How Does Kamala Harris Stack Up Against Joseph Stalin?

I have written several articles on postings related to politicians. A list of links have been provided at bottom of this article for your convenience. This article will, however address different aspects on these politicians.

Joseph Stalin

He was a Georgian revolutionary and Soviet politician who ruled the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s until his death in 1953. He served as the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1922–1952) and premier of the Soviet Union (1941–1953). Despite initially governing the Soviet Union as part of a collective leadership, he eventually consolidated power to become the country’s de facto dictator by the 1930s. A communist ideologically committed to the Leninist interpretation of Marxism, Stalin formalised these ideas as Marxism–Leninism, while his own policies are known as Stalinism.

Born to a poor family in Gori in the Russian Empire (now Georgia), as a youth Stalin joined the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. He went on to edit the party’s newspaper, Pravda, and raised funds for Vladimir Lenin‘s Bolshevik faction via robberies, kidnappings, and protection rackets. Repeatedly arrested, he underwent several internal exiles. After the Bolsheviks seized power during the 1917 October Revolution and created a one-party state under Lenin’s newly renamed Communist Party, Stalin joined its governing Politburo. Serving in the Russian Civil War before overseeing the Soviet Union’s establishment in 1922, Stalin assumed leadership over the country following Lenin’s 1924 death. Under Stalin, “socialism in one country” became a central tenet of the party’s dogma. Through the Five-Year Plans, the country underwent agricultural collectivisation and rapid industrialisation, creating a centralised command economy. This led to severe disruptions of food production that contributed to the famine of 1932–33. To eradicate accused “enemies of the working class“, Stalin instituted the “Great Purge“, in which over a million were imprisoned and at least 700,000 executed between 1934 and 1939. By 1937, he had complete personal control over the party and state.

Stalin’s government promoted Marxism–Leninism abroad through the Communist International and supported European anti-fascist movements during the 1930s, particularly in the Spanish Civil War. In 1939, it signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, resulting in the Soviet invasion of Poland. Germany ended the pact by invading the Soviet Union in 1941. Despite initial setbacks, the Soviet Red Army repelled the German incursion and captured Berlin in 1945, ending World War II in Europe. The Soviets annexed the Baltic states and helped establish Soviet-aligned governments throughout Central and Eastern Europe, China, and North Korea. The Soviet Union and the United States emerged from the war as global superpowers. Tensions arose between the Soviet-backed Eastern Bloc and U.S.-backed Western Bloc which became known as the Cold War. Stalin led his country through the post-war reconstruction, during which it developed a nuclear weapon in 1949. In these years, the country experienced another major famine and an antisemitic campaign peaking in the doctors’ plot. After Stalin’s death in 1953, he was eventually succeeded by Nikita Khrushchev, who denounced him and initiated the de-Stalinisation of Soviet society.

Widely considered one of the 20th century’s most significant figures, Stalin was the subject of a pervasive personality cult within the international Marxist–Leninist movement, which revered him as a champion of the working class and socialism. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Stalin has retained popularity in Russia and Georgia as a victorious wartime leader who established the Soviet Union as a major world power. Conversely, his totalitarian government has been widely condemned for overseeing mass repressions, ethnic cleansing, deportations, hundreds of thousands of executions, and famines that killed millions.

It can be said that Stalin was a product of his times. He was arrested and imprisoned/exiled on several occasions to Siberia. It is certain that he became tougher thanks to these experiences and more callous to the suffering of his fellow man. You have to be tough to survive in Siberia, where it is only the fittest that persevere. While he may have been paranoid prior to these arrests and imprisonments it certainly reinforced this trait. One of the ways to survive in the Gulags of Siberia was to turn on your fellow prisoners to gain favor with the prison guards. So you had to be suspicious of everyone. These hard learned lessons followed him into later life, where while in power he slaughtered anyone who was questionable in their support of him.

While Stalin was in exile, Russia entered the First World War, and in October 1916 Stalin and other exiled Bolsheviks were conscripted into the Russian Army, leaving for Monastyrskoe. Stalin was required to serve four more months on his exile, and he successfully requested that he serve it in nearby Achinsk. Stalin was in the city when the February Revolution took place; uprisings broke out in Petrograd—as Saint Petersburg had been renamed—and Tsar Nicholas II abdicated to escape being violently overthrown. The Russian Empire became a de facto republic, headed by a Provisional Government dominated by liberals.In a celebratory mood, Stalin travelled by train to Petrograd in March. There, Stalin and fellow Bolshevik Lev Kamenev assumed control of Pravda, and Stalin was appointed the Bolshevik representative to the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, an influential council of the city’s workers. In April, Stalin came third in the Bolshevik elections for the party’s Central Committee; Lenin came first and Zinoviev came second. Stalin helped organise the July Days uprising, an armed display of strength by Bolshevik supporters. Lenin began calling for the Bolsheviks to seize power by toppling the Provisional Government in a coup d’état. Stalin and fellow senior Bolshevik Leon Trotsky both endorsed Lenin’s plan of action.Lenin returned to Petrograd and secured a majority in favour of a coup at a meeting of the Central Committee on 10 October.

