SO WERE DEMOCRATS RIGHT TO OPPOSE THE CONTRAS?:

Painting the White House Red: Radical globalist ideology has possessed the occupant of the Oval Office and is bringing about the revolution Communism never could. (John Laughland, January 16, 2006, The American Conservative)

We hear much about how former communist states are Westernizing, but has this process been bought with the price of our own subjection to what used to be communist ideals?

Take revolution, for instance, a key Marxist concept. Fifteen years ago, it still carried—at least for conservatives—the negative connotations of “Bolshevik,” “sexual,” and “French.” Now, by contrast, George W. Bush has elevated the promotion of “a global democratic revolution” to the central goal of U.S. foreign policy. In his second inaugural speech, he announced nothing less than a program of political emancipation for the whole planet—he said that America was pursuing “the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” Trotsky would have been proud.

Revolution has now become a completely positive word in the Western political lexicon. Recent years have seen a spate of “people power” revolutions, especially in Eastern Europe. Perhaps authoritarian regimes, rather like the walls of Jericho, really are brought tumbling down by the chanting of a John Lennon song, but it often turns out that things were not as spontaneous as was claimed at the time. In the case of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine last year, it is now a matter of public record that the U.S. poured huge sums into the campaign of Viktor Yushchenko and that the Ukrainian KGB was also heavily involved on the Americans’ side, playing a key role in stage-managing the whole charade. Nonetheless, the myth of revolution now wields such a strong hold over the Western mind that, with the compulsiveness of children who beg to be retold the same story, we regularly accept these fairy tales at face value.

Prior to the fall of communism, “revolution” and “people power” were considered just leftish propaganda. We dismissed the Soviet regime’s appeal to its own founding event as grotesque political kitsch, masking the sinister reality of power machinations behind the scenes. Now we seem to have become more naïve and have started to take two-dimensional archetypes about “the people” seriously. This is because the West has fallen in love with the myth of revolution. Chairman Mao once said, “Marxism consists of a thousand truths but they all boil down to one sentence: ‘It is right to rebel.’” That sentiment now forms a central tenet of Western political orthodoxy and U.S. foreign policy.

One hesitates to call it logic, but applying what passes these days for the reasoning of the far Right you'd think most of them must have opposed Ronald Reagan and the revolution he led against Communism. Of course, none of them did.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 15, 2006 12:11 PM