Memorable Quotes From A Rose In December

 

 Once an avowed believer in the "equality" of Communism, Rose Wilder Lane, 
along with many other philosophical writers and artists of her generation, quickly 
changed their minds  regarding this most repressive system of government, 
especially when the horrors of untold human suffering were exposed
  in Joseph Stalin's Russia during the 1930's.

 Under the auspices of his brutal regime, millions of Russians died after  
 being sent to forced labor camps, while millions of others died from starvation,
or became the victims of ethnic cleansing and/or deportation to remote areas
of the Soviet Union as part of Stalin's "population transfer" policies.
  

The following quotes reveal her change of heart on the subject.

  

Rose Wilder Lane
December 5, 1886-October 30, 1968
Prolific American writer
Daughter of Almanzo and Laura Ingalls Wilder
Image courtesy/Herbert Hoover Presidential Library

 

 

 

 

 

"In 1919, I was a communist.  My Bolshevik friends of those days are
scattered now; some are bourgeois, some are dead, some are in China
and Russia, and I did not know the last American chiefs of the *Third
International, who now officially embrace Democracy. They would
repudiate me as a renegade comrade, for I was never a member of
The Party. But is was merely an accident that I was not." 

 

 "I came out of the Soviet Union no longer a communist,
because I believed in personal freedom."

 

"As an American I am of course fundamentally opposed to democracy
 and to anyone advocating or defending democracy, which in theory 
and practice is the basis of socialism." 

 

 

"Anyone who says that economic security is a human right, has been
too much babied. While he babbles, other men are risking and losing
their lives to protect him.  They are fighting the sea,  fighting the land,
fighting disease and insects and weather and space and time, for him,
while he chatters that all men have a right to security and some
pagan god-Society, The State, The Government, The Commune-
must give it to them.  Let the fighting men stop fighting this inhuman
earth for one hour, and he will learn how much security there is." 

 

 

"Nothing whatsoever but the constitutional law, the political structure
of these United States protects any American from the arbitrary seizure
of his property and his person...from the Gestapo and the Storm Troops,
from the concentration camp, the torture chamber, the revolver at
the back of his neck in a cellar."

 

 

"I am now a fundamentalist American, give me time and I will tell you
why individualism, laissez-faire, and the slightly restrained anarchy of
capitalism offer the best opportunities for the development of the human spirit." 

-Rose Wilder Lane

 

 * The Third International was an international political organization existing
between 1919 to 1943, advocating the spread of communism worldwide.