Good Morning, Mr. Orwell

[salib]

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2006/08/14/007.html

Many American Jews wring their hands in anguish as the hope for peace in the Middle East wanes. Some people in Israel are agonizing over their nation's soul and there are pilots who have followed the military moral code when deliberately missing civilian targets in Lebanon. European leaders are calling on Israel to exercise restraint.

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Communism proposed a radical reorganization of society, accompanied by the physical suppression of propertied classes, to usher in nothing less than universal happiness. As former Soviet citizens crossed the border out of the country, they clung to the same ideological paradigm -- namely, the yearning for definitive solutions and a belief in simple, clear-cut and preferably bloody methods. Switching signs and becoming right-wingers was easy. Extremes of different types are a lot closer to each other than they are to the center.

Not surprisingly, many prominent American neoconservatives began life as Trotskyites -- except for Max Boot, who was born in the Soviet Union.

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Peace and prosperity have spread throughout Western Europe and beyond thanks to liberal democracy. For all the belligerent American rhetoric about exporting democracy, the European Union has done it successfully in its little corner of the world -- and certainly not at gunpoint.

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