In the early hours of 25 October, Stalin joined Lenin in a Central Committee meeting in the Smolny Institute, from where the Bolshevik coup—the October Revolution—was directed. According to the historian Oleg Khlevniuk, Stalin “filled an important role [in the October Revolution]… as a senior Bolshevik, member of the party’s Central Committee, and editor of its main newspaper”; the historian Stephen Kotkin similarly noted that Stalin had been “in the thick of events” in the build-up to the coup.

On 26 October 1917, Lenin declared himself chairman of a new government, the Council of People’s Commissars. Stalin backed Lenin’s decision not to form a coalition with the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionary Party, although they did form a coalition government with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries. Stalin became part of an informal foursome leading the government, alongside Lenin, Trotsky, and Sverdlov; of these, Sverdlov was regularly absent and died in March 1919. Stalin’s office was based near to Lenin’s in the Smolny Institute, and he and Trotsky were the only individuals allowed access to Lenin’s study without an appointment. Although not so publicly well known as Lenin or Trotsky, Stalin’s importance among the Bolsheviks grew.

Stalin supported Lenin’s desire to sign an armistice with the Central Powers regardless of the cost in territory. Stalin thought it necessary because—unlike Lenin—he was unconvinced that Europe was on the verge of proletarian revolution. Lenin eventually convinced the other senior Bolsheviks of his viewpoint, resulting in the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918. The treaty gave vast areas of land and resources to the Central Powers and angered many in Russia; the Left Socialist Revolutionaries withdrew from the coalition government over the issue. The governing RSDLP party was soon renamed, becoming the Russian Communist Party.

After the Bolsheviks seized power, both right and left-wing armies rallied against them, generating the Russian Civil War. To secure access to the dwindling food supply, in May 1918 Sovnarkom sent Stalin to Tsaritsyn to take charge of food procurement in southern Russia. Eager to prove himself as a commander, once there he took control of regional military operations. The Bolsheviks won the Russian civil war by the end of 1919. By that time, Sovnarkom had turned its attention to spreading proletarian revolution abroad, to this end forming the Communist International in March 1919; Stalin attended its inaugural ceremony. Although Stalin did not share Lenin’s belief that Europe’s proletariat were on the verge of revolution, he acknowledged that as long as it stood alone, Soviet Russia remained vulnerable.

Lenin died in January 1924. Stalin took charge of the funeral and was one of its pallbearers; against the wishes of Lenin’s widow, the Politburo embalmed his corpse and placed it within a mausoleum in Moscow’s Red Square. During the 13th Party Congress in May 1924, “Lenin’s Testament” was read only to the leaders of the provincial delegations. Embarrassed by its contents, Stalin offered his resignation as General Secretary; this act of humility saved him and he was retained in the position. As General Secretary, Stalin had had a free hand in making appointments to his own staff, implanting his loyalists throughout the party and administration.

In October 1927, Zinoviev and Trotsky were removed from the Central Committee; the latter was exiled to Kazakhstan and later deported from the country in 1929. Some of those United Opposition members who were repentant were later rehabilitated and returned to government. Stalin was now the party’s supreme leader, although he was not the head of government, a task he entrusted to key ally Vyacheslav Molotov.

The Soviet Union lagged behind the industrial development of Western countries, and there had been a shortfall of grain; 1927 produced only 70% of grain produced in 1926. Stalin’s government feared attack from Japan, France, the United Kingdom, Poland, and Romania.

In 1929, the Politburo announced the mass collectivization of agriculture, establishing both kolkhozy collective farms and sovkhoz state farms. Stalin barred kulaks from joining these collectives. Although officially voluntary, many peasants joined the collectives out of fear they would face the fate of the kulaks; others joined amid intimidation and violence from party loyalists. Officially, the Soviet Union had replaced the “irrationality” and “wastefulness” of a market economy with a planned economy organized along a long-term, precise, and scientific framework; in reality, Soviet economics were based on ad hoc commandments issued from the center, often to make short-term targets. The USSR underwent a massive economic transformation. New mines were opened, new cities like Magnitogorsk constructed, and work on the White Sea-Baltic Canal begun. Millions of peasants moved to the cities, although urban house building could not keep up with the demand. Large debts were accrued purchasing foreign-made machinery. Many of the major construction projects, including the White Sea-Baltic Canal and the Moscow Metro, were constructed largely through forced labor.

In 1928, Stalin declared that class war between the proletariat and their enemies would intensify as socialism developed. He warned of a “danger from the right”, including in the Communist Party itself. Stalin desired a “cultural revolution“, entailing both the creation of a culture for the “masses” and the wider dissemination of previously elite culture. He oversaw the proliferation of schools, newspapers, and libraries, as well as the advancement of literacy and numeracy. Socialist realism was promoted throughout the arts, while Stalin personally wooed prominent writers, namely Maxim Gorky, Mikhail Sholokhov, and Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy.

In 1935–36, Stalin oversaw a new constitution; its dramatic liberal features were designed as propaganda weapons, for all power rested in the hands of Stalin and his Politburo. He declared that “socialism, which is the first phase of communism, has basically been achieved in this country”.

