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Scrolling on my phone this past week, I came across the headline “White People Own 98 Percent of Rural Land. Young Black Farmers Want to Reclaim their Share.” The headline echoed a lot of the talking points I keep watching on social media, especially when it pertains to “white people.” I read weekly statements about how they need to give back the land they “stole,” and other similar ideas.
This particular headline caught my attention, not because of the racial topic, but because of the word “reclaim.” It sounded vaguely familiar. Similar in some way. I felt as if I was reliving some sort of memory. Then it hit me, it reminded me of Hugo Chavez’s famous word as he decided to take someone’s private property: “¡Exprópiese!”
The word translates to “expropriate,” which really is not a common word used in English. At least not that I know of. Essentially, what Chavez was saying, was the short version of “let’s take this land.” It is the state forcefully taking private property, for public use. “Public.” Now you might be thinking that “reclaiming” land from white farmers to hand over to black farmers is not the same, but the meaning is still there. To begin with, you cannot “reclaim” something which was not yours, you can only take.
Now, Venezuela did not have quite the racial conversation to the level that exists in the United States. But yet it was still there. Especially when it concerned those who had a European lineage, meaning closer to the “colonizer.” But really the Socialist Party used and abused the indigenous people as tools against the people who they called “the oligarchs.” Generally, the middle class and up.
What is happening in the United States today might not look exactly how it did for us in Venezuela, but the lines have been drawn. There is a clear and blatant attempt to create a sort of class struggle, but it is not the old-school Marxism of poor against rich, more so black against white, men against women, and many other categories which continue to divide and polarize the nation. In some ways, it seems as if my family and I are reliving history. The driving factor of decision really seems to be the academia and media elite, against the working class and traditional family. The more they divide, the less we notice what they are doing.
In 2001, the Socialist Chavez government replaced the police. In 2004, Marxists in Caracas decided Christopher Columbus had been found guilty on a trial of public opinion, so they took down his statue in an effort to erase his story and the fact that the nation of Venezuela had been founded under Spanish and European values.
The slow manipulation of history kept going through the years, in which statues were taken down in favor of a more “indigenous” and less European look. Names of streets and national parks changed. Even eventually our flag, and the name of the country. To the point that it is literally not the same nation, I was born into.
To the untrained eye, these changes might not seem significant, but now that I have seen them again, not only here, but while looking at the history of the rise of communism in places like China, Hungary, Russia, and even Greece, I have started to notice certain patterns. The division of classes and people, the forceful confiscation of land and property, and the erasure of history. For what reason? Perhaps it is to collapse the old and bring in the new.
I would have never expected to see such a massive cultural change happen before my eyes in the United States. But yet here we are. Generations of Americans have been indoctrinated through media and academia for years to the point that most of the professors in major Universities report being liberal or extremely liberal. The change happened gradually, but we are seeing it accelerate now.
Ronald Reagan once said that “Freedom is never more than a generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”
Is it time to reclaim that freedom yet?
