Greetings. This is Pastor David Bass at New Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church with a moment of truth, where we challenge you to think through an important issue of life and faith. And today, I want to challenge you to think through the issue of socialism in America. This is fast approaching us like a freight train in the current election, and it's an issue that we're all going to have to deal with. But I have somebody here with me today who has had deep experience to his toenails growing up under socialism, and his is the voice of experience and the voice of reason.

He's an articulate man. His name is Bill Azen, and he is the co-owner with his wife, Dasha, of Wealth of Health here in Idaho Falls. Just an excellent place to find whole foods, good foods, foods that are nurturing to your body. And just full disclosure here, my wife and I have a farm in Teton Valley, and Wealth of Health has been so good to us in selling our milk. And so we have just enjoyed so much Wealth of Health.

And we want to hear Bill now in these things. But Bill, welcome to the program. Thank you, Pastor Bass. I feel pretty honored being almost in the presence of God for a non-religious person that I am. This is going to be a very interesting take.

Well, I've just promoted everybody. I have on occasion heard your recorded broadcast on Sunday morning. And when I was younger, first came to this country, we did start going to various churches to sort of find our home. We went to the Catholic churches. We went to non-denominational church on Fifth West or on South Fifth.

And we just heard preaching, preaching, preaching that didn't make a lot of common sense. A lot of singing, a lot of hand-holding. That's great for a lot of people. And there are all kinds of people who love that. But being that I'm a pretty practical guy, I said, I'm not seeing any connection to life in that preaching.

But then when I listen to you on Sundays, you always tie it to world's events and history and to Middle East history, which you know so much about. And that, to me, it's fascinating because you live and learn, and you want to learn every day. Yeah, it's one of my convictions, Bill, that the gospel transforms every area of life, not only the heart and soul for eternity, but also here in the temporal realm as well. So the gospel transforms politics and culture and society as well. And that's one reason we've got you here, Bill, because you have had a deep experience, like I say to your toenails, you have grown up under socialism.

And why don't you tell us just a little bit about your background first, why we feel that you are qualified to speak on this topic? Yeah, because opinions are like dog poop, and they're all over the sidewalk, and they're absolutely free. So for those people who might have heard me earlier in the week on the Neil Larson's program, you may hear a little bit of a duplication, but that's fine. So I was born in the USSR. Don't know how many people still know what USSR is.

Back in 1963, Cuban Missile Crisis, John F. Kennedy, right in the smack middle of the Soviet Union. Cold War propaganda, communism against the United States. I was raised fortunately in a family that was very quietly anti-communist. It was difficult at that time in the Soviet Union to be anti-communist. Almost every adult was, and every young kid after the age of 10 became a youth communist and then progressed through the ranks.

But my parents, due to their professional skills and jobs, were able to maintain the status. They were very sought after in their professional jobs. So the government laid off of them and basically kept hands off as long as they did not go lauding and doing this in public, demonstrating, et cetera, et cetera. So I, from the young age, being propagandized in high school, and I finished 9 out of 10 years of Soviet high school, is 10 years, not 12, as it is in the United States, heard and watched daily assault. Daily assault.

United States is evil. And the videos that constantly were presented to us were the civil unrests of the 60s, burning down of the buildings in the Bronx, in the Harlem, Angela Davis. They were the heroes of the Soviet Union. This is what United States is. But deep inside, we knew that wasn't it.

My dad was a merchant sailor, so he was on cargo ships, sailed all over the world, and with his own eyes saw the world from Japan to Caribbean to Europe. One country he's never been to was United States. Soviet ships were not allowed into the U.S. But he was in Cuba many times, bringing in oil gas refinery, because they were starving without the Soviet Union's hand. So in 1979, and my family was Jewish on paper, however, for people who don't know the history, in 1917, when the Tsar was taken down, churches and religions of all kinds were basically prohibited.

So there was that gap from 1917 to late 80s, where you saw the church building, but it was empty, and nobody ever went into it, except of the old, old lady, which the government didn't care about, and didn't mind going in there. So I had no religion in my background. My grandma used to very quietly, behind padded doors of the apartment buildings, have some kind of a dinner thing for Passover and Yom Kippur, which we just passed actually right now. That's the Jewish New Year and the Day of Remembrance, the two most important Jewish holidays.

But my parents, my brother and I, were raised absolutely without religion, except what we heard from my grandparents and her friends when they gathered together. Remember, the doors were padded, because every apartment landing that had six or eight apartments had people called stukach, and those people were reporting on any activities to the government. Very similarly now that we're seeing with face masks and people stepping up. Snitches. Snitches, yeah.