Seeking improved international relations, in 1934 the Soviet Union secured membership of the League of Nations, of which it had previously been excluded. Stalin initiated confidential communications with Hitler in October 1933, shortly after the latter came to power in Germany. Stalin admired Hitler, particularly his manoeuvres to remove rivals within the Nazi Party in the Night of the Long Knives. Stalin nevertheless recognised the threat posed by fascism and sought to establish better links with the liberal democracies of Western Europe; in May 1935, the Soviets signed a treaty of mutual assistance with France and Czechoslovakia. At the Communist International’s 7th Congress, held in July–August 1935, the Soviet government encouraged Marxist-Leninists to unite with other leftists as part of a popular front against fascism. In turn, the anti-communist governments of Germany, Fascist Italy and Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact of 1936.

The Great Terror

Stalin often gave conflicting signals regarding state repression. In May 1933, he released from prison many convicted of minor offenses, ordering the security services not to enact further mass arrests and deportations. In September 1934, he launched a commission to investigate false imprisonments; that same month he called for the execution of workers at the Stalin Metallurgical Factory accused of spying for Japan. This mixed approach began to change in December 1934, after prominent party member Sergey Kirov was murdered. After the murder, Stalin became increasingly concerned by the threat of assassination, improved his personal security, and rarely went out in public. State repression intensified after Kirov’s death; Stalin instigated this, reflecting his prioritization of security above other considerations. Repressions further intensified in December 1936 and remained at a high level until November 1938, a period known as the Great Purge. By the latter part of 1937, the purges had moved beyond the party and were affecting the wider population.

The Great Terror ended when Yezhov was removed as the head of the NKVD, to be replaced by Lavrentiy Beria, a man totally devoted to Stalin. Yezhov was arrested in April 1939 and executed in 1940. The Terror damaged the Soviet Union’s reputation abroad, particularly among sympathetic leftists. As it wound down, Stalin sought to deflect responsibility from himself, blaming its “excesses” and “violations of law” on Yezhov.

I am going to skip the war, and continue on to the aftermath, we all know that the allies won. Besides this article is supposed to be a comparison of Harris and Stalin, but in order to do this one has to know something about each of these individuals.

Instead of giving Stalin a sense of security with his victory over the Germans, he only became more paranoid which lead to the following actions being taken. Despite his strengthened international position, Stalin was cautious about internal dissent and desire for change among the population. He was also concerned about his returning armies, who had been exposed to a wide range of consumer goods in Germany, much of which they had looted and brought back with them. In this he recalled the 1825 Decembrist Revolt by Russian soldiers returning from having defeated France in the Napoleonic Wars. He ensured that returning Soviet prisoners of war went through “filtration” camps as they arrived in the Soviet Union, in which 2,775,700 were interrogated to determine if they were traitors. About half were then imprisoned in labour camps. In the Baltic states, where there was much opposition to Soviet rule, de-kulakisation and de-clericalisation programs were initiated, resulting in 142,000 deportations between 1945 and 1949. The Gulag system of labour camps was expanded further. By January 1953, three percent of the Soviet population was imprisoned or in internal exile, with 2.8 million in “special settlements” in isolated areas and another 2.5 million in camps, penal colonies, and prisons.

Cold War policy: 1947–1950

In the aftermath of the Second World War, the British Empire declined, leaving the U.S. and USSR as the dominant world powers. Tensions among these former Allies grew, resulting in the Cold War. Although Stalin publicly described the British and U.S. governments as aggressive, he thought it unlikely that a war with them would be imminent, believing that several decades of peace was likely. He nevertheless secretly intensified Soviet research into nuclear weaponry, intent on creating an atom bomb. Still, Stalin foresaw the undesirability of a nuclear conflict, saying in 1949 that “atomic weapons can hardly be used without spelling the end of the world.” He personally took a keen interest in the development of the weapon. In August 1949, the bomb was successfully tested in the deserts outside Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan.

In his final years he removed himself further from the limelight and he became even more paranoid even of his doctors. He died on March 5, 1953.

Stalin had a soft voice, and when speaking Russian did so slowly, carefully choosing his phrasing. In private he used coarse language, although avoided doing so in public. Described as a poor orator, according to Volkogonov, Stalin’s speaking style was “simple and clear, without flights of fancy, catchy phrases or platform histrionics“. He rarely spoke before large audiences, and preferred to express himself in written form. His writing style was similar, being characterized by its simplicity, clarity, and conciseness. According to biographer Montefiore, “it is clear from hostile and friendly witnesses alike that Stalin was always exceptional, even from childhood”. Stalin had a complex mind, great self-control, and an excellent memory. He was a hard worker, and displayed a keen desire to learn; when in power, he scrutinized many details of Soviet life, from film scripts to architectural plans and military hardware. According to Volkogonov, “Stalin’s private life and working life were one and the same”; he did not take days off from political activities. Stalin could play different roles to different audiences, and was adept at deception, often deceiving others as to his true motives and aims. Stalin was ruthless, temperamentally cruel, and had a propensity for violence high even among the Bolsheviks. He lacked compassion, something Volkogonov suggested might have been accentuated by his many years in prison and exile, although he was capable of acts of kindness to strangers, even amid the Great Terror. He was capable of self-righteous indignation, and was resentful, vindictive, and vengeful, holding onto grievances against others for many years. By the 1920s, he was also suspicious and conspiratorial, prone to believing that people were plotting against him and that there were vast international conspiracies behind acts of dissent.

