Maintaining A Focus
By Gary Aldrich (12/22/03)
Only an absolute bonehead could find something to complain about after Saddam Hussein’s capture. Of course, in an election cycle, there seems to be no shortage of boneheads. Next, Howard Dean will grow a beard – he’s already dug himself a deep enough “Spider hole.”
And yet, what about Saddam Hussein and his now destroyed and discredited government? Are we safer because one man is captured? It’s too easy to write this nightmare off by concluding that Saddam was somehow so persuasive, so powerful and so evil that he was pre-ordained to rise to power, and that eventually, no matter where he was, he would become a murderous tyrant.
Likewise, we should not make the mistake of believing that Saddam’s embrace of a sometimes violent religious movement enabled his rise to power or the horrible atrocities that followed.
Some people try to simplify Saddam, perhaps capture him in a single sentence, or word, or create a clever sound bite suitable for today’s 30 second news cycle. But we can’t allow that to happen. We can’t ignore one of the primary reasons this maniac so easily rose to power, murdered hundreds of thousands of his own country’s citizens – and then marched into the territories of neighboring countries in a quest for more power.
Does Saddam’s life-story ring any bells? It should, because every Socialist-Communist country has either already “been there and done that”, or their rulers harbor dreams of domination and conquest for sometime in the not-too-distant future.
Some of today’s editorials mischaracterize Saddam’s rise to power and his eventual, all too predictable atrocities. They falsely call it Fascism, but the fact is, Saddam’s rise to power and his grip on the throat of his countrymen was possible through the devastating form of government everyone knows as “Socialism.”
Socialism always fails, but not before many human lives are lost while trying to implement and maintain it.
What is it about the human mind that prevents so many people from comprehending the simple truth that liberty and freedom – that which we still enjoy in our wonderful nation – are the only things standing between us and eventual murderous, miserable oppression?
Even now, millions of Americans see no need to end the increasingly massive government entitlement programs, and cannot imagine why anyone would want to stop them. Apparently they don’t understand that the trend we have today is Socialism by another name – Big Government. Or maybe they just don’t care as long as they get something for nothing. We talk about Capitalism and Democracy, but we continually walk to the Left – toward Socialism. Could a Saddam Hussein or a Hitler-type rise to power in this country? Not today – but ask me the same question in another 20 years. Our Founding Fathers fought against such systems – then called absolute monarchies –and they knew why liberty must always prevail.
A Saddam Hussein can never rise to power in this country, or in any other Democracy, as long as the peoples’ liberties are fiercely guarded. That’s because Democracy is the ideology of peace and love of life. No matter how determined, how crazy, how religiously driven the would-be ruler is – those determinations would not matter, as the citizens of this country would eventually put a stop to the madness, because they can!
But take away more and more of our liberties, and eventually we will not have the ability.
Socialist governments are the petri dishes for maniacs like Hitler, Castro, and Saddam Hussein. In a Socialist government system, when the maniacs eventually come to power, they already have the means at hand to take away the last remaining liberties of the oppressed citizenry.
If they can remember that far back, I’m sure the citizens of Iraq can recall each time their government removed some of their rights. Like an ignorant few in this country, they probably reasoned, “So what? If I agree to give up this little right, which I don’t really use anyway, what will it matter?”
If the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis rotting in mass graves could speak, they would remind us all why protecting liberty is so important. The only thing standing between government oppression and freedom is the understanding that Socialism, Communism, Marxism – call it what you will – eventually leads to soul-wrenching dismay and death on a massive scale.
Nazi Germany was a socialist country, as was Iraq. Adolph Hitler and Saddam Hussein were Socialists. We need to tell the truth about history simply because too many people around the globe are continually infected with this virus of the mind we call Socialism.
The only cure for this disease is a firm Democracy unwilling to give up even the most obscure right. Saddam may have been captured, but evil Socialism is alive and well and free to infect even more minds in Iraq. We must teach the Iraqis why it is so important to enjoy and defend their God-given liberties.
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