This tale is important because it represents one more example of the behavior of a political Leftist....whether called Liberals, or Progressives, or Democrats...
1. Under the auspices of Franklin Roosevelt, the United States drew closer, and embraced, the Communist regime of Joseph Stalin. FDR Democrats covered for, ignored, and excused massacres, genocide, government instituted famines and lies of every variety.
Somehow, it was simply communists being communists....no biggie....
The same view of communism has persisted 'til this very day.
2. Jimmy Carter, midway between Roosevelt and Obama, continues that thinking. Unlike the hard Left, proclaiming themselves communists, Liberals usually did not come out and actually support or defend the Soviet Union, rather they soft-pedaled communism by showing contempt and scorn for anticommunists as “primitive” or “knee-jerk” or just plain “nuts” and “warmongers.”
a. The problem, as the Carter left saw it, was the right’s paranoia, its ‘inordinate’ fear of communism, as the Soviet Union and other communist states were neither particularly threatening nor particularly evil.
b. These Leftists found understandable the Soviet Union’s fear of ‘encirclement’....they sympathized with the sociopaths.
3. As is true of most Leftists, Carter didn't notice this because he began his presidency at Notre Dame with a speech that included:
“…We are now free of that inordinate fear of Communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in our fear.”
Franklin Roosevelt would have been proud!
a. "Fifty years of liberal propaganda had people thinking of Communist Party member as lovable idealists and the urge to fire them from their government jobs as an irrational anachronistic prejudice."
Coulter
4. Poor Soviet Union..... fear of ‘encirclement’???...
“Between 1974 and 1980, while the United States wallowed in post-Vietnam angst, 10 countries had fallen into the Soviet orbit: South Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, South Yemen, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Grenada and Afghanistan. Never had the Soviets lost an inch of real estate to the West. The Brezhnev Doctrine stated simply that once a country went Communist, it would stay Communist. In other words, the Soviet empire would continue to advance and gain territory…”
"How the East Was Won"
5. Not everyone missed the obvious.
" … several common assumptions each of which played a major role in hastening the victory of even more repressive dictatorships than had been in place before. These were, first, the belief that there existed at the moment of crisis a democratic alternative to the incumbent government: second, the belief that the continuation of the status quo was not possible; third, the belief that any change, including the establishment of a government headed by self-styled Marxist revolutionaries, was preferable to the present government. Each of these beliefs was (and is) widely shared in the liberal community generally. Not one of them can withstand close scrutiny.”
Jeane Kirkpatrick, ‘Dictators and Double Standards,” « Dictatorships & Double Standards Commentary Magazine
6. There was a stark contrast between the imagined glories of the New Soviet Man and the realities for ordinary people under the tyranny of the Soviet Union. Along with political repression, the Communists practiced an economic theory based on a false ideology that left people perpetually undernourished, ill-clothed and poorly housed. The opening of sections of the Soviet archives provides documentation.
Typical is this letter sent to Pravda in 1932, and, of course, never published:
'Comrade Editor,
Please give me an answer. Do the local authorities have the right to take away the only cow of industrial and office workers? What is more, they demand a receipt showing that the cow was handed over voluntarily and they threaten you by saying that if you don't do this, they will put you in prison for failure to fulfill the meat procurement. How can you live when the cooperative distributes only black bread, and at the market goods have the prices of 1919 and 1920? Lice have eaten us to death, and soap is given only to railroad workers. From hunger and filth we have a massive outbreak of spotted fever.' Richard Pipes on Siegelbaum
Whittaker Chambers wrote in his book WITNESS that liberals are/were incapable of ever effectively fighting Communism because they did not see anything in Communism that was antithetical to their own beliefs.
In short, Liberals are Communists and Communists are Liberals. The revisionist is aware of the horrors of Communism; the tortures, the Gulags, the over 100 million persons done to death.....
...and yet....over and over....they cling to the same anti-American values and regimes.
True to this very day.
1. Under the auspices of Franklin Roosevelt, the United States drew closer, and embraced, the Communist regime of Joseph Stalin. FDR Democrats covered for, ignored, and excused massacres, genocide, government instituted famines and lies of every variety.
Somehow, it was simply communists being communists....no biggie....
The same view of communism has persisted 'til this very day.
2. Jimmy Carter, midway between Roosevelt and Obama, continues that thinking. Unlike the hard Left, proclaiming themselves communists, Liberals usually did not come out and actually support or defend the Soviet Union, rather they soft-pedaled communism by showing contempt and scorn for anticommunists as “primitive” or “knee-jerk” or just plain “nuts” and “warmongers.”
a. The problem, as the Carter left saw it, was the right’s paranoia, its ‘inordinate’ fear of communism, as the Soviet Union and other communist states were neither particularly threatening nor particularly evil.
b. These Leftists found understandable the Soviet Union’s fear of ‘encirclement’....they sympathized with the sociopaths.
3. As is true of most Leftists, Carter didn't notice this because he began his presidency at Notre Dame with a speech that included:
“…We are now free of that inordinate fear of Communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in our fear.”
Franklin Roosevelt would have been proud!
a. "Fifty years of liberal propaganda had people thinking of Communist Party member as lovable idealists and the urge to fire them from their government jobs as an irrational anachronistic prejudice."
Coulter
4. Poor Soviet Union..... fear of ‘encirclement’???...
“Between 1974 and 1980, while the United States wallowed in post-Vietnam angst, 10 countries had fallen into the Soviet orbit: South Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, South Yemen, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Grenada and Afghanistan. Never had the Soviets lost an inch of real estate to the West. The Brezhnev Doctrine stated simply that once a country went Communist, it would stay Communist. In other words, the Soviet empire would continue to advance and gain territory…”
"How the East Was Won"
5. Not everyone missed the obvious.
" … several common assumptions each of which played a major role in hastening the victory of even more repressive dictatorships than had been in place before. These were, first, the belief that there existed at the moment of crisis a democratic alternative to the incumbent government: second, the belief that the continuation of the status quo was not possible; third, the belief that any change, including the establishment of a government headed by self-styled Marxist revolutionaries, was preferable to the present government. Each of these beliefs was (and is) widely shared in the liberal community generally. Not one of them can withstand close scrutiny.”
Jeane Kirkpatrick, ‘Dictators and Double Standards,” « Dictatorships & Double Standards Commentary Magazine
6. There was a stark contrast between the imagined glories of the New Soviet Man and the realities for ordinary people under the tyranny of the Soviet Union. Along with political repression, the Communists practiced an economic theory based on a false ideology that left people perpetually undernourished, ill-clothed and poorly housed. The opening of sections of the Soviet archives provides documentation.
Typical is this letter sent to Pravda in 1932, and, of course, never published:
'Comrade Editor,
Please give me an answer. Do the local authorities have the right to take away the only cow of industrial and office workers? What is more, they demand a receipt showing that the cow was handed over voluntarily and they threaten you by saying that if you don't do this, they will put you in prison for failure to fulfill the meat procurement. How can you live when the cooperative distributes only black bread, and at the market goods have the prices of 1919 and 1920? Lice have eaten us to death, and soap is given only to railroad workers. From hunger and filth we have a massive outbreak of spotted fever.' Richard Pipes on Siegelbaum
Whittaker Chambers wrote in his book WITNESS that liberals are/were incapable of ever effectively fighting Communism because they did not see anything in Communism that was antithetical to their own beliefs.
In short, Liberals are Communists and Communists are Liberals. The revisionist is aware of the horrors of Communism; the tortures, the Gulags, the over 100 million persons done to death.....
...and yet....over and over....they cling to the same anti-American values and regimes.
True to this very day.
