Communism/pseudo-liberalism is a highly infectious, socially communicable disease manifested as a ruthless ideology. Identifying itself with different labels such as progressive , new leftist, socialist, it is extremely adaptable to changing social conditions and it functions to wreck havoc on social life. Because of its highly seductive facade of idealism, young people are especially prone to be infected by it. Once the infection takes hold of the individual, it largely determines his or her course of life and thinking.
In rare cases, the individual recovers from the disease. When this happens, exposure to communism confers a kind of immunity and resistance to it. This first-hand personal experience with communism provides a clearer sense of its destructiveness and how the disease operates than is understood by those who have not been infected by it. One has a feeling from the writing of recovered communists that their anti-communism comes from their gut and not only from their intellect as it often does in anti-communists who were not previously infected. The recovered ones seem to have a deeper sense of the true source of the disease. Some current examples of these survivors are David Horowitz and Norman Podhoretz although there are many others.
For example, comparing Obama to communists of the past, Podhoretz writes, “… whereas the communists had in their delusional vision of the Soviet Union a model of the kind of society that would replace the one they were bent on destroying, the new leftists only knew what they were against: America, or Amerika as they spelled it to suggest its kinship to Nazi Germany. Thanks, however, to the unmaking of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian nightmare, they did not know what they were for. Yet once they had pulled off the incredible feat of taking over the Democratic Party … they dropped the vain hope of a revolution, and in the social democratic system most fully developed in Sweden found an alternative to American capitalism that had a realistic possibility of being achieved through gradual political reform… It was only with the advent of Barack Obama that the leftists at long last succeeded in nominating one of their own.” (The Wall Street Journal August 13-14, 2011).
What is the difference in the approach of Obama’s anti-communist critics between those who are recovered anti-communists and those who did not go through the process of “immunization”? Most conservatives who are not recovered anti-communists appear to be stuck in the social facade of rationalism. Their opposition to Obama’s policies are exclusively based on their reasoning powers. However, although Obama’s political agenda is expressed from the superficial layer, it originates almost entirely from the destructive middle layer of his pseudo-liberal character structure. This is why reason cannot touch it. Ex-communist critics of Obama, on the other hand, because of their past exposure to the disease, have a better sense of the destructive source of his political policies and this perspective is more effective in recognizing and exposing who Mr. Obama really is to the public.
Charles Konia, M.D. 