If you lean politically left, or are undecided, and particularly if you are younger than 50 years of age, PLEASE read this.

Too many people think that freedom, opportunity and a variety of
choices are ever-present features of life in the U.S. — that fundamental
transformation of America will not affect accustomed standards.

When we lived in the U.S.S.R., locked away from the world, kept from
traveling abroad and surrounded by government-controlled sources of
information, we couldn't imagine what kind of life people had on the
outside. Simple things, like tomatoes in stores in winter, seemed
improbable.

When we immigrated to the U.S., I realized that most of what we were
taught about capitalism was false. I was surprised how uninformed and
downright clueless Americans were regarding communist ideology and
history.

The platitudes of communist propaganda that were all around me in the
Soviet Union were accepted as something new and wonderful by
well-meaning people in the U.S. While Soviet citizens were excluded from
the external world by their government, liberal/progressives in the
"free world" were insulated from reality.

In the 1930s, when communists were starving the Russian people with
regulations on farmers, New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty
reported, "Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or
malignant propaganda." For his stories, Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize.

Through the late 1950s, liberal newspapers in America ignored stories
about work prison camps in the Soviet Union. But more than 20 million
people accused of opposition to centralized government perished.

It's stunning for an immigrant from a socialist country to hear in
the speeches of Democratic Party leaders platitudes taught in socialist
countries. Even more stunning is how they resonate with people born in
the free world.

At the end of 19th century and the beginning of 20th calls for
"equality," "fairness," "sacrifices for collective good" and "social
justice" aroused communist revolutionaries in Russia and ushered in the
U.S.S.R. They demonized and obliterated any religion that interfered
with government authority. They erased individualism and
entrepreneurship from society. Animosity among ethnic groups was
insidiously cultivated.

In the U.S., fascism and socialism are classified at the opposite
ends of the political spectrum; in reality, these two ideologies have a
lot in common.

Free market capitalism, which created a large, prosperous middle class
in America, and government-centered ideologies have nothing in common.

The same reader who commented on my July article continued: "Or is
the grim description of life in the former Soviet Union meant to paint
Obama and his party as communists/socialists/fellow travelers bent on
destroying America and all it stands for?"

Yes, that's exactly what I mean — and Obama's rhetoric, actions and results confirm this point.

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