America's 'Useful Idiots' Are Just Like Those In USSR
By Svetlana Kunin
IBDEditorials.com
'We have overthrown capitalism," dictator Joseph Stalin declared in a February 1931 speech to the First All-Union Conference of Leading Personnel of Socialist Industry.
"We have seized power. We have built up a mighty socialist industry. We have transferred the middle peasants on to the path of socialism. We have already accomplished what is most important from the point of view of construction.
"Not much is left to do; to gain technique, to master science. And when this is achieved, our pace shall become such as we dare not even dream of at present."
Sixty years later, the world witnessed the collapse of one of the first socialist economies: that of the Soviet Union.
It's hard to believe that 100 years after the real-life test and failure of the Marxist theory of class warfare, collectivism and central planning, the American people are still buying into this tired ideology, with its superficial and primitive slogans.
Five years into the "we are all in this together" world of Barack Obama, low-income children continue to attend failing schools, bad teachers cannot be fired, jobs are disappearing, insurance premiums are rising, the IRS is oppressing opposition, the media repeat government talking points, government is snooping on citizens and investigating journalists, and the poor are stuck in poverty.
When Choice Is Lost
The United States is getting weaker on all fronts. The only power this administration is gaining is over the American citizens.
The tremendous efforts the Obama administration put into the Zimmerman trial to prove America is racist ended in fiasco. But citizens should not unwind with relief.
Soviet Communists successfully practiced ethnic incitement to redirect disillusion and anger. Prejudices are present all over the world. But when government is involved in a business of incitement of racism and chauvinism, people are in mortal danger.
Living in the USSR for the first 30 years of my life, I have met many people who didn't believe that socialist government was responsible for their misery. The founder of the USSR, Vladimir Lenin, called such people "rotten intelligentsia."
In the USSR, I didn't quite understand this characterization. Only when I emigrated to the USA did I understand the difference between freedom and dictatorship. It can be characterized by one word: "dignity."
When human beings are losing their ability to choose, they lose their dignity. The less choice they have, the more dignity they lose. Once frightened into submission and conformity, the "rotten intelligentsia" no longer represents any danger to the power of dictatorship.
Today in the U.S., I meet people who live in freedom and comfort but believe that the country should be transformed into a dictatorship of the government.
Full of slavish admiration for power, brainwashed by Marxist propaganda and ignorant of history, some of them, such as commentator Thomas Freidman, admire the Chinese system of government. Others, many of them from Hollywood, don't see any problems with the regimes in Cuba or Venezuela.
They demonize role models such as Clarence Thomas or Dr. Ben Carson, and glamorize Al Sharpton. They ignore independent thinkers such as Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams and other brilliant, accomplished individuals. Instead, they inflame racial grievances.
Assisting The Totalitarians
How ironic that the majority of Google employees, working for a company co-founded by the son of Soviet immigrants, support the transformation of free people into servants of the government.
The company's chairman, Eric Schmidt, understood that Barack Obama needed more time to subordinate American people and was therefore very active in the president's re-election. I guess Mr. Schmidt liked what he saw in North Korea.
American liberals and progressives do not pose any danger to totalitarian government; they are eager to assist in its oppression. I must give Lenin credit for understanding the psychology of such people.
Preoccupied with their personal image and status, indifferent to individual freedoms and void of any strong moral values, American progressives and liberals are the same people Lenin defined as "rotten intelligentsia."
Former card-carrying communists are the new Russian oligarchs. They can see through the Obama administration and the rest of American progressives. They were useful to Soviet Communists in the middle of last century; today, they are no longer useful.
Russians lived through all the slogans and actions of class warfare, fairness and equality. They were part of a centralized government and know too well how it works and how it ends.
• Kunin lived in the Soviet Union until 1980, working as a civil engineer. She is now a retired software developer living in Connecticut. This is the 30th column in her "Perspectives Of A Russian Immigrant" series, all of which can be found at ibdeditorials.com.