Earlier this week, Milos Forman, Academy Award-winning director, wrote in The New York Times that he doesn’t “see much of a socialist in Mr. Obama” and that he doesn’t like “the word ‘socialist’ being tossed around by the likes of Rick Perry, Newt Gringrich, Rick Santorum, Sean Santorum, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and others.”
But before liberals get too happy with Mr. Forman’s article, they need to read it a little closer. Mr. Forman, you see, was born in Czechoslovakia in 1932 and did not leave that country until 1968, so when he talks about “socialism,” he isn’t talking about the soft socialism of Western Europe. He is talking about the socialism that he knew for twenty years:
“The critics cry, ‘Obamacare is socialism!’ They falsely equate Western European-style socialism, and its government provision of social insurance and health care, with Marxist-Leninist totalitarianism. It offends me, and cheapens the experience of millions who lived, and continue to live, under brutal forms of socialism. …
I don’t see much of a socialist in Mr. Obama or, thankfully, signs of that system in this great nation. Mr. Obama is accused of trying to expand the reach of government – into health care, financial regulation, the auto industry and so on. It’s fair to question whether the federal government should have expanded powers: America, to its credit, has debated this since its birth. But let’s be clear about how frightening socialism actually could be.
Marx believed that we could wipe out social inequities and Lenin tested those ideas on the Soviet Union. It was his dream to create a classless society. But reality set in, as it always does. And the results were devastating. Blood flowed through Russia’s streets. The Soviet elite usurped all privileges; sycophants were allowed some and the plebes none. The entire Eastern bloc, including Czechoslovakia, followed miserably.
I’m not sure Americans today appreciate quite how predatory socialism was. It was not – as Mr. Obama’s detractors suggest – merely a government so centralized and bloated that it hobbled private enterprise: it was a spoils system that killed off everything, all in the name of ‘social justice.’”
Mr. Forman is right. President Obama is not a socialist, and we should not accuse him of being one. But Mr. Forman is even more right when he reminds us of what real socialism can become and how important it is to make sure it does not ever come back.
We also need to be grateful for those of our leaders who understood the truth about the kind of socialism Mr. Forman experienced and who helped ensure our victory over it in the war that ended in Berlin on November 9, 1989.
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