People’s Republic of Williamsville

Dear Comrades! The proletariat of Williamsville have seized power and, through their vanguard party implemented an appropriate dictatorship to bring the bourgeois liberal order to its knees, defenestrate the nobility, and to implement a true worker’s democratic order. Raise the red banner! Cue the Internationale! Long Live the Glorious Revolution!

Or that’s just what the *checks notes* Village Mayor wants you to think.

“I’m just saying I’m embarrassed to be sitting up here with two trustees who, I will say, are nothing short of communists in their ability to vote ‘no’ on this opposition,” Rogers said. “Because this is exactly what we saw happening in communist China, where people were being taken from their homes against their will and placed into quarantine camps.”

Williamsville Mayor Deb Rogers

I’ve spent some time in communist countries and I can think of a few differences right off the top of my head that would disprove Deb Rogers’ theory about the Trotskyite scum people on her village board who oppose her:

1. Williamsville has a multi-party democratic board of freely elected trustees. This does not happen under communism, where all political power is held by the ruling party, which sets up sham elections with slates of pre-approved party candidates and the electorate is forced to “vote” by checking a “yes” or “no” box. To my knowledge, this has not yet happened in Williamsville.
2. Williamsville enjoys free enterprise whereby people are able to start and own businesses, exploit the working class hire people, and compete in the marketplace in an effort to make a profit. Under most communist regimes, private enterprise, if allowed at all, is limited to only the smallest mom & pop stores such as barber shops, small restaurants, jewelry, and art. If permitted, these businesses are forced to pay confiscatory taxes, their ability to hire people is severely limited, and direct competition with state-owned enterprises is strictly regulated if permitted.
3. Williamsville has a free press and, to my knowledge, the editors and writers of the Amherst Bee are not members of the communist party for which the paper is the official organ.
4. Williamsville has freedom of speech and all of the other freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution of New York and the United States. This is made evident by the way in which Comrade Rogers is free to utter the most obnoxious idiocy without fear of official government sanction therefor.

So we are clear, what Comrade Mayor Rogers is upset about is the idea that people who are suffering from a communicable, transmissible disease, might be ordered by the state to isolate to prevent transmission and epidemic at a place not their home. This is almost exactly like the outcome of the DDR’s Tenth Party Congress in 1981.

Presumably, based on this reported temper tantrum, Comrade Mayor Rogers might consider it to be “communism” for a school to send home a child with lice or strep; that it would be analogous to the Khmer Rouge emptying Phnom Penh of bespectacled citizens and sending them to die in camps for the state Department of Health to ask that people consider other people and take reasonable measures to avoid the preventable spread of infectious diseases, and that the state step in if they refuse.

The proper way for an aggrieved party to seek recourse against what it thinks is a governmental overreach is to file a lawsuit. Oh, look, there’s already one filed. Maybe the nominally “pro-life” bourgeois so-called “Republicans” are happy to have, e.g., an Ebola nurse running around town willy-nilly but that is unlikely to be in the best interests of public health. Then again, public health is a joke anyway, as we don’t have health coverage for every American, and no one gives a crap that we have a Covid positivity rate of 20% locally, or the effect that this has on immunocompromised people and on the economy generally. Glory to the People’s Martyrs who died so you could shop maskless at Target!

For the Village Board of the People’s Republic of Williamsville to pass (or reject) a resolution in opposition to (or support of) a state regulation is an utter and irrelevant waste of time that exists only to let someone grandstand. Comrade Mayor Deb Rogers got her grandstanding moment, and even hurled completely outlandish insults at a couple of trustees who were basically saying that, contrary to the opinions of Titoist bourgeois reactionaries, this was a colossal waste of time and effort. Just like Trotsky and Guevara would have wanted.