People who speak a little Russian understand it's stukach has particular meaning in the world of KGB. So I came to the United States in 1979. Legally, mind you, I am all for legal immigration. I am totally against illegal immigration. It's very damaging.

We waited about a year in the Soviet Union. The background there was under Jimmy Carter. He traded so many hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants for a bunch of food that United States provided, particularly grain program. Again, Soviet Union was starving, broken down, poor, except for the elites, who always had the means and the way. Isn't that the way of socialism?

We will tie a lot of this stuff together. So we waited for one year to get a permission from the Soviet Union to immigrate with massive amounts of background. They had to make sure that my dad was not in privileged information or classified information in the Soviet Union before they let him out. The family left. And we spent about two months in Italy and Austria being vetted by the United States Department of State and FBI before we were allowed to come to the United States.

And the United States was not guaranteed because it could have been Australia. It could have been New Zealand. It could have been Europe or Israel. And what was happening is the countries were looking at who do they need for professional skills? And my dad, being a merchant sailor, they said, we can use you right now.

So the U.S. is open if you choose to come to United States. So we got vetted pretty heavily for our criminal activities, whether we were doing anything illegal before we came to the United States. We came with zero money in our pocket. Everything was left behind. And we came with absolutely no reliance on the United States government.

It was privately sponsored immigration associations that were raising funds from private citizens to bring immigrants in and family. So we've never, ever taken a dime of the social programs as illegal immigrants do today. I finished high school in New York City, went to the Merchant Marine Academy in New York City. That's a naval equivalency of the love boat for people who know what love boat is and cruise ships.

Graduated there, got my U.S. citizenship in five years, which was pretty fast at the time because the United States government was looking at people a lot more seriously back then than they do now and got a job working for defense contractors in Connecticut building nuclear submarines and then wound up here at the site. So my native language of Russian plus top secret clearances for Department of Energy and Department of Defense became very handy when the wall collapsed. And I was tasked by our U.S. Naval Intelligence to do all kinds of projects in the United States and even traveling to Russia.

Now, I have to add that my dad, my brother and my grandpa were all in the Soviet Navy, not being communists, but somehow they managed to survive and prosper and advance in the naval ranks. I wore the uniform of the U.S. Navy for 10 years, Navy reserves. So I love the flag. I love the anthem. I am a patriot of this country.

I am forever appreciative of the opportunity that this country and my family gave me and my brother by allowing us to come here. We learned the English. We never asked for the Russian driver's test or for the Russian language to become a second language. We integrated into the society and we became productive members of this society. And in 1995, after being for 10 years in the government world of the site and other contractors, my particular job became very bureaucratic.

And not that everybody at the site is. A lot of people are doing paper pushing, but a lot of people are doing very productive work. My job just became boring and bureaucratic. And as a young 30-some year old, I decided it was time to move on and we took over the wealth of hope. Yes.

And everything you said about your embracing and with great enthusiasm and with great heart and great passion, great love, the American way, I have since from you over the years that I've known you, Bill. And it's good to hear more of the details of that too. Some of the things I've, I know about you, I've heard just for the first time today. And we didn't come here for economic reasons. There are millions of Russian immigrants in Brooklyn and California and Washington and Massachusetts who came here to make a buck.

We came to escape. Number one, the Jewish religion was heavily persecuted. And then we had personal reasons where my family's life drastically changed over one event. And my parents said, for us, it wasn't important for them, but for the kids, it was important to become free. And so they made the move and again, lost everything, all their friendships, all their connections, finances, everything, stability, and took a huge risk by coming here.

Yeah. But where would you, where else would you want to start with nothing? Yeah. I'm not sure that there is a country today. I'm seeing and hearing all these comments.

Is it time to move to Europe, to Canada? People are applying for Canadian information. Yes. God bless you. Please go.

You will find out that there's still no better country in the world than the United States. Bill, describe for us, since socialism is one of the main topics here in the election, upcoming with AOC and Ilhan Omar and many others embracing socialism. Yes. And doing so overtly, describe the contrast between what you heard about America. You've probably heard about the liberties, the freedoms and so forth, opportunities in America and the old, the socialism that you experienced in Russia itself.

Why don't you compare just a little bit about what you knew in your, in your, the fiber of your bones about socialism and then coming to America and seeing the contrast. Well, um, and what was that like? So the, the background of socialism in 1917, a young kid by the name of Lenin got up on top of a train, said, rah, rah, rah, all you people have been oppressed by the czar. I, you've been abused. You, you're poor.

