This episode of the web series, Toward a More Perfect Union, is called Fear of a Red Planet.
In the US, the attitude towards getting ahead has always been that you have to pull yourself up by the bootstraps through rugged individualism and self-reliance, because it’s a dog eat dog world and you can’t expect anyone to help you.
But the truth is that everybody gets help along the way, in one way or another. Humans are actually conditioned to cooperate and collaborate with one another.
Yet, anything that smacks of helping people in America is portrayed as socialism, especially if the help comes from the government.
The fear of socialism and communism is ingrained in Americans heads, so much so that politicians use it as a fear tactic to tell people that the government is coming to take all their freedoms away and control every aspect of their lives. This leads to socialism being portrayed as a threat to the personal freedom and economic prosperity of Americans.
During the Cold War, a popular slogan was Better Dead Than Red, as there was compete fear over the possibility of a red planet. The Vietnam War itself was fought to stop the spread of communism.
But it might just be time to rethink what the definition of socialism is.
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Thanks for watching! Feel free to let me know what you think.