Russian Pres. Endorses Obama in 2012

Perspectives Of A Russian Immigrant (No. 17)

By SVETLANA KUNIN
Posted 07/08/2011 06:09 PM ET
 

'I can tell you directly," Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said in a June 19 interview with the Financial Times, "I would like Barack Obama to be re-elected president of the United States maybe more than someone else. ... If another person becomes U.S. president, then he may have another course."

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A month earlier, Lech Walesa, former leader of Poland's Solidarity union, declined an invitation to meet with America's president. "It is tough to tell journalists what you would want to tell the president of a superpower," Walesa told Poland's public broadcaster, TVP. "But this time I will not tell him, I will not meet him, the meeting does not suit me."

Obama is the product of teachings that both Medvedev and Walesa know well. To anyone who has lived in a socialist country, the class-warfare theory in Obama's rhetoric sounds all too familiar.
Medvedev realizes that with the Obama administration, Russia has a good chance to return to its lost status of powerful and feared nation, while the U.S. will continue to slide in a weak and hopeless direction.
From 1919 to 1991, the Soviets provided monetary support to help leaders of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and other Soviet sympathizers spread socialist ideals and anti-American propaganda.

In 1993, after the collapse of the U.S.S.R., experts from the Library of Congress traveled to Moscow to review previously secret archives of the CPUSA, sent to the Soviet Union for safekeeping by party leaders. The records revealed an irrefutable link between Soviet intelligence and the CPUSA.

On Dec. 2, 1939, Jay Lovestone, a founder of the CPUSA who had broken with the Stalin regime, testified before the House Special Committee about communist activities in the U.S.: "You cannot fight Stalinism in this country, or elsewhere, by repression, by outlawing legislation, by declaring it a crime to be a member of it. When you do that, you supply them the most powerful sentiment — blood of martyrdom.
"Secondly, I think their ideas ought to be subjected to maximum sunlight. They represent a special type of character, and I am convinced, in the light of their own traditions and the light and the character of the labor movement, that if their ideas are subjected to the opening, scorching sunlight and sunshine, that they cannot flourish."

Today in the U.S., Lovestone's advice is forgotten. The investment by the old Soviet commissars, from Lenin and Stalin to Khrushchev and Brezhnev, in the socialist and anti-American propaganda inside the U.S. has paid off.
Proponents of a big and powerful government that regulates the lives of others are reminiscent of the Japanese soldiers who continued to fight years after their country surrendered to end World War II in 1945.

American liberals and progressives are oblivious to the fact that socialized economies either collapse (U.S.S.R.), go bankrupt (Europe) or keep people locked in poverty (Cuba, North Korea, African nations).
The so-called American elite, supporters of the Obama administration, have much in common with the Soviet "nomenclatura" — those within the U.S.S.R. and other Eastern European countries who held key administrative positions and regulated all aspects of people's lives but were themselves excluded from the rules.

Last January, on the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan's birthday, a statue was unveiled in Budapest by grateful Hungarians who honored his leadership in helping end communism.
And on July 1, Reagan was presented posthumously with the highest Czech state decoration, the Order of the White Lion, for his contribution to communism's demise in Central and Eastern Europe.

America's real elite are people who appreciate the uniqueness of a country where government's power is limited by its founding laws, and achievements are not limited by the destructive consequences of the socialist agenda.

Barack Obama is bringing to America what people in former socialist countries experienced and rejected.

Obama is reversing everything good about the U.S. — opportunities and prosperity inside and alliances with democracies outside.

That is why Lech Walesa, the legendary Polish anti-communist, declined to meet with Obama, and why Russia's Dmitry Medvedev is hoping for his re-election.

• Kunin lived in the Soviet Union until 1980, working as a civil engineer. She is now a retired software developer living in Connecticut. The other 16 articles she has written for IBD are available in the Special Series section of IBDeditorials.com.

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