For most Westerners and anti-communist Russians, he is viewed overwhelmingly negatively as a mass murderer; for significant numbers of Russians and Georgians, he is regarded as a great statesman and state-builder. Stalin strengthened and stabilized the Soviet Union; Service suggested that without him the country might have collapsed long before 1991. In under three decades, Stalin transformed the Soviet Union into a major industrial world power, one which could “claim impressive achievements” in terms of urbanization, military strength, education, and Soviet pride. Under his rule, the average Soviet life expectancy grew due to improved living conditions, nutrition, and medical care; mortality rates also declined. Although millions of Soviet citizens despised him, support for Stalin was nevertheless widespread throughout Soviet society. Yet Stalin’s necessity for Soviet Union’s economic development has been questioned, with it being argued that Stalin’s policies from 1928 on may have only been a limiting factor. Interior of the Joseph Stalin Museum in Gori, Georgia. Stalin’s Soviet Union has been characterized as a totalitarian state, with Stalin its authoritarian leader. Various biographers have described him as a dictator

According to Kotkin, Stalin held “zealous Marxist convictions”, while Montefiore suggested that Marxism held a “quasi-religious” value for Stalin. Although he never became a Georgian nationalist, during his early life elements from Georgian nationalist thought blended with Marxism in his outlook. The historian Alfred J. Rieber noted that he had been raised in “a society where rebellion was deeply rooted in folklore and popular rituals”. Stalin believed in the need to adapt Marxism to changing circumstances; in 1917, he declared that “there is dogmatic Marxism and there is creative Marxism. I stand on the ground of the latter”. Volkogonov believed that Stalin’s Marxism was shaped by his “dogmatic turn of mind”, suggesting that this had been instilled in the Soviet leader during his education in religious institutions. According to scholar Robert Service, Stalin’s “few innovations in ideology were crude, dubious developments of Marxism”. Some of these derived from political expediency rather than any sincere intellectual commitment; Stalin would often turn to ideology post hoc to justify his decisions. Stalin referred to himself as a praktik, meaning that he was more of a practical revolutionary than a theoretician.

As a Marxist and an extreme anti-capitalist, Stalin believed in an inevitable “class war” between the world’s proletariat and bourgeoise. He believed that the working classes would prove successful in this struggle and would establish a dictatorship of the proletariat,^[685] regarding the Soviet Union as an example of such a state. He also believed that this proletarian state would need to introduce repressive measures against foreign and domestic “enemies” to ensure the full crushing of the propertied classes, and thus the class war would intensify with the advance of socialism. As a propaganda tool, the shaming of “enemies” explained all inadequate economic and political outcomes, the hardships endured by the populace, and military failures. The new state would then be able to ensure that all citizens had access to work, food, shelter, healthcare, and education, with the wastefulness of capitalism eliminated by a new, standardized economic system. According to Sandle, Stalin was “committed to the creation of a society that was industrialized, collectivized, centrally planned and technologically advanced.” Stalin viewed nations as contingent entities which were formed by capitalism and could merge into others. Ultimately he believed that all nations would merge into a single, global human community, and regarded all nations as inherently equal.

Kamala Harris

Kamala Devi Harris was born on October 20, 1964 and born in Oakland, California, Harris graduated from Howard University and the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. She is an American politician and attorney who has served as the junior United States senator from California since 2017. She is the Democratic vice presidential nominee for the 2020 election.

She began her career in the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office, before being recruited to the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office and later the City Attorney of San Francisco‘s office. In 2003, she was elected district attorney of San Francisco. She was elected attorney general of California in 2010 and re-elected in 2014. She defeated Loretta Sanchez in the 2016 Senate election to become the second African American woman and the first South Asian American to serve in the United States Senate. As a senator, she has advocated for healthcare reform, federal de-scheduling of cannabis, a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, the DREAM Act, a ban on assault weapons, and progressive tax reform. She gained a national profile for her pointed questioning of Trump administration officials during Senate hearings, including Trump’s second Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, who was accused of sexual assault. Harris ran for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination and attracted national attention before ending her campaign on December 3, 2019. She was announced as former vice president Joe Biden‘s running mate in the 2020 election on August 11, 2020. She is the first African American, the first Asian American, and the third female vice presidential running mate on a major party ticket after Geraldine Ferraro and Sarah Palin, respectively.

In 1990, Harris was hired as a deputy district attorney in Alameda County, California, where she was noted as being “an able prosecutor on the way up”. In 1994, California Assembly speaker Willie Brown, who was dating Harris at the time, appointed her to the state Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and later to the California Medical Assistance Commission. In February 1998, San Francisco district attorney Terence Hallinan recruited Harris as an assistant district attorney. There, she became the chief of the Career Criminal Division, supervising five other attorneys, where she prosecuted homicide, burglary, robbery, and sexual assault cases – particularly three-strikes cases. In 2000, Harris reportedly clashed with Hallinan’s assistant, Darrell Salomon,^[42] over Proposition 21 (“Prop 21”), which would have granted prosecutors the option of trying juvenile defendants in Superior Court rather than juvenile courts. Harris campaigned against the measure and Salomon opposed directing media inquiries about Prop 21 to Harris and reassigned her, a de facto demotion. Harris filed a complaint against Salomon and quit.

