Jon Stewart Was Wrong
“Filth, crime, and inflation” in American cities are not the “price of freedom” but signs of government failures.
Please feel free to click the ❤️ or 🔄 button so more people will read it. Thank you!
On September 16, 1989, a small grocery store in the Clear Creek area near Houston, TX, had an unusual visitor. His name was Boris Yeltsin, a prominent politician of the Soviet Communist Party at the time. He served as the First Secretary of the Moscow City Committee of the Communist Party between 1985 and 1987 and was a member of the Soviet Parliament when he visited the U.S. in 1989.
The Soviet delegation came to Houston mainly to visit NASA. Checking out an American grocery store wasn’t on the agenda. It was all Yeltsin’s idea. He wanted to have a glimpse of ordinary Americans’ life. An American report following Yeltsin observed that Yeltsin “roamed the aisles of Randall’s nodding his head in amazement...He told his fellow Russians in his entourage that if their people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw the conditions of U.S. supermarkets, ‘there would be a revolution.’” In Yeltsin’s autobiography, he wrote about the grocery visit:
"When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people. That such a potentially super-rich country as ours has been brought to a state of such poverty! It is terrible to think of it."
Yeltsin saw many great things in America during the 1989 visit, from the Statue of Liberty to NASA. But it was an ordinary grocery store that convinced him: communism is a lie and capitalism is superior. He quit the Communist Party two years after his trip to America and helped bury the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, Yeltsin’s economic reform was a disaster. Ultimately, he delivered Russia to his hand-picked successor, Vladimir Putin.
I had my own Yeltsin moment in 1996, when I first walked into an American grocery store: the whole place was well-lit, clean, and had no weird smell; there was an abundance of food at affordable prices neatly stacked up on shelves; no shelves were empty; there were no long lines at the check-out; and the store opened 24x7 so I could get anything I wanted whenever I wanted. Like Yeltsin, a visit to an American grocery store convinced me that capitalism was superior to socialism. Many immigrants from socialist countries who experienced starvation and food shortages back in their home country told me they felt the same way when they walked into American grocery stores, too.
Few people in the West realize that the most potent weapon that helped the West win the Cold War against Communism was not nuclear warheads but the West’s high standards of living. Once people in those Communist countries saw or experienced the prosperity of the West, they all had the Yeltsin moment: realizing Communists sold them a big lie, and they demanded change.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Confucius Never Said to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.