Real Tyranny

Hysterical liberals have taken to calling President Trump a tyrant.  They compare him with Adolf Hitler and warn us that he is in the process of destroying our democracy.  Unless we stop him—and stop him now—our tradition of freedom and self-government will soon be no more.

So what evidence do they adduce to substantiate this dire prediction?  Well look at his executive order temporarily barring immigrants from six primarily Muslim nations.  This cruelly deprives our universities of hundreds of graduate students essential to on-going research.

If that were not enough, he ordered I.C.E. to deport thousands of criminal illegal aliens.  The man has the temerity to demand that the law be enforced—even though this will tear millions of loving families apart.  As everyone knows, thieves and felons make excellent family members.

Trump is so misguided—so despotic—that he has threated sanctuary cities with losing federal funds if they do not obey laws they are pledged to respect.  Some of his officials even suggest that they might eventually arrest officials who flout the law.  Could anything be more vile?

The answer is a resounding—Yes!  I have recently been reading Jung Chang’s book: Mao: The Unknown Story.  This man was a real tyrant.  So far as I can tell, he might have been the most despicable human being to tread our planet during a century crowded with dictators.

Liberals love the Hitler slur.  They know he was a mass murderer; hence in their impoverished imagination they can think of no worse epithet to hurl at Trump.  Mao’s name seldom comes up because he was a communist and therefore is presumed to have some redeeming qualities.

Nothing could be farther from the truth.  Mao was a monster.  Even before the tens of millions of deaths he visited on China during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, his hands were soaked in blood.  Mao’s rise to power was strewn with dead rivals and mass starvation.

This was a man who personally enjoyed torturing his victims.  He reveled in causing excruciating pain in order to dissuade others from resisting his authority.  Here was a man who routinely broke his promises, invented crimes his competitors did not commit, and even allowed his wives and children to experience malnutrition and violent execution.

Here was a man who threw his soldiers into battles he knew they could not win so that he could outmaneuver those who challenged his power.  During the Long March this meant that he took an army of eighty thousand and reduced it to four thousand—for no military gain.  He even had the audacity to brag of victories in battles that never took place.

Many young recruits joined the Red Army lured by the promise of social equality.  Then, during the Long March, they had to crawl on their knees over stony mountains garbed only in rags, while Mao was carried in a litter, wore well-kept uniforms, and slept in fine residences.

Collectivists, like all good left-wingers, make promises they cannot keep.  Obama’s were merely the latest incarnation of guarantees intended to mobilize support from naïve idealists.  He, and his ilk, are determined to amass ever more power in governments they control.  This was also true of Mao, Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot.

Progressives insist that conservatives are bloodthirsty demagogues, whereas the reverse is often true.  In fact, Trump is trying to reduce the size of the federal government.  He is likewise eliminating thousands of onerous regulations and seeking to put more money into the hands of ordinary citizens.  Where is the despotism in this?

At the moment, Democrats are wildly seeking to prove a non-existent conspiracy between Trump and the Russians.  At the same time, they are attempting to cover-up their own power grabs during Obama’s tenure.  As they see it, they are choirboys standing in the way of a mean-spirited autocrat.

Once upon a time, most Americans knew that communism equaled tyranny.  They also loathed socialism on the grounds that it threatened freedom.  Today, the world has been stood on its head.  Millions believe that more government control ensures liberty, whereas less is a menace to their welfare.  This is fantasy on stilts.

Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.

Professor of Sociology

Kennesaw State University