A Man Without a Country is by far one of the best, short-reads I've ever placed my eyes on. Kurt Vonnegut was such a masterful writer, it is too bad he is not here with us today to make blood shoot out of the eyes of people like Rush Limbaugh and Jeff Katz.
The most interesting point he made in his little pseudo-memoir is in relation to Karl Marx and religion. Karl Marx states in his Communist Manifesto that "religion is the opiate of the people". Most anti-socialist American's have interpreted this as an anti-religion phrase-the end-all-be-all for why communism is bad and will never work.
Vonnegut supposes that when Marx wrote that statement in 1844, "...that opium and opiate derivatives were the only effective painkillers anyone could take. Marx himself had taken them. He was grateful for the temporary relief they had given him. He was simply noticing, and surely not condemning, the fact that religion could also be comforting to those in economic and social distress. It was a casual truism, not a dictim."
I am unashamedly a socialist. I do not think the government should control everything, but it is necessary for the health and benefit of the people that certain things like price gouging by big insurance and oil companies is regulated and put to a stop-that we aren't taking arsenic when the bottle says Tylenol. In the mid to early nineteenth and twentieth century, American Socialists greatly elevated the "dignity and political acumen" or the American working-class.
It is a shame that socialism has gotten such a bad rap because of the Joseph Stalin's and Mao-Tse-Dong's of the world.
Vonnegut said it best when he compared socialism and Christianity. ""Socialism" is no more an evil word than "Christianity." Socialism no more prescribed Joseph Stalin and his secret police and shuttered churches than Christianity prescribed the Spanish Inquisition. Christianity and socialism alike, in fact, prescribe a society dedicated to the proposition that all men, women and children are created equal, and shalt not starve."
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