May Day

A great day for remembrance. If you don't know why, it's because we won that long war too. (And most of the battles were fought in Korea and Vietnam.)

Don't miss this.

Update: Via Hit and Run, more ghosts of May Day past from Moscow - from Life Magazine. Note the captions - just a hint of the modern embrace of the Orwellian nightmare. Forty five years later and the subtle re-writing of history is in full swing.

Red Tide: The Soviet army on the march through Moscow on May Day 1959. The Cold War was at its height, and leaders in both Washington and Moscow were preparing for an inevitable showdown.

Russia prided itself on its industrial capacity to build everything from motorbikes to spacecraft.

You can almost feel the joyful exuberence of these young gymnasts:

The caption reads:

Young women participate in a mass gymnastic routine at the 1959 celebrations. The mass choreography so popular at such events inadvertently reflected some of the strictures of Soviet life.

Next:

Tanks roll through Moscow during the 1963 May Day parade. Despite the martial pose, the previous year's Cuban missile crisis had confronted both sides with the horror of a potential nuclear clash, and had prompted them to begin managing their conflict to avoid war.

Vigilance: Soviet Military personnel keep an eye on the crowd at the 1947 May Day celebrations in Moscow's Red Square

How do you tell a Communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin.
-- Ronald Reagan

There's been some effort from certain quarters recently to downplay the significance of the threat posed by communism in decades past. In hindsight, or so the new narrative goes, it wasn't such a threat after all. (See here and here.) To argue otherwise now is to risk ridicule, or accusations of bigotry, or at least of being non-PC. A few wars later, a few million dead, and communism collapsed. Americans were silly to feel threatened - but Americans are ignorant and paranoid, and that's the same convenient narrative used to explain why we are over reacting to the perceived threat from Islamic terrorism today. Those of superior intellect know they've nothing to fear.

Pay no attention to the Left's involvement in cartoon riots in Denmark, or elsewhere in the world. Don't look too closely at this. Or this. And certainly not this.

Two harmless, impotent forces combined are still a harmless, impotent force, right?

Or is it three? Lou Dobbs:

Most of the mainstream media has been absolutely co-opted by the open borders and illegal immigration advocates. I'm not opposed to demonstrations and protests of any kind, even by those who are not citizens of this country, because one way or another, demonstrations and protests enrich and invigorate the national debate and raise the public consciousness of truth.

But only one newspaper, to its credit, reported that illegal aliens and their supporters' boycott of the national economy on the First of May is clear evidence that radical elements have seized control of the movement. The Washington Post, alone among national papers, reported that ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) has become an active promoter of the national boycott.

Some illegal immigration and open borders activists in the Hispanic community are deeply concerned about the involvement of the left-wing radical group. But others, like Juan Jose Gutierrez, whom I've interviewed a number of times over the past several months, manages to be both director of Latino Movement USA and a representative of ANSWER.

As Gutierrez told us on my show, "The time has come...where we need to stand up and make a statement. We need to do what the American people did when they pulled away from the British crown. And I am sure that back in those days many people were concerned that was radical action."

Just how significant is the impact of leftists within the illegal immigration movement? It is no accident that they chose May 1 as their day of demonstration and boycott. It is the worldwide day of commemorative demonstrations by various socialist, communist, and even anarchic organizations.

People are talking about backlash, and how these rallies are counterproductive. That's probably right, but I think that's what the A.N.S.W.E.R. folks are hoping for. Right now you have lots of immigrants who want to be part of America. The A.N.S.W.E.R. people have been stoking these demonstrations not because they want to help illegal immigrants, but because they hope to provoke a backlash that will make them angry at America instead. They don't have short-term ameliorative political goals -- they want shock troops for the revolution.

Or is that Tehran?

(Bumped from 2006-05-01 23:29:30)