In 2002, Harris prepared to run for District Attorney of San Francisco against Hallinan (the incumbent) and Bill Fazio Harris was the least-known of the three candidates, but persuaded the Central Committee to withhold its endorsement from Hallinan. Harris and Hallinan advanced to the general election runoff with 33 and 37 percent of the vote, respectively. In the runoff, Harris pledged never to seek the death penalty and to prosecute three-strike offenders only in cases of violent felonies. Harris ran a “forceful” campaign, assisted by former mayor Willie Brown, Senator Dianne Feinstein, writer and cartoonist Aaron McGruder, and comedians Eddie Griffin and Chris Rock. Harris differentiated herself from Hallinan by attacking his performance. She argued that she left his office because it was technologically inept, emphasizing his 52 percent conviction rate for serious crimes despite an 83 percent average conviction rate statewide. Harris charged that his office was not doing enough to stem the city’s gun violence, particularly in poor neighborhoods like Bayview and the Tenderloin, and attacked his willingness to accept plea bargains in cases of domestic violence. Harris won with 56 percent of the vote, becoming the first person of color elected as district attorney of San Francisco.

Under Harris, the D.A.’s office obtained more than 1,900 convictions for marijuana offenses, including persons simultaneously convicted of marijuana offenses and more serious crimes. The rate at which Harris’s office prosecuted marijuana crimes was higher than the rate under Hallinan, but the number of defendants sentenced to state prison for such offenses was substantially lower. Prosecutions for low-level marijuana offenses were rare under Harris, and her office had a policy of not pursuing jail time for marijuana possession offenses. Harris’s successor as D.A., George Gascón, expunged all San Francisco marijuana offenses going back to 1975.

In the early 2000s, the San Francisco murder rate per capita outpaced the national average. Within the first six months of taking office, Harris cleared 27 of 74 backlogged homicide cases by settling 14 by plea bargain and taking 11 to trial; of those trials, nine ended with convictions and two with hung juries. She took 49 violent crime cases to trial and secured 36 convictions. From 2004 to 2006, Harris achieved an 87 percent conviction rate for homicides and a 90 percent conviction rate for all felony gun violations. Harris also pushed for higher bail for criminal defendants involved in gun-related crimes, arguing that historically low bail encouraged outsiders to commit crimes in San Francisco. SFPD officers credited Harris with tightening the loopholes defendants had used in the past. In addition to creating a gun crime unit, Harris opposed releasing defendants on their own recognizance if they were arrested on gun crimes, sought minimum 90-day sentences for possession of concealed or loaded weapons, and charged all assault weapons possession cases as felonies, adding that she would seek prison terms for criminals who possessed or used assault weapons and would seek maximum penalties on gun-related crimes. Harris created a Hate Crimes Unit, focusing on hate crimes against LGBT children and teens in schools. In early 2006, Gwen Araujo, a 17-year-old American Latina transgender teenager, was murdered by two men who later used the “gay panic defense” before being convicted of second-degree murder.

Death penalty

Harris has said life imprisonment without parole is a better and more cost-effective punishment than the death penalty, and estimated that the resultant cost savings could pay for a thousand additional police officers in San Francisco alone. During her campaign, Harris pledged never to seek the death penalty. After a San Francisco Police Department officer was shot and killed in 2004, U.S. senator (and former San Francisco mayor) Dianne Feinstein, U.S. senator Barbara Boxer, Oakland mayor Jerry Brown, and the San Francisco Police Officers Association pressured Harris to reverse that position, but she did not. (Polls found that seventy percent of voters supported Harris’s decision.) When Edwin Ramos, an illegal immigrant and alleged MS-13 gang member, was accused of murdering a man and his two sons in 2009, Harris sought a sentence of life in prison without parole, a decision Mayor Gavin Newsom backed.

On November 12, 2008, Harris announced her candidacy for California attorney general. Both of California’s senators, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, House speaker Nancy Pelosi, United Farm Workers cofounder Dolores Huerta, and mayor of Los Angeles Antonio Villaraigosa all endorsed her during the primary. In the June 8, 2010 primary, she was nominated with 33.6 percent of the vote, defeating Alberto Torrico and Chris Kelly.

In February 2012, Harris announced an agreement with Apple, Amazon, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, and Research in Motion to mandate that apps sold in their stores display prominent privacy policies informing users of what private information they were sharing, and with whom. Facebook later joined the agreement. That summer, Harris announced the creation of a Privacy Enforcement and Protection Unit to enforce laws related to cyber privacy, identity theft, and data breaches. Later the same year, Harris notified a hundred mobile-app developers of their non-compliance with state privacy laws and asked them to create privacy policies or face a $2500 fine each time a non-compliant app is downloaded by a resident of California. In 2015, Harris secured two settlements with Comcast, one totaling $33 million over allegations that it posted online the names, phone numbers and addresses of tens of thousands of customers who had paid for unlisted voice over internet protocol (“VOIP”) phone service and another $26 million settlement to resolve allegations that it discarded paper records without first omitting or redacting private customer information. Harris also settled with Houzz over allegations that the company recorded phone calls without notifying customers or employees. Houzz was forced to pay $175,000, destroy the recorded calls, and hire a chief privacy officer, the first time such a provision has been included in a settlement with the California Department of Justice.

