Wake Up & Smell the Parochial Clichés

In Conservative circles, it is common to hear or read that President Obama is a Socialist, a radical, a Fascist, an anti-capitalist, and/or anti-American. I have no problem with that and often refer to him and his in that light myself. Moreover, I consider him incredibly shallow intellectually, naive in thought, and inexperienced or willfully in denial of real world realities.

Writing a 3 part series in Pajamas Media, Oleg Atbashian reminds us of some basic historical realities that have long been ignored by the MSM, education, and the American elite. Atbashian has seen life from both sides. He has been in the U.S. since 1994, but lived most of his life in the Soviet Ukraine.

These three articles serve as a valuable reminder to things that we all know, but are lost in most of the political/ideological rhetoric that is exchanged among us.

The first in Atbashian's series is titled Obama Regresses to Cold War Mythology … and Switches Sides.

Excerpt:

The same people who chanted the mantra of “change” are having a hard time noticing the real change happening in the world today. Apparently, in their view, any change that contradicts the above template is either not happening, in which case it’s a fabrication of imperialist propaganda, or being forced on the world against its wishes, in which case the perpetrator can only be the criminal, capitalist cabal at the heart of American imperialism with its long and ruthless arm of the CIA. Any mention of oil or gas in this context becomes undeniable proof of this theory.

In this sense, Obama’s notion of “change” is not change at all, but rather a regression to a mythological past, which impedes the real change the world so desperately needs.

The second article is Obama’s Quest into the Magic World of Anti-American Mythology.

How many of you, upon hearing about an overthrow of a leftist dictator, instinctively thought of a CIA plot?

How many, at least at some point in your lives, believed that aggressive U.S. meddling ignited hot spots on the world map? That any pro-U.S. leader of a small country is probably a CIA puppet? That the American model of individual liberty and capitalism was being imposed on the people of Latin America, Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East against their will, and they might be happier with leftist tyrants?

These are the attitudes leftist propaganda is designed to create — but they may also be the result of an elitist presumption that people of the world cannot think for themselves and have no room in their souls for individual ambitions and achievements outside of what the government is giving them. Short of stating it explicitly, elitism implies that “the masses” are mindless, spiritless creatures without free will, always in need of the largesse of the state, and for their own good the state ought to nationalize the country’s resources in order to feed its subjects.

There is a reason why snobby elites on the Upper East Side of Manhattan generously donate to leftist causes and support leftist politicians. Snobs and radicals often act in accord because they are not opposites, as some believe, but rather spiritual cousins — equally despising “the bourgeois,” sharing a low view of humanity as herd animals, and sorting people not on their individual merits but by color, income, occupation, ethnicity, gender, and any other characteristic except the content of their minds. Such beliefs have often served as a veiled excuse for tyranny...

First of all, one cannot maintain intellectual and moral integrity while decrying U.S. presence in the hot spots of the Cold War, if one does not also mention the presence in the same hot spots of the Soviet espionage agencies, the KGB and the GRU. Their job was to initiate the hot spots and then fan the flames, spreading the fire to the rest of the world. The U.S. objectives were quite the opposite — to extinguish or at least to localize the fire — which made American involvement a necessary if often inadequate antidote.

To blame the hot spots on the U.S. presence would be as insane as to blame fires on firefighters because their trucks are always at the scene...

Having come here from the USSR — a country whose government invented this strategy and lived by it — I was astonished by the abundance of leftist propagandistic clichés in the American mainstream media. The exclusion of the Soviet connection in any discussion of America’s culpability is one of such clichés. It is a telltale sign of a prefabricated myth.

Where’s the “imperialist propaganda” when you need it? The leftist propaganda encountered so little resistance in the land of the alleged “capitalist conspiracy” that an airbrushed version of history has almost universally replaced the truth in the media, education, and entertainment. The intended result is the widespread notion of America’s guilt. One doesn’t even need to be a leftist anymore to believe in this country’s image as a violent empire controlled by greedy capitalist oligarchies that dictate its policies.

Altbashian's third article is A U.S. President, Raised on KGB Propaganda.

It would be absurd to presume that people of the world go to bed every night loving dictators and hating the United States. Obviously, the first conscious thing on the mind of a European, an African, or an Asian as they wake up in the morning is not how to survive another day of “America’s economic and cultural imperialism.” And since anti-Americanism is incompatible with common sense that guides our daily lives, people must be reminded of it every day to keep it alive. That is the burden that radical intellectuals have taken upon themselves, dispensing daily quotas of leftist clichés to the “unwashed masses” down below...

The fraudulent image of America as the “violent imperialist aggressor” was picked up by the Western media, disseminated through activist groups, and found its way into policy making, exemplified by John Kerry’s 1971 “Genghis Khan” testimony before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, where Kerry almost verbatim repeated the KGB fabrications, later recognized by Pacepa as his own subversive product...

This is how Pacepa [the highest ranking of a number of defectors from the Eastern Bloc intelligence agencies] remembers it:

During my last meeting with Andropov, he said, wisely, “now all we have to do is to keep the Vietnam-era anti-Americanism alive.” Andropov was a shrewd judge of human nature. He understood that in the end our original involvement would be forgotten, and our insinuations would take on a life of their own. He knew well that it was just the way human nature worked.

Andropov’s strategy must still be working if even today Barack Obama believes in these insinuations strongly enough to apologize before the world for the perceived history of “American arrogance.”

The Soviet Union may have self-destructed in 1991, but the seeds of intellectual deception it had planted gave such a bountiful crop that seventeen years later America has elected a leader who is guided by received notions designed to subdue and destroy this country. Apparently, the rumors about America’s victory in the Cold War appear to have been greatly exaggerated.

Please read these articles to remind yourself of the realities of the world before "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall."

(Oleg Abashian is also the instigator of The People's Cube.)

(H.T. Dissecting Leftism.)