In the late 1980s William J. Murray journeyed to the Soviet Union to see the country where his Marxist mother had wanted to raise him.
The CIA and the Western media had spent years portraying the Soviet Union as a threat to the United States, but when Murray arrived he didn’t see a powerful nation capable of threatening America; rather, he saw gravel roads in Moscow, obsolete buses, stoplights that didn’t work and landline telephones out of order – a country going bankrupt.
Every police officer was corrupt because police didn’t earn enough money.
Recounting this story during a recent appearance on the “Stand for Truth” radio show, Murray said it’s a myth that Ronald Reagan bankrupted the Soviet Union through increased defense spending.
“What bankrupted the Soviet Union was selling bread for a nickel a loaf when it cost 75 cents a loaf to make,” Murray told host Susan Knowles. “What bankrupted the Soviet Union was charging people three cents to ride on a subway system when it was costing three or four dollars a rider in order to provide the service. That’s what bankrupted the Soviet Union.”
In other words, Communism, the governing philosophy of the Soviet Union, is what bankrupted the Soviet Union.
The Soviet government had fixed prices below market value, which led to a scarcity of goods, according to Murray. People formed long lines on street corners, waiting for a truck to pull up and unload a cargo of black market goods for sale. In one Moscow department store, the shelves were empty, but vendors lined the walls offering black market goods.
This trip to the USSR was not Murray’s first brush with Communism. His mother, American Atheists founder Madalyn Murray O’Hair, was a Marxist who actually tried to defect to the Soviet Union in 1960 with William and her other son. She failed.
Nonetheless, O’Hair raised William in a Marxist-atheist household. But he avoided becoming a Marxist like his mother, and the reason was simple.
“I got a job,” he told Knowles. “Look, people don’t understand, we attribute Marxism in our circles, in conservative circles, we attribute Marxism to the university campus. You know, there’s a lot of things on the university campuses; Marxism isn’t one of them. They have a lot of screwed up social ideas; they have socialist ideas, but they’re not true Marxist ideas.
“The Marxists from the 1920s on recruited from the unemployment lines.”
Murray explained it’s hard to convince a college professor, with his six-digit salary and three-day-a-week work schedule, to put all of his income into a big pot with everyone else and only take out what he needs to survive, which is what a true Marxist would do.
“However, when you have virtually nothing and you’re in an unemployment line and you’re on welfare, you’re anxious for everybody to put something into the tub so you can take out what you need,” he said. “So the recruiting for true Marxism has always been out of the unemployment line.”
Murray said his mother had trouble holding down a job. Although she was smart and well educated, her brash personality constantly turned people off. As an atheist, she believed she was more advanced than people who believed in God.
In fact, Murray said virtually everyone he met growing up who was involved with his mother’s activism was unemployable for one reason or another. Therefore Marxism naturally attracted them.
Murray, on the other hand, didn’t have trouble holding down a job. He worked in the airline industry, got promoted quickly, and eventually abandoned the Marxism his mother had instilled in him.
But he never forgot about Marxism completely. Given his experience with a Marxist mother and his time in the Soviet Union as an adult, Murray felt he was well qualified to write a book about the dangers of such a centrally planned system. And he felt 2016 was the right time to do it.
“As I saw the drift of the United States and the entire Western world toward that Soviet model that I had watched the demonstration of… I felt that it was my responsibility to write a book that explained what it was and what it did and that it wasn’t only Marxism,” he said.
The resulting book, “Utopian Road to Hell: Enslaving America and the World with Central Planning,” debuts March 8. As Murray alluded, the book is not exclusively about Marxism or Communism; he covers fascism as well.
“This view that Marxism and Communism and fascism are at opposite ends of the spectrum, and one is far left and one is far right – that’s nonsense,” Murray insisted. “They’re the same thing. They are utopian thought. They are the concept that a small group of people can get together and functionally write a plan for society that will benefit all people; that they are so smart and so intelligent that they and they alone can come up with a system that works for everybody and that will supply everybody with their needs.”
Murray sees such utopian thought creeping into the United States. He cited Medicare as an example. When Medicare patients go to their doctor, the doctor presents them with a set of alternatives that are approved by Medicare, i.e. the federal government. There are usually other alternatives, but the government has not approved them for use by Medicare patients.
Murray considers President Obama to be a utopian, just like Marx, Lenin, Pol Pot, Hitler and Mussolini. He thinks Obama is a true believer, a man who really believes he can lift America’s poor out of poverty and give every American health care, food, and a good job.
“Now Hillary Clinton, I don’t think so,” Murray said. “I think she’s just an opportunist and con artist and thief.”
But he thinks Obama did not view his grand promises in the 2008 and 2012 elections as empty promises, but as a utopian condition he could actually create in America.
“In many societies, that has wound up leading to violence and repression and death when people weren’t able to deliver that,” Murray warned. “Fortunately in the United States we have the kind of system where going in that direction is difficult because we have 50 governors that have their own armies and a military that’s sworn to defend the Constitution, not to follow the president.
“So we have an escape valve still there; whether that remains, that’s another question.”
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