Lessons from "Fiddler on the Roof"

Lessons from “Fiddler on the Roof”

I love the United States of America.  I love this nation with every fiber of my being.  Last week I was reminded how much I love it when I viewed a playing of the film version of Fiddler on the Roofon TV.

In the past, I was generally taken with the sentimentality of the story. This time around, however, I was struck by its tragedy.  Here were decent people trying to get by as best they could, but repeatedly oppressed by their neighbors.  Merely because they were Jewish, they were ultimately driven from their homes.

In fact, this happened to the grandparents on both sides of my family. Nevertheless because I was born in America I could not identify with their plight.  Nor did I realize the degree to which our country saved them from oppression.  The Russia and Poland of their youth were not free countries.  Ours is!

But then I listen to Bernie Sanders.  His ancestors came from the very same place as mine.  They too were rescued by the decency and openness of the land to which they fled.  All the same, Sanders is advocating a revolution.  He wants to change the U.S. into something it has never been.

In the movie, the beau of the second daughter is a revolutionary. He advocates the overthrow of the tsar and the establishment of a socialist utopia.  For his troubles, he is arrested by the police and exiled to Siberia.  Like many Jews, he assumed that socialism would bring freedom and fairness.

History has shown, however that the opposite is true.  Wherever it has been tried, including Russia, it brought poverty and tyranny.  It did not release the victims of despotism from their predicament so much as swap one form of repression with another.

Tevye (the movie’s hero) dealt with a son-in-law to be did not realize this.  Having never been fully implemented, the downside of socialism was not yet visible. Sanders has no such excuse.  The viciousness of total state control has now been demonstrated countless times. (see Venezuela.)

It is for this reason that I no longer find Sanders amusing.  Hitherto I considered him a charming anachronism. He was someone caught in a political time warp.  Whereas I managed to extricate myself from the delusions of my forebears, he had not.

No longer am I so generous.  Today I perceive this presidential wannabe as a threat to our freedom.  By making socialism sound as if were a variant of democracy, he is making it seem harmless.  This is not the case—and never has been.

Democratic socialism is a contradiction in terms.  Socialism is never democratic.  In its quest for total social control, it has to resort to coercion. Sanders claims socialism is about freedom.  This is a lie.  Concentrating power in a central government is always a formula for robbing citizens of self-direction.

The truth is that whenever anyone—and that includes the ordinary citizen—gets in the way of the socialist agenda, he has to be neutralized.  He cannot be allowed to interfere with the plans of government experts.  Democracy is consequently impossible.

A case in point is Sanders promise of guaranteed work at a living wage. What he doesn’t say is that this has been tried in Russia and Eastern Europe.  Indeed, I have seen it in action in Rumania and it was a disaster.

People did, in fact, get guaranteed work—but not of their choosing. They could not follow their dreams because the government had other dreams for them.  As a result, they put in very little effort, which depressed the level of production.  This decreed that they be paid less; hence they had the worst of both worlds—less freedom and less prosperity.

Is this what we want?  My grandparents came to a country that had genuine freedom.  They were able to earn a decent living, as well as to prepare for their children and grandchildren to do better.  Capitalism might not have been what they sought, but it was part of what liberated them.

America is not perfect.  We all know that.  But replacing it with something that has an inferior track record does not make sense. Our freedom has been hard won. Why would we want to throw it away because we like the personality of the person who is advocating its demise?

Because we live in a free country, it is easy to take its benefits for granted.  Unfortunately our liberties also enable us to imprison ourselves.  So why would we voluntarily adopt a system like that of the USSR? Just for a few goodies we will never receive?  

Bernie Sanders should be ashamed of himself!

Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.

Professor Emeritus

Kennesaw State University