Harris prioritized environmental protection as attorney general, first securing a $44 million settlement to resolve all damages and costs associated with the Cosco Busan oil spill, in which a container ship collided with San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge and spilled 50,000 gallons of bunker fuel into the San Francisco Bay. In the aftermath of the 2015 Refugio oil spill, which deposited about 140,000 gallons of crude oil off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, Harris toured the coastline and directed her office’s resources and attorneys to investigate possible criminal violations.

After 24 years as California’s junior senator, Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) announced her intention to retire from the United States Senate at the end of her term in 2016. Harris was the first candidate to declare her intention to run for Boxer’s senate seat. Harris officially announced the launch of her campaign on January 13, 2015. Harris was a top contender from the beginning of her campaign: weeks after she announced her campaign, a survey by Public Policy Polling showed her leading in a hypothetical match-up against Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, 41 percent to 16 percent.

Harris had been considered a top contender and potential frontrunner for the 2020 Democratic nomination for president. In June 2018, she was quoted as “not ruling it out”. In July 2018, it was announced that she would publish a memoir, a sign of a possible run. On January 21, 2019, Harris officially announced her candidacy for president of the United States in the 2020 United States presidential election. In the first 24 hours after her candidacy announcement, she tied a record set by Bernie Sanders in 2016 for the most donations raised in the day following an announcement. On December 3, 2019, Harris withdrew from seeking the 2020 Democratic nomination, citing a shortage of funds. In March 2020, Harris endorsed Joe Biden for president.

In May 2019, senior members of the Congressional Black Caucus endorsed the idea of a Biden–Harris ticket. In late February, Biden won a landslide victory in the 2020 South Carolina Democratic primary with the endorsement of House whip Jim Clyburn, with more victories on Super Tuesday. In early March, Clyburn suggested Biden choose a black woman as a running mate, commenting that “African American women needed to be rewarded for their loyalty.” In March, Biden committed to choosing a woman for his running mate. On April 17, 2020, Harris responded to media speculation and said she “would be honored” to be Biden’s running mate. In late May, in relation to the death of George Floyd and ensuing protests and demonstrations, Biden faced renewed calls to select a black woman to be his running mate, highlighting the law enforcement credentials of Harris and Val Demings.

On June 12, The New York Times reported that Harris was emerging as the frontrunner to be Biden’s running mate, as she is the only African American woman with the political experience typical of vice presidents. On June 26, CNN reported that more than a dozen people close to the Biden search process considered Harris one of Biden’s top four contenders, along with Elizabeth Warren, Val Demings, and Keisha Lance Bottoms.

On August 11, 2020, Biden announced that he had chosen Harris. She is the first African American, the first Indian American, and the third woman after Geraldine Ferraro and Sarah Palin to be picked as the vice-presidential nominee for a major party ticket.

They used to try and hide who they really are. Now, the Democrat Party proudly throws around their anti-Christian, anti-Israel, anti-American, anti-Liberty, anti-Free Market, anti-Constitution attitude.

They are deconstructionists who are dismantling American History and the American Culture in order to fundamentally transform America into a socialist nightmare. The most amazing part of it is how they have so many Americans buying into their overthrow of Americanism, without asking questions, without examining the facts.

The whole thing is based on lies, projection, and tyrannical tactics that mirror the efforts of past bloody regimes run by murderous tyrants such as Adolf Hitler, Mao Tse Tung, Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, and the Khmer Rouge. Yet, they don’t see it.

The Democrat Party’s history of racism is alive and well in the Joe Biden campaign

The Democrat Party’s history of racism is alive and well in the Joe Biden campaign, and has been in every past campaign in our lifetime. We have just not been able to see it as clearly as we do now. The totalitarian left is willing to poison the water supply to make sure you behave. They, largely through social media, are willing to do what they can to support communism’s attempt to seize control of our system. And there are Americans who are not only cheering this kind of authoritarian behavior, they are willing to run to the streets and burn down symbols of law and order and our history to help the cause. “Defund the police,” they scream, which actually means, “let the revolutionaries burn down the system.”

The authoritarians of the Democrat Party have politicized healthcare in this country to the point that they are currently controlling us in the name of a virus to the point that it is illegal to go to church, assemble with groups in your own home, or speak out against their idiotic, anti-science mandates. Meanwhile, they encourage the rioting in the streets of radical street thugs who do so not because they are honestly angry, but because it ushers in opportunities for a new socialist regime. They are no different than the brown shirts and black shirts of fascism during the last century.

Then, to put the cherry on top of the whole thing, the Democrat Party’s presidential candidate has happily picked Kamala Harris as his running mate, a character assassination expert who deployed her skills against Brett Kavanaugh, and who happily promoted a communist front group that put up bail for violent Marxist street thugs. She’s the same power hungry authoritarian who ruthlessly went after pro-life activist David Daleiden, who, if you remember, filmed numerous undercover videos exposing Planned Parenthood employees admitting they make huge profits from the sale of tissue from aborted fetuses, and that upset Harris so greatly that she sent a team of heavily armed agents to his home to seize all of his footage. The Real Kamala Harris then orchestrated an attack against Daleiden that left him nearly ruined, and facing jail time for exposing Planned Parenthood’s criminal activity.