Look at how you live. I can promise you better. And that resonated with the peasants. So the czar was killed, uh, or put in exile, his family, et cetera, et cetera. Lenin became this, uh, uh, symbol of socialism, um, exterminated millions of people very quickly, uh, hired, created basically KGB or the, the previous, uh, KGB, uh, uh, organization.

And, uh, that continued on with Stalin and, and on and on where the, one of the biggest things is in socialism, look at, uh, Soviet union or Russia, China, Venezuela, Cuba, uh, North Korea, the value of life is meaningless. I am not a pro-life and I'm not a religious person, but it's very easy for the communists to kill a million people because they, uh, opposed an ideology or spoke out against ABC, whatever it is. So the biggest differences in the United States until right now that we're seeing with these, uh, uh, fiery protests and not the peaceful ones, but, but, uh, radical anarchy protests, the value of life has been devalued.

And of course, uh, why is all of a sudden abortion is not important to 50% of the population if they're valuing a black life or a Hispanic life or some other life? I'm just throwing a question out there. What separates that life from a baby's life? And again, I'm not a pro-life. Uh, I was raised without a church.

I was raised without a God or religion. Um, I deeply understand that the discipline and the wellbeing of people comes from believing and, uh, in some higher being and a family raising, uh, the good people. But, uh, one of the biggest things you see, uh, in the United States, if you first arrive here from a socialist country is abundance, abundance, overabundance, in many cases, way, way overabundance, which I would say maybe it wouldn't be too bad to cut down on some of the stuff, but that is something that you see empty shelves. You see lack of toilet paper where people were using magazines and newspapers crumbled up in toilets.

Uh, the joke was, uh, fine grit, sandpaper, uh, whatever you needed to use. There was no toothpaste, no toothbrushes. There was no jeans. There was nothing at all. The Soviet Union produced bare minimum essentials.

Uh, and people just existed. They survived. They got up in the morning. They didn't say a lot. They didn't protest there.

They just survived. And they hoped to put food on the table and make it to the next day. Uh, and if you did say something, then you would kind of very quietly disappear or never to be seen again. Or maybe you were, you were told, uh, if you calm down, this behavior will let you back into the society in a year or two. And so the gulags, which were known then still exist.

There are a lot of political opposition. Even if you're plugged into the news a little bit, you see that if Putin gets a challenger and that challenger is a little bit vociferous, that challenger disappears pretty quickly, either with poison or, uh, or a bullet in the head, or just nobody knows where that person disappeared to. The principles of socialism that, that drove the results, the conditions in which you grew up, um, are being espoused now. That is that government is the end all be all free, uh, education, free healthcare, uh, now, uh, an annual minimum wage. Yeah.

Uh, up and down the line. Um, what is at the heart and core of the, of those kinds of socialist principles that then ultimately leads to the conditions in which you grew up? Right. So number one, the government controls production. Uh, the only place that it's ever succeeded was inside the kibbutzes in Israel, which you can call classic communist things where people harvest together and share the wealth.

But outside of those kibbutzes, Israel is a pretty democratic, uh, Western type, uh, world. Uh, when people throw Sweden or Norway and Denmark into the mix or Finland, uh, they forget that those countries live on massive amounts of that dirty oil and the funds that they have very similar to Alaska or, uh, uh, some other countries that, uh, have these, uh, uh, production, uh, royalties off of oil can afford, uh, the government to give, uh, for social programs. So there is zero motivation and zero incentive for people to advance because I'm in the Soviet Union. You had no idea what your wage was.

You were given a paycheck and that paycheck was very similar for a, an engineer after four years or six years of school and a person who was sweeping the streets. Um, you were given a stipend to, to go towards your utilities, towards your apartment. There was about a 10 year waiting list. Again, this is under communists. Things have changed since the wall came down and Putin does understand the economic, uh, growth and taxation.

But under the communists, you waited 10 to 15 years to get a car because cars were not produced. And when they were produced, they were garbage. Um, you can, uh, revert for a second to Scandinavian countries where the sales tax is in the 20% range right now for a cup of coffee. And until just a few weeks ago, it was 200% of the value of a vehicle, which was just reduced to 100%, which is a huge tax cut. So why do Norwegians and Swedes ride bicycles?

Because it's very expensive to own a car, but all of them do own a car. They all own teeny little cars because they're less expensive. Uh, and they do commute when they need to. But when we hear this, uh, they're all happy riding bicycles. There's a reason for that.

The government does force you in the direction by taxing you. So you have no idea what your wages are. You don't know what you're worth. You have really no savings. You cannot own any property.

