfless public servants in middle and upper management. It’s been long enough, and we’ve seen enough of what our fellow man is capable of to intuit that the whole notion of public service is a fanciful lie, for the most part.

If you lived in the city, it was easy for them to tighten the screws to the point that the stores looked like they’d been ransacked by a mob of starving savages. Empty shelves, empty glassed-in refrigerators, empty counters, empty everything except for the lady in the white smock and the paper hat behind the counter because even though she had nothing to sell and there was nothing to buy, she still had to show up for work.

It reached the point that government officials were going through the villages, counting how many chickens farmers had in their coops and how many heads of cattle they had grazing in the fields. It had to come to the point that the average citizen could not survive without the government because only then could the government unleash the tyranny it had always planned on unleashing.

Yesterday, I read that the mayor of Chicago wants to open city-owned grocery stores now. I had to chuckle. They’re not even trying to hide it anymore. Why am I telling you all this? Because once you see it, you can’t unsee it. I was only nine when I left Communist-run Romania, but I’ve read as much as any historian on what they did to bring about the consolidation of power and the subjugation of tens of millions of people. That less motivated and intelligent people are trying to do the same in America is troubling because it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that this will end badly for all concerned.   

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.