Obama Slogan 'Forward' is Used By Socialists Too
By Svetlana Kunin
IBDEditorials.com
There is a modern parallel to Obama's new campaign slogan, "Forward!" It is the motto of the modern Socialist Movement "Forward!" (translated: "Vperiod!"), founded in Russia in 2005. Its declared goal is the socialist transformation of society.
In March 2011, the Socialist movement Forward officially merged with another organization, Socialist Resistance, to create the Russian Socialist movement. Its website states that the organization provides a joint platform for the anti-capitalist left.
As declared in the movement's Manifesto, the key task is taking anti-capitalist positions and comprehensive support for all forms of worker resistance to the power of the rich.
The movement's main collaborative forces are trade unions, eco-socialists, gender equality movements, strike committees and protest-coordinating counsels. These are similar to President Obama's support groups: organized labor unions, environmentalists, feminists, community organizers and policy development organizations such as the Center for American Progress.
One component that the Obama administration has but the out-of-power Russian Socialist movement does not is an opponent-monitoring apparatus such as Media Matters — what Communist Party leaders in the former Soviet Union used to have.
After introducing the motto "Forward!" — identical to slogans of Socialists of the past and present — Obama rolled out an imaginary vision of Julia, in which the government is involved in all aspects of a person's life.
No need for virtual reality. There is a real-life timeline for an average person in a society where the government plans, regulates and provides free services for its citizens in countries past and present — the USSR, Cuba, etc.
Government provides free education, free medical care and other services to all citizens by paying all working men and women salaries that allow for a certain minimal standard of living.
Children as young as a year old are enrolled in free day-care centers. There, they learn that for everything good in life, they should be grateful to the great party leaders, especially to the leader of the governing party.
At age 17, after graduating from the public high school and passing competitive acceptance tests, teenagers can enroll in free colleges and universities. But government-imposed quotas regulated certain ethnicities out of enrolling in specified occupations.
Unless someone from the family is a member of the government with access to special clinics, hospitals and the best doctors, a person in need of medical attention visits a free clinic assigned to his or her address and waits in line to see a doctor assigned to the clinic.
If surgery is required, it is performed free of charge in overcrowded hospitals, with reusable surgical instruments. Due to a lack of medication, especially at the hospitals outside capital cities, minor surgeries are performed without anesthesia and with limited painkillers, followed by recovery amid unsanitary conditions with little attention from nurses.
After graduating from college, new professionals are assigned their places of work. Independent of occupation, their salaries are just enough to cover bare necessities, as was the case for their parents.
When young adults get married, they can afford to have one child. Two children is a stretch. A family with just one child would not be able to live on one salary. Due to shortages of contraceptives, abortion is a common birth-control mechanism and, as with all minor surgery, often performed without anesthesia.
At retirement, most citizens live on pensions below a minimal standard of living.
I personally lived that life in the former USSR until age 30. When my young family of three immigrated to the USA, my parents stayed behind. After botched medical procedures in a free hospital, my father screamed from pain for three days before he died at age 70.
Like President Obama, Russians also evolved on the gay rights issue. Homosexuality used to be outlawed in the Socialist Soviet Union. Today it is not a crime in Russia. Even so, facing an alarming decline in number of newborns and an eventual demographic disaster, they do not play with the redefinition of marriage.
Otherwise there's a lot in common among an Obama administration striving for total government involvement in people's lives, the communists of the former Soviet Union and modern Socialists in Russia.
The society that Obama is moving America "forward" will allow any president to outlaw or impose whatever he wants without consent of the people.