Obamanomics and Bolshevism: Birds of a Feather

The following passages are my translations from chapter 18 of Jules Romains’s Le Monde Est Ton Aventure. The novel was completed some time shortly before or just after World War II, and its characters are of course fictional. Yet the events described—specifically, in this case, the closely scrutinized visit of two Western journalists to the Black Sea region in 1922—are based on Romains’s own experiences and those of his literary colleagues. The speaker in every case below is an American relief worker, who has briefly spirited Jallez and Bartlett away from their official keepers and undertaken to translate a few honest conversations with local farmers struggling to survive the current famine.

Excerpt 1: “There are indeed fifteen villages, as I was saying. He gave me a figure for the inhabitants that strikes me as a bit creative… I’ll double-check. They continue to suffer terribly. I asked him if he doesn’t think that the drought is the trouble’s primary cause. He says that a drought without Bolsheviks would not have been such an ordeal… but that Bolsheviks without a drought are already a terrifying ordeal. Nothing can be done as long as they’re here. He has explained to me something of the local system of oppression that they have installed. If this is true—and there’s no reason to suppose it false—then one can hardly make out how these poor people will ever dig their way out of misery. The Bolsheviks’ game has been—as it seems to be everywhere—to depend upon connections with the local populace—connections with several hundred ne’er-do-wells, incompetents, and drunkards that are bound to exist in any community of several thousands, even in a place like this where the level of public morality exceeds the average. They commanded these minions to form a committee among themselves… hold on a minute, I’ll ask him what they call it.”

Excerpt 2: “This committee makes it rain and shine hereabouts. It terrorizes the village executive committee—or the village soviet, if you prefer—whose president serves at its whimsy. The president in question is also one of the shadiest characters around, a complete stranger to the country, arrived from who-knows-where. Some contend that he’s a Lett, others that he’s a Jew. As you see, it’s all very vague. He was imposed at the head of a list that the population was amiably asked to elect without any discussion.”

Excerpt 3: “The president of the soviet is in league with the committee of deadbeats. And just in case he were to be lacking in docility or zeal, he is under the surveillance of his secretary, a small young man—very elegant, very polished in manner—who was imposed like all the others. For another quality of this system that you will notice everywhere is that everyone spies and terrorizes back and forth. As soon as a peasant seems to be pulling himself up by hard work, the committee demands with indignation that his harvest and his livestock be confiscated. The president immediately proposes the measure to the village soviet, which makes haste to adopt it. I believe that the official paperwork refers to the process as requisition or taxation.”

Excerpt 4: “First of all, this is what happens [both with international food relief and] with the little bit of wheat or maize that the central government sometimes sends. The distribution is made through the village soviet… practically by the president and the young secretary. It’s they who draw up the lists and fix the quantities. They begin by entering themselves, their families, their friends, and their relations. It appears that they even pass something along to re-sellers, who sell our donated grain—at a very elevated price—to local black markets. You therefore have an entire band, very well organized and with a very studied division of labor, in the manner of gangs in our societies.”

Study the system well. These are the “jobs that cannot be outsourced” which President Obama promised to a plainant during a “virtual townhall meeting” last week. One of his official shills further explained to a reporter that two in three jobs require a college diploma. Both of these opaque remarks converge upon the reality of a hugely burgeoning public sector. Put in plain English: the Obama administration intends to create the American Union of Soviet Republics. The vast majority of wage-earners will be on the public payroll, busily scribbling forms and generating computer files to punish industry and redistribute its fruits. Naturally, of those recruited for this massive bureaucracy, the most favored class will be all of the previously “marginalized”—citizens like the single mom of a minority race or ethnicity, who will be rushed through some joke-of-a-university and receive a joke-degree preparatory to heading the Statistics Division of the local Bureau of Domestic Energy Efficiency (or BUDEE, if you prefer). Jews, ominously, have always been marginalized (and have sometimes marginalized themselves). Though often ideologically kindred to the discontents who fueled the Bolshevik Revolution (and were later targeted by Stalin), our American Jews are growing even more notorious and more suspect for pushing war with the Islamic world—a position which could re-ignite a diabolical sympathy for pograms. Then our Big Brother government repeals free speech and imprisons “thought criminals”… then the sympathy for persecuted reactionaries grows… and then… well, about then is the time, I suppose, that President Obama suspends elections due to national emergency.

This has all happened before. It could easily happen again.