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During 2019 I lived a couple of months in New York, those were different times, the coronavirus did not exist, the American economy had not been flooded with cheap dollars, there was no inflation close to 10%, in the White House a Republican was in charge, and certainly, the former capital of the world did not look like a communist paradise.
The contrasts in New York have always been radical, Upper Manhattan has nothing to do with Midtown, let alone the suburbs in Brooklyn or Queens. The image projected on the outside of the Big Apple is a romanticized Woody Allen movie, with glimpses of the great skyscrapers, the majestic and imposing Central Park, and the inexhaustible cultural spaces that impact the world with Broadway plays, the Lincoln Center, and the sublime art collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, however, behind that facade of superiority hides the tragic decline of Western society.
New York has long ceased to be the most ideal representation of capitalism, in fact, in the city that word is now a noisy one, in the streets there is endless graffiti that speak of “revolution”, “fighting wealth”, and “ending the system”; talking about communism now seems more acceptable than talking about work, capital and wealth creation, in public squares you no longer see people in suits having lunch to return to their jobs, what you see is drug addicts, homeless and anarchists. The New York of today does not inspire respect or admiration, it inspires fear, pity and a sense of emptiness, of collective suicide from which it is difficult to escape.
I was with my wife last weekend in the city and our joint feeling was that we never wanted to return. The dirt in the streets has tripled, the garbage has impregnated a large part of the city with an unpleasant aroma, on every corner you come across a homeless person in such catastrophic conditions that it is difficult to understand how they are still alive, people frequently approach you to offer you drugs, crime and assaults are as repetitive as the obesity in the works of Botero, and in the subway you must be alert all the time that some psychopath does not approach you and throw you on the train tracks to kill you.
But without a doubt, the most unreal, dystopian and terrifying episode was the one we witnessed in Washington Square Park, where for minutes we doubted whether we had entered the set of a Terry Gilliam movie, or whether a remake of “12 monkeys” was being filmed.
New York Communist Party. Photo: Emmanuel Rincón
In our first steps in the square we were greeted by a mob of people who looked like they had been taken out of a mental institution, they were talking to themselves, jumping around, wearing torn and dirty clothes and hair that must have accumulated the dirt of the street after at least two months without taking a bath; we continued our way in and we ran into street vendors exhibiting dildos and some kind of penis-shaped candles, further on there was a group of alleged monks, supposedly meditating in the middle of that dystopia and selling spiritual packages. All this, of course, wrapped by a pungent smell of marijuana, and hundreds of people consuming alcohol and other drugs, being verbally admonished by a couple of impotent policemen who were systematically ignored by the mass. Everything went so fast that when we entered the square, we just started looking for the nearest exit, and in the middle, we were stopped by a group of activists preaching the “goodness” of communism.
Suddenly my wife couldn’t take it anymore, and began to take hurried steps to get out of that nightmare, one of the activists insisted and gave me a pamphlet that said: “Are you interested in building a better world? Join the Communist Party of New York…”, and all over the middle of Washington Square Park, there was a booth with signs declaring themselves “anti-fascists” and recruiting new members.
Communists in New York. Photo: Emmanuel Rincón
As I left the square I was overwhelmed by an intense sense of hopelessness, I left my country escaping the evils of socialism to arrive in the only nation where freedom supposedly reigns, only to observe how these totalitarian systems are gaining ground in developed societies.
Looking back on the history of mankind, I find it incomprehensible and surprising that there could be people in free societies recruiting candidates for genocidal movements. Communism has more than 100 million victims in the last century and yet these ideological doctrines are discussed in public spaces, universities and even at the governmental level without any problem.
How is it possible that people who endorse genocides can be easily recruiting members? Can anyone imagine that in any public square of any country with the rule of law, activists with Hitler banners would stand up to recruiting Nazis with the intention of exterminating Jews?
At present, my native country, Venezuela, with a population of over 30 million inhabitants, has almost 7 million people taking refuge in other parts of the world, due to socialism, and hundreds of thousands more have perished from hunger and disease due to economic devastation. This scenario is repeated in Cuba, and has been replicated with more or less repercussions in other nations throughout history, such as in East Germany -where the socialists built a wall to prevent their inhabitants from escaping the country-, in North Korea, the Soviet Union, or China, where economic collectivism generated a famine that killed at least 40 million people (four times the population of the entire city of New York).
Today the biggest problem is not that a score of activists are touting the benefits of communist famines in one of the main squares of New York, the issue is that different congressmen of the city with representation in Washington, speak openly in favor of these nefarious policies, and that the economic system that turned the United States into the most powerful country in the world is demonized and questioned daily in the streets and main media, while the other system, the one of famines, totalitarianism, expropriations, and executions is praised in public squares and on national television.
The reality of the moment is that New York has been taken over by communists, ideologically it has become a laboratory of ideas of the extreme left, the streets cannot escape the smell of shit and the messages of revolution, its local representatives are only the most suitable characterization of the soul of the city, and barring a miracle, everything points to the fact that the former glory of the new world will end up buried by its own inhabitants.
Emmanuel Rincón is a lawyer, writer, novelist and essayist. He has won several international literary awards. He is Editor-at-large at El American // Emmanuel Rincón es abogado, escritor, novelista y ensayista. Ganador de diversos premios literarios internacionales. Es editor-at-large en El American