Happy Warrior
Back to the USSR
52 | http://www.nationalreview.com MARCH 23 , 2020I
Tis in no way to disparage the child-rearing efforts
of my beloved parents to note that the greatest gift
they ever got me was obtained two years before I was
even born. In the summer of 1968, my parents—both
in their 20s, both with secure jobs, both beneficiaries of
“free” health care, both graduates of top-flight Commu -
nist literacy programs—packed one bag each, left the
small apartment they shared with relatives in Budapest,
and boarded a train headed for Rome. They wouldn’t
return to visit Hungary until 1990, by which time they
were fully Americanized.
The summer my mom and dad defected to the United
States, the Soviet Union was busy crushing the aspira-
tions of Czechoslovakian reformers by sending 600,000
Warsaw Pact troops and tanks to Prague to end a student
uprising. The scene was, no doubt, familiar to anyone
who’d witnessed the Soviet crushing of Hungary’s demo-
cratic aspirations in 1956 or the crushing of East Ger -
many’s democratic aspirations in 1953. If there was one
thing Commies were able to do with ruthless efficiency,it
was crush dissent.
The summer that my parents spared me a life in some
soul-sucking collectivist factory—and Hungary wasn’t
the worst nation in the Eastern Bloc at the time; there
were no mass arrests, no gulags, just economic inertia
and a tedious low-grade authoritarianism—Bernie
Sanders was role-playing a Trotskyite in his class war
against the Lumpenproletariatand kulaks of Burling -
ton, Vt.
There’s no record of the future mayor of that prosperous
city ever defending the brave men and women of the
Prague Spring—why would he, after all?—though he did
find the time to publicly admire the Vietcong, a group
responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Ameri -
cans. Bernie would make apologizing for Commu nists a
lifelong endeavor. You’ll forgive me if I takeit personally.
My father, a year younger than Bernie, was born two
years before the Nazi deportation of the Jews of Hungary
got into full swing. His father would never return. His
mother, a seamstress with a knack for staying alive,
would take to Budapest’s perilous streets to welcome
the Red Army as liberators. Soon enough the Soviets
would teach Jews a thing or two about anti-Semitism
themselves—not only on the home front, but in bank -
rolling the most virulent and indefatigable post-war ene-
mies of the Jewish people.
Bernie, who didn’t have my grandmother’s excuse to
embrace Communists, never offered a word of support for
the thousands of Jews trapped in the Soviet Union, not
even on his voyage de nocesas a 47-year-old to the CCCP.
If anyone is confused about how Marxists view “organs of
bourgeois reaction”—especially the ones they grew up
in—Bernie’s tapping of Linda Sarsour and Ilhan Omar as
campaign surrogates offers a good clue.Anyway, by 1969, my father, trained as a chemist but
unable to find work in that field, began his new life pack-
ing bags in a warehouse while my pregnant mother
assembled beads for which she was paid by the bracelet.
But not for long. I doubt either of them was aware that in
the United States a red-diaper baby could move to New
England and become a professional revolutionary, never
having to really work a day in his life. And I’m positive
that the prospect of such a life would have chafed their
newly adopted sensibilities.
I’ve never met anyone who has escaped Communism—
not from Cuba or China or Hungary or Ethiopia—who had
any interest in living on the dole. Now, perhaps not every-
one is as hard-working or as lucky as my parents—and,
of course, chance plays its part in everyone’s life. But
when socialists such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez mock
and dismiss the notion of Americans’ “lifting themselves
up by a bootstrap,” they are no longer pressing some lib-
eral case for equality, they are embracing an un-American
notion. They are trolling for victims. Victims of religion.
Of industry. Of race. Of circumstance. Of history. Once
socialists have convinced an entire generation they’re
victims, there is no way back.
Fortunately, my emotional detestation of collectivism
comports perfectly with my intellectual detestation of
Bernie’s movement. Capitalism saves the victims that
socialism produces. Nothing achieved under socialism
can’t be achieved under capitalism—other than perhaps
inducing perfectly healthy people from a beautiful island to
get on rickety homemade rafts and try to traverse the
Caribbean to move to Florida. And yet, here we are. Again.
William F. Buckley Jr., this magazine’s founder, had
typical prescience in a 1962 debate with novelist Norman
Mailer, who, like Bernie, was a Castro apologist. Buckley
noted that while Americans didn’t know how to deal with
Communist dictators, “there is a much bigger problem:
We don’t know how to deal with Harvard University. If
Harvard couldn’t spot Castro for what he is and show us
how to cope with him, who can?” The “dulled... moral
and intellectual reflexes” of our elites, Buckley said, are
what should scare us most.
The way we treat Bernie, as a crank or well-meaning
left-winger, is itself a way to normalize Marxism—“demo-
cratic socialism,” in this iteration. We would never treat
any other similarly destructive ideology with the same
nonchalance. For me, it’s nearly unfathomable to accept
that my parents—and thousands of others who gave up
their friends and families to come to this meritocratic
nation—would ever have as their president a socialist who
praised the Soviet Union.
Happy warriors shouldn’t take politics too personally.
When it comes to Marxists, and I have no doubt Bernie
is one, I make an exception. I take history too seriously
not to.BY DAVID HARSANYI
backpage - FINAL_QXP-1127940387.qxp 3/4/2020 3:09 PM Page 52
UPLOADED BY "What's News" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws