Schadenfreude really is great, isn’t it?
That is, the practice of rejoicing in someone else’s misery; in this case, the American left. And while it seems an unattractive trait, in this case it is totally warranted, and much rejoicing is called for.
The American people are brilliant, though a bit more patient than I would have liked. They gave a chance to a thoroughly undeserving fellow, in part because of racial appeal, but also because he seemed to carry a promise of something indefinable that appealed to people, so they went against their better judgment and elected him. Twice.
And he just about destroyed the country.
The statists he installed in power during his eight years didn’t understand that it was not about them, nor about their ideology, it was only about Obama himself. Egoist that he is, Obama understood that full well.
So they ran someone they thought was a shoe-in to continue in Obama’s innumerable lawless activities, further advancing his increasingly leftist ideology. Despite every kind of corrupt practice imaginable, the democrats couldn’t bring this one, the election of 2016, over the top. It was not just because of the terrible candidate, of the endless scandal, of the Obama policies coming to disastrous fruition in countless ways, it was because the American people saw what the left was espousing unobscured by a seemingly attractive frontman, and wanted no part of it.
You see, there are, much to the left’s shock and chagrin, lots more of us than there are of them. The tyranny of the leftist minority is no more, and America, basically, has saved itself.
Very few times in history has a nation so magnificently recovered from near destruction. Usually, when a nation moves in the direction that we did in 2008, it begins that nation’s irreversible decline.
Perhaps the most tragic, and far-reaching, example of this was what happened to Russia as a result of the Bolshevik Revolution at the beginning of the 20th Century. Never in history had the few caused so much damage to the many.
The Russian leader, Czar Nicholas II, was by all reports a good man, but an ineffectual leader of the millions of Russian subjects in the increasingly backward country. Things effectively came to a head in Russia following their disastrous entry into World War I. Following this folly, Russia was “in ruins, and ripe for revolution.”
Far-left activities Vladimir Lenin had been percolating abroad, fostering his communist views and how to impose them on his native country. As soon as he sensed the weakened condition that had overtaken Russia after war, revolution, famine, the defection of the imperial army, the abdication of the Czar, and the later failure of the provisional government established afterward, rushed home along with his few acolytes, took over and put his tyrannical regime in place.
Winning the temporary affection of the “workers,” i.e., the peasants, and subsequently, parts of the Russian military, the Bolsheviks quickly pressed their advantage forward, taking over increasing bits of the former Czarist government to solidify their power base, also by seizing “post and telegraph offices, electric works, railroad stations, and the state bank.”
At what was determined to be the perfect time, Lenin announced his “attempt to construct the socialist order in Russia. This new government was made up of Soviets, and led by the Bolsheviks, which ironically meant “the majority” in Russian.
Starting to sound familiar?
The people now under the thrall of the Bolsheviks yet continued to love their Czar, whom they always referred as “Papa.” The Bolshies, who were as vicious and violent as any out of control mob in the street, couldn’t take a chance on relinquishing any power back to the still-beloved Czar, so they installed the Czar, his wife Alexandra, and their five beautiful children, and murdered them by machine gun fire in a humble house in the unremarkable village of Yekaterinburg in 1918. Lenin and his fellow murderers managed to keep this horrendous crime a secret for quite some time, responding to the many queries as to the welfare of the royal family, that the “Czar and his family had been sent to a safe place.”
The burial place, holding their burned and mutilated bodies, was not found until 1989.
When the massacre of the Czar and his family became known, however, it created worldwide outrage.
This event, coupled with the increasing dissatisfaction with Bolshevik rule, caused yet another revolution to break out in Russia, this one between the “Reds,” the communists and supporters of Lenin, and the “Whites,” the former ruling classes of Russia. The Whites suffered a brutal defeat, and the Union of Soviet Socialists Republics was established as a result.
Thus, a vicious minority, espousing and implementing a brutal totalitarian ideology on a people who didn’t want it, created a new nation, ruling and terrorizing a citizenry for over 70 years.
It is estimated, though no one will ever know for certain, that a minimum of 62 million people were killed in this minority takeover of a warm and wonderful, though backward, people, and it took in large part the great effort of a triumvirate of brilliant and caring Westerners, anti-Communists all, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II, to bring an end to one of the most evil terrorist regimes of all time.
After largely and silently witnessing what the left has done to us for the last eight years, it is not a stretch to imagine what a 21st century version of the Bolshevik minority takeover of Russia had in store for us. It is perhaps only the American spirit that could have so thoroughly rejected the intolerant tyranny of the left, and that the truly great American people fought back against this vicious minority, and saved our nation.
Susan Smith brings an international perspective to her writing by having lived primarily in western Europe, mainly in Paris, France, and the U.S., primarily in Washington, D.C. She authored a weekly column for Human Events on politics with historical aspects. She also served as the Staff Director of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Children, Family, Drugs and Alcoholism, and Special Assistant to the first Ambassador of Afghanistan following the initial fall of the Taliban. Ms. Smith is a graduate of Wheeling Jesuit University and Georgetown University, as well as the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris, France, where she obtained her French language certification. Ms. Smith now makes her home in McLean, Va.