Fifty years of Heritage (edition 13) Published May 26, 2011 By Eric M. White 910 AW/PA YOUNGSTOWN AIR RESERVE STATION, Ohio -- Each week in 2011, the 910th AW/PA office will republish a historic article or highlight from the archive along with a brief commentary. In the case of articles, we will publish exact copies of the originals, so any grammatical or typographical errors are intentional reproductions. Article13: Language in the war of words (part four) Note: For the full scope of this series, read the three previous Fifty Years of Heritage articles. From the February, 1961 Buckstone Carrier (our archives lack December, 1960 and January 1961 issues of the base magazine) (Editor's note; This is the sixth in a series of articles on Communism Vs. Christian faith, writen by Chaplain Robert A Boettger, 459th TCW Chaplain. Very little is to be gained by merely pointing out the faults of others while ignoring our own. But ignorance of the basic beliefs of communism, an alien creed, can weaken our own faith and make us easy marks for the enemies of Western civilization. On successive months, Lt Col Boettger will discuss these topics: Religion, Man, Education, Morality, Government, Economics, Peace, the Future, as these things are understood by communists and by us.) VI Economics My father-in-law was a man of independence. Before his retirement in 1949, he owned a farm in southern Ohio. He was so much opposed to government regulation that he refused to accept government checks for letting his land lie fallow. Had he been a farmer in Russia when collectivization started, he would have been shot. The Communist states have enforced the formation of giant farms and have erased the opposition by killing the opposers. As it is, Gramp died peacefully at the age of 81, with his integrity firm. He was the fifth generation to hold the land in Highland County. This story is the story of freedom vs. communism. The Russian rulers have made gigantic strides with a series of 5 year plans. They started with a primitive, backward, agricultural economy under the Czars. Now the country is an industrial - agricultural economy producing 48,600,000 tons of steel annually as compared with 4,200,000 tons before 1917. Our tonnage is now 104,000,447 annually. Steel is a basic barometer of an industrial society. But the cost of this Russian progress has been high . The economy of Russia is rigidly controlled by the Party Presidium in Moscow. They set the production goals, pass them down the line to the factories and farms, and make sure that the managers are not only Party men, but are watched carefully as well. There are no free labor unions, no collective bargaining, no self government nor individual economic enterprize. Even the collective farms, which are represented as being groups of democratic farmers, are under the fir control of the Party which determines the use of farm machinery. Russia has never fully recovered from the slaughter of livestock by the independent farmholders in 1928 when they were forced into the collective farms. The total annual production of the Soviet Union, a land of 200,000,000 people is roughly estimated at about the total production of the 170,000,000 Americans. In Moscow you would have to work twice as long for a pound of bread as you do here. For beef, five times as long; tea, twenty-one times; for a suit of clothes, sixteen times as long. You would stand in long lines for ordinary staples, much of which would be gone by noon. You might have to pay months in advance for luxury items. These dreary facts do not make the real difference, however. The big thing is freedom. If you were a Russian you could not hope to be an independent business man, engineer or farmer. You would follow the Party plan. You could not evade the goals nor quit your job to seek a better one. You would have government prices based on a ruble value about half of its real monetary value. You would be punished if you did not succeed in your job. In short, you would pay for industrial progress by the loss of freedom and enterprise. Under such a system, the will of people is gradually weakened until they accept the decisions of others without question. Soon a very few rule many without criticism or opposition. And the secret police are there to see that it stays that way. In Russia, 15,000,000 government workers and Party officials rule the people. In the U.S. it takes 4,400,000 people to run the local, state and Federal government services. Thus the Communist faith produces a slave state -- the biggest and most successful plan in all history to subject and exploit millions of people.