Her radical pro-baby-slaughter stance is only the beginning of her Anti-Christian Bigotry

Her radical pro-baby-slaughter stance is only the beginning of her Anti-Christian Bigotry. Harris came out in favor of forcing Christians into violating their religious tenets by forcing them to pay for abortion. While attorney general of California she was furious when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the Hobby Lobby case that Christian institutions did not have to pay for abortion and contraceptives in their employee healthcare packages. She believed Hobby Lobby should be forced to cover abortion-inducing drugs and devices. She wrote a brief urging the Supreme Court to take up the case and, when it did, joined with the attorney general of Massachusetts to write an amicus brief arguing that the court should force Hobby Lobby to cover abortifacients. This premise lurked at the foundation of her argument: When people start for-profit corporations, they must leave their “personal” religious beliefs behind. In her amicus, Harris suggested that the free exercise of religion is a right created by manmade statutes—not God—and is a “personal” thing that should be kept in an “inner sanctum.”

Kamala Harris, who is not black, by the way, she is half Indian, half Jamaican, according to Trump, is the kind of opponent any GOP candidate would dream of. She’s a radical, supporter of policies that are compromising the family, compromising law and order, and policies that are literally sending Democrat-ruled New York City straight down the tubes. She hates America, she hates our institutions, and she has even gone so far as to compare ICE to the KKK.

In short, radical and unapologetic, hard left anti-Christian, anti-American Kamala Harris epitomizes exactly what the Democrat Party has become. She was the logical choice to be Biden’s running mate.

Comparison

Left-wing extremists are emulating the Brownshirts of 1930s Germany. This means specifically (1) identification of convenient martyrs to the Cause like Horst Wessel and (2) exploitation of the purported martyrdoms to incite mindless violence including murder, pillage, arson, and riot along with desecration of places of worship.

Wessel was an up-and-coming leader of the Brownshirts when he was murdered by Germany’s counterpart of Antifa, the Communist KPD and Red Front Fighters’ League, whose slogan was “Strike the fascists wherever you find them.” The communists’ opposition to fascism, while obviously laudable, did not however make the communists good people, either. Two violent gangs of evildoers fought each other, and the Nazis unfortunately came out on top. I say “unfortunately” because, while communists have proven themselves equally willing to commit mass murder as shown by Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot, the Nazis were more competent at it. While Hitler used Germany’s professional officer corps to his advantage, Stalin purged and decimated his to leave Russia relatively defenseless against Operation Barbarossa.

The Wikipedia entry adds, “The death of Wessel and the proliferation of the Horst-Wessel Lied [Horst Wessel Song] was the beginning of the Nazi cult of martyrs.” Joseph Goebbels wanted to turn Wessel’s funeral into a mass demonstration the same way the “woke” left held a bigger funeral for George Floyd than the one Martin Luther King received.

The United States is now seeing the same old message from new groups: Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and the Democratic Party as represented by Joe Biden and especially Kamala Harris. The difference between this newest set of martyrs and Horst Wessel is that Wessel was actually murdered. The jury is still literally out for the Democrats’, Antifa’s, and BLM’s Horst Wessels, and, in at least two cases, the shooters have not even been charged.

Michael Brown was shot by a Ferguson, Mo. law enforcement officer after Brown more likely than not tried to take the officer’s sidearm and turn it against him. “The physical evidence establishes that Wilson shot Brown once in the hand, at close range, while Wilson sat in his police SUV, struggling with Brown for control of Wilson’s gun.” Left-wing extremists nonetheless used Brown’s purported martyrdom as a pretext to re-enact the Night of the Broken Glass in Ferguson. Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren joined in (August 9, 2019) by falsely accusing the police officer of “murdering” Brown even though, as lawyers, they knew better.

George Floyd

George Floyd, another “Gentle Giant” whose criminal record included the robbery of a woman at gunpoint, is somewhat more controversial. There are serious questions as to whether the officers who arrested him fulfilled their responsibility to ensure his safety and well-being once he was in their custody, and we will have to wait for the legal system to determine this. The “woke” left lost no time, however, in turning Floyd into yet another Horst Wessel with a wide array of posters that portray him as some kind of saint, while universities have established George Floyd scholarships. Left-wing extremists used Floyd’s “martyrdom” as an excuse to re-enact the Night of the Broken Glass in Minneapolis.

Rayshard Brooks

Fulton County, Georgia district attorney Paul Howard charged police officer Garrett Rolfe with “murdering” Rayshard Brooks after Brooks discharged a taser at Rolfe and apparently Rolfe’s partner. This is despite the fact that Howard himself depicted a taser as a deadly weapon as defined by Georgia law. The prosecutors argued that the taser was no longer dangerous as Brooks had discharged it twice. It is doubtful that Rolfe kept count in all that confusion. The extreme left used the opportunity to take up where General Sherman left off in 1864 by burning part of Atlanta and killing an 8-year-old girl whose black life was clearly as meaningless to them as police captain David Dorn’s was to thugs in St. Louis. Killing people is such a wonderful way to tell us how much lives of any color really matter to one’s cause, isn’t it?

Jacob Blake

The police officer who shot Jacob Blake after Blake resisted arrest and then put his hand where the officer couldn’t see what he was doing was serving an arrest warrant for alleged felony sexual and domestic abuse by Blake. The New Orleans Saints nonetheless allowed their players to put Blake’s name on their helmets, thus forcing the alleged victim to see Blake’s name should she watch this team play. Then again, given the prevalence of domestic violence and sexual assault in professional football, maybe this is just another case (alleged unless and until proven in court) of “boys will be boys.”

