Hating the Left

Oleg Atbashian, one of the two geniuses behind The People's Cube, is a writer and artist from Ukraine. Atbashian was still living there when the Iron Curtain fell and witnessed the attempted coup by Communist Party hacks attempting to undo the democratic reforms. He has an essay on Pajamas Media comparing the Bush hating left-wing protesters in the streets of America today with the Russians who took to the streets in Moscow to support Boris Yeltsin's defiance of the hard liners.

Here is a sample:

“Freedom can’t be increased by abusing and disparaging it.”

Today’s anti-Bush rallies in the U.S. demand the very opposite of what the pro-freedom Soviets rallied for. By advocating for the government control of economy, the ideological monopoly of the Left, and massive redistribution of wealth, American leftists espouse the same ideas as the backward Soviet hardliners - same song, different verse.

These self-absorbed “progressives” don’t want to hear about the strife of the Soviet people who had learned the hard way that these ideas only result in massive poverty and loss of freedoms for everyone involved. In effect, the leftist rallies spit in the face of every victim of communist oppression, living or dead. That count is in the hundreds of millions.

There’s nothing heroic in disparaging democratic institutions, dishonoring the American flag, and carrying placards with anti-capitalist, anti-American slogans pre-printed for them by communist front groups with the money donated by corrupt foreign dictators. The protesters absurdly accuse this free country of being a fascist dictatorship, fully aware that an hour later they’ll be drinking expensive coffee at Starbucks - and not dragged to a political prison and getting their teeth knocked in - a likely prospect for dissidents in the countries whose leaders they idolize.

They may believe their protest leads to more freedom - but freedom can’t be increased by abusing and disparaging it. Objectively, they diminish freedom by providing hope and moral support to dictators, helping tyrants to brainwash their populations, and knocking the ground from under the feet of real fighters for freedom. That makes them a tool in the hands of a reactionary totalitarian ideology. As if supporting communist dictatorships were not enough, “progressive” rallies now also feature slogans backing the Iranian regime that imprisons and tortures its own dissidents.

I love people who grew up under totalitarian governments and then made it to the United States. They tend to be, first, grateful for what the United States has done for them personally and for what it offers people who live here in general. And second, they tend to hate the left with a burning passion which matches my own.

They have lived in the kind of nations which America would become if it were left up to people like Hillary Clinton and John Kerry and Nancy Pelosi. And we could add John Edwards and Barack Obama and Ralph Nader and the entire membership of the Green Party and PETA and all the other constituent groups which make up the left. They have lived under that kind of government and escaped it and want no part of it.

They tend to regard anyone who wants to bring that kind of evil to our shores as a mortal enemy. Just like I do. I was born and raised in the United States so I have no first hand experience of the kinds of things that Oleg Atbashian experienced in Ukraine or that Alexander Solzhenitsyn went through in the Soviet Gulag or that generations of Cubans have endured or what kind of hell the people of Rhodesia are going through, but unlike most Americans I have a keen sense of just how magnificently lucky I am to be here.

I know how lucky I am to be here so I share the murderous fury of the immigrants from the lands which are ruled by the left unchained.