Stalin, Muhammad and Obama

Jan. 22, 2015: President Obama walks to board Air Force One at Forbes Field Airport in Topeka, Kansas, en route to Washington, after speaking at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

Pundits agonize over President Obama’s resistance to calling Islamist terror “Islamist terror.” How can he not see the obvious? How can he ignore the overwhelming and ever-increasing evidence? How can he insist that his subordinates continue their buffoonish insistence that Islamist terror has nothing to do with Islam and that they—secularized Christians and non-observant Jews—know Islam’s character better than Muslims themselves?

President Obama and his commissars fit the longstanding pattern of behavior (insistence, denial, castigation) that the hard left has embraced for generations.

It’s easy. President Obama and his commissars fit the longstanding pattern of behavior (insistence, denial, castigation) that the hard left has embraced for generations. In the mid-20th century, leftists, bereft of God and desperate for a new faith, insisted for decade after decade that Comrade Stalin was a paragon of political virtues and that the Soviet Union was Utopia. All reports of purges, terror, man-made famines and the Gulag were fabrications of capitalists and their servants.

President Obama and his commissars fit the longstanding pattern of behavior (insistence, denial, castigation) that the hard left has embraced for generations.

Even after Premier Khrushchev revealed Stalin’s crimes to the world, hardcore leftists excused or ignored the truth, insisting still that Red terror wasn’t terror and that Communism was a movement (religion?) of peace and progress, that humankind’s hope still waited in the east. Only the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet collapse briefly sobered a few on the extreme left—the milieu in which our president spent his youth and pre-presidency adulthood.

But leftists need a utopia, a fantasy heaven on earth, to comfort them and to give their lives purpose. Robbed of the Soviet dream, the forlorn left was in need of a new redeemer.

Welcome, Comrade Usama! The left—and young Barack Obama -- already saw Islam as an oppressed religion, the noble faith of the wretched of the earth, while casting Christianity and Judaism in the role once occupied by capitalist imperialists: that of oppressors. Bin Laden gave the left a new torch to carry. While it remained necessary to condemn terrorism in public, the left simultaneously justified it in a globalized version of the Marxist construct of a class struggle.

Really, didn’t American deserve 9/11?

Islamism fit the left like a tailored glove. Just as Western Reds didn’t need to endure life in the Soviet Union (“Pass the foie gras, Comrade!”), so today’s leftwing cadres need not actually live in the Middle East or North Africa. From the comfort of Cambridge or the splendor of California’s coast, they can rationalize radical Islam, a creed that would, if imported here, exterminate them as surely as Comrade Stalin would have purged the old American left.

The staff of Charlie Hebdo? Stalin would have killed those pranksters, too. The only difference is that “Uncle Joe” would have gotten them all.

When you take the long view, it’s disheartening (to put it mildly) that the Western left simply cannot live without dreaming of an impossible utopia to be imposed by one ideology or another on the rest of us. Radical Islam? It’s a “religion of peace.” Just as Soviet Communism was an ideology of peace, justice and brotherhood.

So President Obama’s just playing by the time-honored rules, substituting Muhammad for Josef Stalin or Mao: Never criticize the Party. Ignore the facts. If the facts can’t be ignored, deny or twist them. No matter what, stick to the script (let them laugh for now, they’ll see soon enough...). And anyone who strays one inch must be neutralized, whether as a Trotskyist yesteryear or slandered as an Islamophobe today.

The left’s existential bleakness and its resultant need to embrace horrid schemes for man-made heavens on earth form a peerless argument for humankind’s need for religion. In the absence of belief there is only a desert of the soul. And Red terror gives way to Islamist terror. The Communist International cedes pride of place to the global caliphate. Comrade Stalin fades into Comrade Muhammad.

Truth is malleable. Facts are nuisances to be exterminated, along with troublesome people. Middle-class notions of freedom must be shouted down. The rule of the intellectuals must be imposed. Never, ever criticize the cause. Deny everything. Never forget that Islam’s a religion of peace.

The future is ours, Comrades.