The Left’s About-Face on USSR and Russia
By Tim Donner | Jul 18, 2018 The left has gone ballistic, crying foul, pounding the table and calling President Trump everything from a Russian puppet to a traitor after his summit with Vladimir Putin. Trump’s refusal to publicly condemn the Russian strongman — and sharp criticism of his own country for a relationship with Russia which he said has “never been worse†– has led to a sudden outbreak of patriotism on the left.
But leftists who make a habit of ridiculing traditional American patriotism have long since abandoned the high ground regarding Trump in general, and the Russian Federation in particular. Their loud objections are akin to the boy who cried wolf. They sound the alarm on everything Trump has said and done to the point where few outside the hard left even pay attention anymore.
And that is before we even consider the left’s warm embrace of Russia in the days of Soviet communist tyranny.
Truth be known, when Russia was the Soviet Union, the Russians were never viewed as an enemy by American progressives. The salad days of Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev were accepted, even embraced, in most quarters of the left as the collectivist wave of the future. Typical of the left’s betrayal was a letter written by powerful Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) to Soviet leader Yuri Andropov in 1983, urging him to pay no attention to the anti-Soviet rhetoric of then-President Ronald Reagan, promising that he and his fellow left-wingers would undermine Reagan at every turn, and recommending placing Soviet officials on American TV to “appeal directly to the American people about the peaceful intentions of the USSR.â€
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https://www.libertynation.com/the-lefts-about-face-on-ussr-and-russia/
