Socialism: The left has falsely demonized Tea Party protests in the U.S. as violent. But it ignores real violence in Greece, where leftists and anarchists have rioted and even murdered to fight cuts in their welfare state.

A week ago, the European Union and the U.S.-backed International Monetary Fund came through with $146 billion to bail out the biggest spendthrift in Europe. Greece didn't deserve it.

For years it lied about its finances and when the truth finally spilled out, its deficit as a share of GDP stood at 13.6% (vs. the 3% required of EU members) and the debt had swelled to 115%. Parties left and right were to blame, having spent wildly to feed a socialism so institutionalized it became an insatiable Minotaur.

But the rescue funds came anyway, courtesy of U.S. and European taxpayers, with the hope that Greece never again will have to suffer such humiliating treatment. Instead of thanking their benefactors, Greeks attacked the very capitalist countries that bailed them out.

Greece's powerful public sector unions, not the private sector, led the effort.

Defending their entitlements and privileges, they led 25,000 on a two-day general strike, blasting the EU and IMF austerity measures as an attack on their shiftless lifestyles. Thugs among them, many of them idle youths and students from the rich northern part of Athens, targeted the very private sector that pays their bills.

They went after Greece's tourism industry, one of its last sources of legitimate revenue, and trashed the capital, including areas that had been spruced up for the 2004 Olympic Games.

They pick-axed marble off buildings to hurl at police and sprayed graffiti on buildings, imagining themselves Che Guevara-style guerrillas. Worse, they firebombed a bank, murdering three innocent bank employees. To underline their barbarism, they then blocked firefighters attempting to rescue them.

Underscoring the violence, Greek President Karolos Papoulias said Wednesday that Greece had "reached the edge of the abyss."

This is real violence, none of which has ever been remotely visible at Tea Party protests in the U.S. Media pundits and politicians have attempted to smear these millions of Americans as violence prone, but now it's clear they are patriots, doing a public service by calling for the government to halt its socialist binge spending.

Unfortunately, Greece-style rage may be the future for America as public sector unions swell, and the Obama administration moves to nationalize one sector of the U.S. economy after another.

The people trying to halt this march toward socialism stand in stark contrast to those in Greece, which shows just how unreformable socialism is and just how inevitable Greece's crash was.

Far from being demonized, the Tea Party participants should be considered true heroes trying to save America from an inevitable slide into Greek-style socialism.