Barry Rubin: Letter from Bratislava, Slovakia: Two States for Two Peoples

Letter from Bratislava, Slovakia:
Two States for Two Peoples

By Barry Rubin

A Czech friend, who has achieved considerable success in life since then, reminded me that for several years he was a window-washer under the Communist regime. The government of the proletariat believed that the worst thing it could do to people who had dissented was to send them into the proletariat. During that period, he was very active in the democratic opposition.

Since he spoke good English, he was often asked by his comrades (probably not the right word) in the anti-Communist struggle for freedom to be the guide for visiting Western sympathizers. Often, he recounts, these were Western leftists eager to explain to those Czechs engaged in the battle for liberty that Marxian socialism was really a great idea, they just needed to make a few adjustments.

Imagine if you will, people who had grown up in an ideological dictatorship that sent people to prison for making the wrong joke being lectured by a bunch of spoiled, well-dressed Western intellectuals on the splendor of their prison.

That’s a familiar image today, with many gays, self-identified feminists, Jewish leftists, and leftists in general (including those pretending to be liberals) extolling ideologies and systems that would pound them into the ground. Who are they, for example, to criticize the treatment of women as one step above cattle since after all that’s the local custom? And, they continue, the women really like it! Yesterday’s reactionary racist chauvinism is today’s multicultural progressivism!

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Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). His latest book is Israel: An Introduction, to be published by Yale University Press in January 2012. You can read more of Barry Rubin's posts at Rubin Reports, and now on his new blog, Rubin Reports, on Pajamas Media

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