Posted on 08/24/2011 4:48:54 PM PDT by Qbert
The oddball media slander of the tea party, now routine, shows more than a little calculation along a rather perilous historical line.
In the 1920s, in advance of the collectivization of private farms, Soviet leadership stigmatized as "class enemies" a productive set of landowners known as "kulaks."
[Snip]
In the beginning, the Soviets attempted to turn peasant farmers against the kulaks by denouncing them, in Mr. Lenin's illiberal words, as "bloodsuckers, vampires, plunderers of the people and profiteers, who fatten on famine."
[Snip]
Before he was through, Stalin and his progressive pals killed off at least 5 million of these people either though starvation, ruthless deportation or outright murder.
If you think the analogy between tea party and kulak a bit extreme, allow me to share a few recent quotes, the first from Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Maureen Dowd of the New York Times (whose ace reporter, Walter Duranty, covered up Stalin's terror-famine and won a Pulitzer for it):
"Tea Party budget-slashers were like cannibals, eating their own party and leaders alive. They were like vampires, draining the country's reputation, credit rating and compassion."
[Snip]
Bloomberg columnist Margaret Carlson weighed in as well, her mangled prose not quite obscuring her unhinged contempt:
"There's a nihilist caucus which is, 'Listen, we want to burn the place down.' I mean, they're not, they've strapped explosives to the Capitol and they think they are immune from it."
Steven Rattner, MSNBC's economic analyst, extended the jihadi metaphor on Morning Joe:
"It's like a form of economic terrorism. I imagine these tea party guys are, like, strapped with dynamite, standing in the middle of Times Square at rush hour and saying, 'Either you do it my way, or we're going to blow you up, ourselves up, and the whole country up with us.'"
(Excerpt) Read more at wnd.com ...
These kulaks have guns. Come and get us, Red Guards!
LOL
Mark
They are going with a talking point in a time when polls say people favor spending cuts over Tax increases. This talking point is a continuation of the same line that failed in 2010.
To my knowledge, the kulaks were hardly wealthy. {or not?} They simply had a little more than the useful idiots who had nothing.
History teaches us that evil bastards know how to play “divide and conquer”.
Danged straight. And we aren't afraid to use them.
I often think of my uncle, a Navy medic in WW2, he was at Omaha beach on D-Day. He served in a MASH unit in Korea. He served in Vietnam. For his names' sake, I will NOT let the United States sink into communism without a fight.
Yep. And they had every opportunity to raise taxes for the two years that they controlled Congress and the presidency if they wanted to do so.
Most people see through the lame charade.
Obamacare is the method for killing off the Tea Party Kulaks.
All they have to do is deny care to those identified as being in opposition to the regime.
If there’s one Democrat with a conscience, they will let a journalist know that there is an Enemies List that is tied to the Obamacare programs.
I like that analogy. I was thinking of the Jews in Nazi Germany, myself. Every political huckster needs an enemy.
The greatest crimes by far are those perpetrated by governments, under the guise of protecting the people.
"To my knowledge, the kulaks were hardly wealthy. {or not?} They simply had a little more than the useful idiots who had nothing."
"Many were not wealthier, only more industrious..."
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080303065735AAs9sAL
“Kill the kulaks! They’re horders and wreckers!”
Everything old is new again.
The Democrats are the Nazis calling for the extermination of Tea Party Jews
That’s funny. I made this historical reference in detail several times on FR in the past couple of weeks.
I guess it’s an obvious one.
Or, the writer reads FR. :-)
Well, kulaks vote and write checks that keep dumb $hxx polticians in office....
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
I read some quotations from various Soviet officials about the Kulaks, and if you substitute “Tea Party member” for that group, it’s downright spooky how similar the rhetoric is to what the American leftists are saying today. The same class warfare, the same isolating and demonizing of targets like the Soviets...
(Of course the German National Socialists had the same hatred for Jewish capitalists, as well.)
bm
Actually I think a better comparison can be made with government employees. Tea party members are political activists, not a social/occupational group. Like government employees today, kulaks were vilified simply on the basis of their occupation, not for their political activism. They lived their lives in good faith and were castigated for political purposes. I’m not saying that there aren’t abuses and waste in the public sector, or that all public sector workers are blameless, but the broad brush attacks on civil servants remind me of the outlandish charges leveled against the kulaks during the period of collectivism.
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