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editorial

George W. Bush breathes new life into the Stalin legacy

Who'd have ever thought it?

A gulag of secret prisons across Central Asia and Eastern Europe, where torture is practiced.

Rampant distortion of history, and an official policy of lies.

The betrayal of loyal public servants for petty public reasons.

Sounds like the regime that Josef Stalin ran.

Of course, there are differences.

The people who ended up in Stalin's gulag tended to be a wide range of political “undesirables,” but more than anything dissident or disgraced communists, and especially those who might become rivals of Stalin. The residents of Bush's gulag are Muslims, some of whom were never enemies of the United States but got rounded up by mistake.

Typical of Stalin's distortion of history was the Sergei Eisenstein film version of “Ten Days that Shook the World,” where Stalin is shown as managing the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and Trotsky is portrayed as bewildered by it all. (The reality was the Trotsky was head of the Soviet Military Committee and thus the principal organizer of the coup, and went on to found the Red Army that won the ensuing civil war, while on the day of the revolution Stalin was the editor of Pravda and went on to be Lenin's affirmative action guy in the party's Organizational Bureau, from whence he appointed the people who cleared his path to power.) Typical of Bush's distortion of history is the notion that he and Karl Rove have created that George W. Bush, the guy who got out of Vietnam by a cushy Air National Guard assignment from which he was absent without leave for the last year, is a big war hero; while besmirching the military records of the likes of of McCain, who spent years as a prisoner of war, John Kerry, who served in the Navy in Vietnam, and Max Cleland, who left part of his body behind in that conflict.

Stalin's fantasy weaving reached its peak in the bizarre plots that were alleged in the purge trials of the 1930s. Bush's big achievements in that category are the tall tales about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction and convincing a large part of the American public that Iraq had something to do with the September 11, 2001 al-Qaeda attacks on the United States.

Stalin had many a spouse of a dissident, and many a public servant with an unblemished record on the job, taken away. The Bush administration just outs CIA undercover agents whose spouses point out lies and ruins the careers of military officers who give sound advice the the president doesn't want to hear.

Stalin spoke on behalf of the workers and peasants, even if he was out mainly for himself. Bush famously identifies his base as “the haves and the have mores.”

And Stalin, though he might have liked to rule the world, got as far as he safely thought he could go and then threw an iron curtain around his empire, while Bush really does think that he can rule the world and is leading the United States into conflicts everywhere.

Bear in mind...

A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.

Jane Austen

The way to govern well is to employ honorable men, even though they are enemies.

Simón Bolívar

One of the ways of helping to destroy a people is to tell them that they don't have a history, that they have no roots.

Desmond Tutu