Why they burned LA down

6 days left till Trump returns.

Historian Ray Notgrass provides textbooks and other supplies for homeschoolers. He does podcasts to promote his business and he devoted one episode to my favorite American songwriter, Irving Berlin:

The 5-year-old boy watched in horror and confusion as angry men rode into his village. The men dragged people from their homes and beat them. They ransacked the homes and set them on fire. “Why?” he must have wondered. “What have we done?”

The year was 1893, and the place was Russia. The so-called crime of the people of that village was that they were Jewish. Such attacks, called pogroms, were all too common in Russia at that time. The boy’s father made a life changing decision. The family was going to escape this abuse and move to America.

The boy’s name was Israel Beilin (B-E-I-L-I-N). He was born in 1888, the eighth child in the family. His father was a cantor, a singer in Jewish synagogues. When the family came to America in 1893 and settled in New York City, the father went to work, but the family was still poor. Years later, Israel recalled, “I never felt poverty because I’d never known anything else.” The young man did not know any English when he came to this country.

The boy of course was Irving Berlin. His family’s crime under the czar was being Jewish.

Under communists, there was a greater threat to those in power: the middle class.

In 1861, the czar ended serfdom, liberating far more millions that ending slavery in America freed. The former serfs who succeeded—success being ownership of as little as 8 acres of land—were labeled kulaks defined by the oxymoronic term wealthy peasants.

The Library of Congress opened the Soviet files after that evil empire collapsed. LOC reported:

Having come to power in October 1917 by means of a coup d'état, Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks spent the next few years struggling to maintain their rule against widespread popular opposition. They had overthrown the provisional democratic government and were inherently hostile to any form of popular participation in politics. In the name of the revolutionary cause, they employed ruthless methods to suppress real or perceived political enemies. The small, elite group of Bolshevik revolutionaries which formed the core of the newly established Communist Party dictatorship ruled by decree, enforced with terror.

This tradition of tight centralization, with decision-making concentrated at the highest party levels, reached new dimensions under Joseph Stalin. As many of these archival documents show, there was little input from below. The party elite determined the goals of the state and the means of achieving them in almost complete isolation from the people. They believed that the interests of the individual were to be sacrificed to those of the state, which was advancing a sacred social task. Stalin's “revolution from above” sought to build socialism by means of forced collectivization and industrialization, programs that entailed tremendous human suffering and loss of life.

Although this tragic episode in Soviet history at least had some economic purpose, the police terror inflicted upon the party and the population in the 1930s, in which millions of innocent people perished, had no rationale beyond assuring Stalin's absolute dominance. By the time the Great Terror ended, Stalin had subjected all aspects of Soviet society to strict party-state control, not tolerating even the slightest expression of local initiative, let alone political unorthodoxy. The Stalinist leadership felt especially threatened by the intelligentsia, whose creative efforts were thwarted through the strictest censorship; by religious groups, who were persecuted and driven underground; and by non-Russian nationalities, many of whom were deported en masse to Siberia during World War II because Stalin questioned their loyalty.

Although Stalin's successors also persecuted writers and dissidents, they used police terror more sparingly to coerce the population, and they sought to gain some popular support by relaxing political controls and introducing economic incentives. Nonetheless, strict centralization continued and eventually led to the economic decline, inefficiency, and apathy that characterized the 1970s and 1980s, and contributed to the Chernobyl' nuclear disaster. Mikhail Gorbachev's program of perestroika was a reaction to this situation, but its success was limited by his reluctance to abolish the bastions of Soviet power—the party, the police, and the centralized economic system—until he was forced to do so after the attempted coup in August 1991. By that time, however, it was too late to hold either the Communist leadership or the Soviet Union together. After seventy-four years of existence, the Soviet system crumbled.

Communists purged the Russian army, too. They starved Ukraine into submission. Red China would have its cultural revolution in the 1960s with Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung (The Little Red Book) replacing religion. The book was basically cut-and-pasted from Confucius.

The communists easily killed 100 million people. Communists want power and actually like mowing people down.

American communists are having their purge now under FJB. Biden opened the borders to bring in millions of military-age illegals who will terrorize the land beginning with apartment buildings in Aurora, Colorado, where the mayor provides them cover.

In California, Chairman Brylcreem stepped up efforts to cripple the state by destroying dams in the name of saving the fish. A million fish died in the process. The media is OK with that.

In Sacramento, Democrats rejected home owner insurance premium hikes. Companies began shutting down their operations in California.

Billions that could have gone to build reservoirs and other public works went to homeless projects headed by well-paid Democrat operatives.

In Los Angeles, the “First Black Woman Mayor” installed lesbians to run the fire department and cut the fire department budget. Fox reported, “For the 2023-2024 fiscal year, Los Angeles budgeted $837 million for the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD), which was roughly 65% the size of the homeless budget of $1.3 billion.”

As the Santa Ana winds began their season after a particular dry summer, the DEI mayor headed to Ghana to be absent when the inevitable happened.

The fires began a week or so ago. At least one was started by an illegal alien. The New York Post reported:

The homeless man tackled and zip-tied by onlookers who say he was trying to start fires with a blowtorch near a Los Angeles wildfire is an illegal immigrant who will likely be protected by California’s sanctuary city status, according to a report.

The suspect, identified as Juan Manuel Sierra-Leyva, is a Mexican national who is in the United States illegally, Immigration and Customs Enforcement sources told Fox News.

But don’t worry, kulaks. Uncle Sam will rebuild your home, bypassing those rules and regulations LA said citizens needed to protect the environment—the same excuse given to blow up dams.

All that the government asks is that you show gratitude for joining the welfare state.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the continent, Fox reported, “FEMA kicks hurricane survivors out of temporary housing into snowstorm and freezing temperatures.”

Irving Berlin wrote God Bless America. Unfortunately, his beloved adopted country became Russia.