Another leftist hits the wall of reality
By Aussiegirl.
However, it took her a few years. Read Phyllis Chesler's amazing story of being an American-Jewish bride in Afghanistan in the 60's. Her experience of trying to tell her compatriots how lucky they were to live in America with all its freedoms echoes my own experiences with my own friends. None of them could understand my deep appreciation of the freedoms of this country, given the experiences of my own family under the Soviets and the Nazis. When I told a college classmate that I thought America was the greatest country on earth, she looked at me like I was insane and said she thought we were one of the most evil. No amount of explanations of what real evil was like in the form of repressive communism was enough to dissuade her or others like her. They always accused me of being "obsessed" with communism, and personally thought socialism was a superior form of government. It's frustrating to have to spend your life not talking about what you know to be true simply because people will just refuse to believe you. I've had people tell me to my face that they "didn't believe me" when I told them what my parents had experienced under communism. There are none so blind as those who will not see.
FrontPage magazine.com :: My Afghan Captivity by Phyllis Chesler
On December 21, 1961, when I returned from Afghanistan, I kissed the ground at New York City's Idlewild Airport. I weighed 90 pounds and had hepatitis. Although I would soon become active in the American civil rights, anti-Vietnam war, and feminist movements, what I had learned in Kabul rendered me immune to the Third World romanticism that infected so many American radicals. As a young bride in Afghanistan, I was an eyewitness to just how badly women are treated in the Muslim world. I was mistreated, too, but I survived. My "Western" feminism was forged in that most beautiful and treacherous of countries.
In 1962, when I returned to Bard College, I tried to tell my classmates how important it was that America had so many free libraries, so many movie theatres, bookstores, universities, unveiled women, freedom of movement on the streets, freedom to leave our families of origin if we so chose, freedom from arranged marriages—and from polygamy, too. This meant that as imperfect as America may be, it was still the land of opportunity and of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
My friends, future journalists, artists, physicians, lawyers, and intellectuals, wanted only to hear fancy Hollywood fairy tales, not reality. They wanted to know how many servants I had and whether I ever met the king. I had no way of communicating the horror, and the truth. My American friends could not or did not want to understand. As with my young college friends so long ago, today's leftists and progressives want to remain ignorant.
posted by Aussiegirl @ 2:59 PM
1 Comments:
Thanks, Aussiegirl, for publishing this amazing story. I agree that "there are none so blind as those who will not see", the important word here being "will": a deliberate, willful closing-off of the reasoning part of the brain in order to preserve the lie that gives some sort of comforting structure and identity. This article comes from FrontPage magazine.com--for me a must-read website every day, as is Ultima Thule--and over the last few years they have published several dozen symposia, hosted by Jamie Glazov, which deal with many interesting and vital topics, among them the Islamic threat to the West. On October 21 he brought together for a symposium--highly relevant, as it turns out, to this article--six former leftists, among them Chesler and Tammy Bruce, who had seen the light of truth and left the lemmings--as did David Horowitz, the founder of FrontPage magazine.com. Here is the link to this extremely interesting and pertinent symposium: Leaving the Political Faith. While I'm on the subject of these symposia, there's another one, also pertinent to this discussion, that Jamie Glazov hosted on August 6, 2002, shortly after the death of Alexander Ginzburg, the former leading Soviet dissident. He invited three other former Soviet dissidents together to discuss Ginzburg's life and what he represented. This symposium must be read to understand what the face of a real enemy looks like, and the seemingly impossible efforts necessary to combat it. Here is an exchange from the symposium that illustrates this: Question #9: When you look at the Soviet regime and you see the most monstrous system that ever existed in the history of man, it becomes fascinating and inspiring to know that there were brave souls, like Alexander Ginzburg and yourselves, who, knowing that they risked torture, death and life-imprisonment, still stood up alone to confront despotism. Personally, I have always been in awe of these heroes, wishing that I had the courage to be who they were (and are), and hoping that I too would have done what they did if I had been in their shoes. But talk is cheap, and I do not know, if I were really put into that hell, if I would have or could have been a dissident. What makes a dissident?
[Yuri] Yarim-Agaev: You cannot become a dissident and remain true to your position if you are prepared to make only some specific sacrifices. You have to be ready for the labor camps and/or death. There could be many other tests and temptations, which you cannot foresee from the outset. Some of them can be harder for you to endure personally than those which you envisioned about in the beginning. It may sound strange, but many of us experienced some more difficult tests in the free West or modern Russia than in the communist Soviet Union. I can say it about Ginzburg too. That explains why some dissidents who stood firm to the KGB and Soviet persecutions gave in to temptations of freer and easier times. Only a profound and deep philosophy, as well as strong principles, can help you to stay the course. Ginzburg had them and did not go astray. Here is the link to this symposium: Alexander Ginzburg and the Resistance to Totalitarian Evil, Then and Now. Having read this very important symposium, each of us can then ponder the question, as Jamie Glazov did, of whether or not we have it within us to become a dissident. Perhaps we are lucky that fate has not chosen to make us confront this question, and we haven't had to spend a good part of our lives in jail, rather than doing fun things and living normal lives. Surely this problem is one of the eternal problems of human life, with no general solution for everyone--but we are lucky that such men and women exist--and have always existed.
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