Kamala Harris, meanwhile, told Blake she was proud of him, maybe for resisting arrest and putting a cop in reasonable fear for his life, as seems to be the case. Joe Biden met with Blake’s father, a Louis Farrakhan–supporter, and he also called Blake’s family “incredible.” Here, by the way, is a situation almost identical to Blake’s. The suspect resisted arrest, a taser failed to incapacitate him, and he was able to reach into his car as Blake attempted to do. One of the officers suffered a severed femoral artery and is lucky to have not, as BLM and Antifa graffiti put it, “oinked his last.”

Chicago Black Lives Matter organizer Ariel Atkins made it quite clear that it is OK to ruin other people’s livelihoods in the name of her cause: “I don’t care if somebody decides to loot a Gucci or a Macy’s or a Nike store because that makes sure that person eats. That makes sure that person has clothes. That is reparations. Anything they want to take, take it because these businesses have insurance.” Right — the looters are looking for food hidden in those Gucci bags and Nike shoeboxes.

The Jacob Blake Song

Here are the lyrics for translation into German; the music (Horst-Wessel Lied) is already available.

Burn the flag! The streets tightly blockaded!
BLM and Antifa loot with loud riotous chaos.
Our comrade shot by a Kenosha pig
Kamala Harris is so proud of him!

Block the streets for the Antifa battalions,
Mob the motorists for the carjacking thugs!
Thousands are looting the capitalists’ stores,
Free Gucci bags and Nikes for everybody!

Torch the cars for Black Lives Matter!
Burn Kenosha for the woke revolutionaries!
Millions are looking upon Biden and Harris for hope,
The day of transformation and change dawns!

For the last time, the call to arson is sounded!
For the riot, we all stand prepared!
Already Biden’s signs populate all the streets.
The Night of Broken Glass is close at hand!

You are the progressive Democratic mayor of an American city. You have done everything right in that you have adopted the most recent trendy and politically correct liberal stands on community issues. You have demoralized and reduced funding for the police force, declared support for street demonstrations, and spoken out for social justice. Why then, is a mob of Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Antifa activists besieging your house and demanding your resignation?

Suddenly, the horrible realization hits you: You have been cancelled for showing insufficient revolutionary zeal. You have joined the ranks of loyal fellow travelers who have become expendable in virtually every radical leftist revolution.

Joseph Stalin perfected the cancel culture even though he used different terms. Those who disagreed with him or showed insufficient revolutionary zeal became “unpersons.” Any mention of them was purged from official records, history books, and their photos were airbrushed out. If they were prestigious enough to have statues erected in their honor, the monuments were removed. It has taken the American radical left quite a while to feel powerful enough to formerly adopt a cancel culture.

There is a lot of similarities between the belief systems of Harris and Stalin. They both appear to be in favor of a totalitarian state. We all know that Stalin was guilty of genocide on a mass scale. I am in no way inferring that Harris is of the same mentality. It does appear that she will not let anything stand in her way to achieve her goals. I believe Stalin was a lot more ruthless, mainly because he could be. However we can’t sell her short. If Their ticket wins, Biden will be a nothing but a speed bump for her. So, only history will tell if my beliefs are vindicated. Though AOC is becoming a good runner-up candidate for Stalin’s soul mate. She recently started an accountability Project to tabulate all Trump supporters. Right out of Stalin’s play book.

Resources:

en.wikipedia.org, ” Joseph Stalin,” By Wikipedia editors; en.wikipedia.org, “Kamala Harris,” By Wikipedia editors; en.wikipedia.org, “political positions of Kamala Harris,” By Wikipedia editors; canadafreepress.com, “Kamala Harris, the anti-Christianity, anti-American Choice,” By Douglas V. Gibbs; americanthinker.com, “The Left’s New Martyrology,” By Civius Americanus; http://www.washingtontimes.com, ” Will Antifa and Black Lives Matter cancel the Biden-Harris ticket?” By Gary Anderson; conservativeangle.com, “JUST LIKE STALIN’S GREAT PURGE: AOC Leads Democrat Effort to Create ‘Trump Accountability Project’ Hit List to Pay Back Trump Supporters,” By Jim Hoft;

Addendum:

Lenin’s Testament:

Stalin is too crude, and this defect which is entirely acceptable in our milieu and in relationships among us as communists, becomes unacceptable in the position of General Secretary. I therefore propose to comrades that they should devise a means of removing him from this job and should appoint to this job someone else who is distinguished from comrade Stalin in all other respects only by the single superior aspect that he should be more tolerant, more polite and more attentive towards comrades, less capricious, etc.

— Lenin’s Testament, 4 January 1923; this was possibly composed by Krupskaya rather than Lenin himself.

Common Sense and Ramblings In America

How Does Kamala Harris Stack Up Against Joseph Stalin?

The Great Terror

Cold War policy: 1947–1950

Death penalty

The Democrat Party’s history of racism is alive and well in the Joe Biden campaign

Her radical pro-baby-slaughter stance is only the beginning of her Anti-Christian Bigotry

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The Great Terror

Cold War policy: 1947–1950

Death penalty

The Democrat Party’s history of racism is alive and well in the Joe Biden campaign

Her radical pro-baby-slaughter stance is only the beginning of her Anti-Christian Bigotry

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