There is no motivation for a doctor to become a better doctor or for an engineer to get a PhD. We can see all of these, uh, uh, going back. We can see the tentacles going, coming out of, uh, government ownership of production. Correct. And the Norway owns oil production Norway.

They've nationalized Venezuela. Venezuela is the same thing. Right. And just think about it a few years ago, Venezuela was one of the richest countries in the world. And what happened with a few regimes there, uh, it basically disappeared.

Now the communism or the socialism, my friends, Marx and Engels who wrote the communist manifesto, that was my Bible going to high school in the Soviet union. We had to memorize the communist manifesto, the four pillars of the manifesto. And you can tie him to exactly step for step with what we're seeing today is separate people from religion. How quickly did people give up their right to go pray during COVID? Uh, even if you were outside with 20 people maintaining 50 foot distance, not us, we continue to be, I saw enough videos.

Sure. Oh yeah. All over the country arrested by the local cops for violating the gathering ordinance. So separate people from religion, separate people from guns, uh, Nazi Germany, 1930s and, uh, communist 1917 guns were taken away from people so they could not resist. Number three, media, convert media and implant people into media so they can continue propagandizing.

Uh, we see this with MSNBC, CNN, uh, uh, New York times, uh, to a much lesser extent, Fox news on the, on the right side. Growing up, Pravda was the, was the byword. Yeah. The word truth and, uh, Novosti, which was an irony. Right.

And then red star was the big newspaper, uh, uh, in Russia as well. And then the fourth tentacle was start working out on the, working on the mush brains of the kids and then continue progressing through high school, through college with whatever the evil propaganda is. And we can obviously see that now with the teachers unions, not the teachers, but the teachers unions pushing propaganda, uh, all the way up to colleges where it's very difficult to find a college today who will accept free speech and argument on any kind. So there's four tentacles. Now we shared a video from many years ago of a gentleman and, and people can probably find it.

Uh, the interview was given in the mid eighties. He was a chief of station Novosti in Canada, uh, uh, KGB, Colonel in the KGB, the responsible for subverting and, uh, uh, bloodless gunless education of the American crowd, uh, with the benefits of the communism. And he goes through the exact same tentacles that started in 1960s where the Soviet union implanted lots and lots of people inside United nations, inside our universities, inside our political spectrum.

We now have people, uh, Ilhan Omar, uh, Bernie Sanders, who fully believe that free, free, free, which appeals to the young population and many older ones, because it is good to have free stuff, but they don't understand that there is no free lunch in the world. That's right. And the government always has its, uh, cost, um, as well. Um, and one of the things that you find with, uh, totalitarian regimes as well is, is a principle that you alluded to earlier. That is the individual does not matter.

It's the state that, uh, that, uh, is, is most important. And, uh, that conflicts majorly with the American principle of the individual, uh, and incentive opportunity, um, that every individual has in America. Um, and I'm not saying, uh, it's, it's not good or whatever. If somebody here in the United States loves that system of government and life, we have a fortunate opportunity, which we did not have in the Soviet Union to travel. You were not allowed to travel, but here you can get a ticket one way to Venezuela or China.

They may be happy to take you. They may not be happy to take you, but at least you could get up and go and experience that life. Sure. And you may not have to travel that far. Um, pretty soon because we're talking about California, New York, which is very quickly becoming, uh, Bill, uh, we have just begun to scratch the surface.

I think we, uh, can probably, um, continue to another episode. Does that sound appealing to you? Absolutely. Maybe you'll get some questions from your parish. That's right.

And from our, uh, listeners all over the, uh, all over Southeast Idaho. So I would invite everybody then to do precisely that. And you can direct those questions, um, to me, Pastor David Bass at New Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church. And you can do that by calling area code 208-523-0196. That's 208-523-0196.

And you will, uh, be able to submit those questions then, uh, to my voicemail. And we will go ahead and take those up then next week. Uh, but until then, uh, New Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church meets for holy worship on Sunday at 10 a.m. at 101 4th Street on the corner of 4th and Boulevard. And we encourage you to check out our website where we have a catalog of our past radio messages. And you'll find that at, um, uh, omnispotestas.com.

That's Latin, O-M-N-I-S-P-O-T-E-S-T-A-S.org. Excuse me, that's .org. And that means all authority. All authority has been granted to Christ. And, uh, you'll find our catalog then of previous radio messages there.

And for more information or to submit a question, uh, for Bill, uh, go ahead and call us at area code 208-523-0196. Okay. . .