Leftward progress

As “progressives” burn the flag, decry our troops (bad language warning), and rally in support of Islamic terrorism, in protests sponsored by the communist front group ANSWER, this brilliant essay is penned today by a Ukrainian journalist who lived under a real dictatorship in the USSR in 1991.

“People who think the Bush years have usurped freedoms and reversed decades of progress “don’t even begin to know what junta really means nor what it feels like to live in a dictatorship.”

“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.”

My husband and I were in the Ukraine in 1992, and we saw with our own eyes the practical fruit of “progressive” policy enacted by the former communist government. People who never smiled, empty store shelves, bread lines at 4 in the morning, because if you wait till 7 in the morning to get your bread, there won’t be any. Of course, you can’t make your own bread, because there is no flour on those empty store shelves. Broken down factories, plumbing, public works; everything broken down and disintegrating. The ladies room at the main public building did not even have any toilets in it — just open sewer pipes in the floor. There were warning signs posted by the river not to fish in the river, because the water was contaminated from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant meltdown, but people fished in the river anyway — they couldn’t get enough food otherwise. And no churches, no Christian bookstores, no Christian radio stations, no mention of Jesus Christ anywhere — because atheism was the state religion.

That is the utopia the “progressives” in this country want for us and for our children. With themselves excluded, of course, because the ruling class in such states never suffers the same fate as the serfs who are forced to support them.