Painting the White House Red

January 16, 2006 Issue
Copyright © 2006 The American Conservative

Radical globalist ideology has possessed the occupant of the Oval Office and is bringing about the revolution Communism never could.

By John Laughland

It is often overlooked that George Orwell’s Animal Farm predicted not only the horrors of communism but also the end of the Cold War. At the end of the fable, the farmer, who symbolizes the capitalist West, returns to the farm and plays cards with the pigs, who symbolize communism. The shivering creatures outside, symbolizing ordinary people, “looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

We normally think of the end of the Cold War as having marked the unambiguous victory of capitalism over communism. But has Orwell’s prediction proved right, and has there instead been a convergence of the two? We hear much about how former communist states are Westernizing, but has this process been bought with the price of our own subjection to what used to be communist ideals?

Take revolution, for instance, a key Marxist concept. Fifteen years ago, it still carried—at least for conservatives—the negative connotations of “Bolshevik,” “sexual,” and “French.” Now, by contrast, George W. Bush has elevated the promotion of “a global democratic revolution” to the central goal of U.S. foreign policy. In his second inaugural speech, he announced nothing less than a program of political emancipation for the whole planet—he said that America was pursuing “the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” Trotsky would have been proud.

Read more in the American Conservative