Shakedown Socialism: Book About How to Recognize the Enemy
Shakedown Socialism: Exposes Socialist and Progressive Rackets
IN the 6th century BC, Sun Tzu advised to “Know thy enemy.” Shakedown Socialism, People’s Cube founder Oleg Atbashian’s essential guide for spotting the same Progressive policies that failed in his native USSR and are being foisted on unaware Americans is the best way to follow Sun Tzu’s advice in 2010.
RECOGNIZE THE SOCIALIST/PROGRESSIVE RACKET BEFORE IT DESTROYS YOUR LIFE: READ SHAKEDOWN SOCIALISM
HOW TO SPOT THE PERPETUAL BLOODSUCKING MACHINE THAT IS PROGRESSIVISM
Oleg Atbashian is perhaps better known as “Red Square,” the founder and force behind the website The People’s Cube, which Rush Limbaugh called the “Stalinist version of the Onion.” Recently, Atbashian freed up enough time from his various endeavors to pen a book that anyone who is serious about recognizing the various redistributionist schemes of Socialism.
The name of the book is Shakedown Socialism. Remember it; if Big Government isn’t cut off at the knees soon, readers will find the book a handy guide to what is next in store for them.
A little about Oleg Atbashian first.
Before moving to the U.S. in 1994, Atbashian lived in Ukraine where he sometimes worked as a propaganda artist for the old Soviet Union, creating agitprop posters for the local Party Committee in a small town. During that time, Oleg says he “witnessed the transition of Republics of the Soviet Union from corrupt socialism to corrupt kleptocracy.”
When he arrived in the U.S., Atbashian was puzzled by the “level of delusional affection for all things Left among the ‘liberal’ intellectual elites who take America’s exclusive well-being for granted.” At that time Oleg dismissed this “delusional affection” as silly and of little consequence.
Then 9/11 happened. Oleg witnessed that day from the base of the Twin Towers. “I’m still haunted by the horror I came to be a witness of,” says Atbashian. “The subsequent blame-America attitude among the intellectual trend-setters enraged me; ‘liberalism’ no longer seemed laughable. It was dangerous suicidal madness that had to be confronted. I took up political activism.”
The book itself is an entertaining and enlightening read. Reading through the first three chapters, its quickly apparent that Atbashian connects the failed policies of his native Russia–which he had to live through–to those same policies as advocated by Socialist, Progressives and others in the U.S. who’ve not had to suffer under a country governed by those same failed schemes.
In Chapter One, Lenin: “Trade Unions are the School of Communism,” Atbashian demonstrates how labor unions, working through the Democratic Party, is attempting to freeze out the free movement of labor–except to those approved by union leaders. Where did SEIU’s Andy Stern get his ideas? Hint: they didn’t spring his creatively fertile imagination.
Chapters Two and Three cover the topics of “Incoming: Forced Inequality and Economic Injustice” and “Unions: A Study in Collective Greed and Selfishness.” Both chapters are chock full of examples connecting policies which Progressives have worked to install in the USA which were implemented in the USSR decades before.
Make that “Implemented in the USSR decades before–and failed.”
Chapter Four [Rigging the Economy in the Name of 'Justice'] was particularly good. Many readers will recognize the current Progressive buzzwords of “social justice.” The chapter starts out:
The demands of forced economic equality are usually justified by the “growing gap” between the rich and the poor, and men and women, as well as various groups of minorities. Such demands are usually followed by a plan to improve on reality by aggressively tampering with market forces–which, as we already know, can only make the existing income gap worse due to the resulting poverty, economic stagnation and limited upward mobility.
Sound familiar? It should. Liberals have been using the “social justice” MO to help destroy America’s competitive edge for quite some time. Every perceived inequality is a reason for MORE government intervention; the failure of the government’s ‘solutions’ is further evidence that EVEN MORE government control of the economy is needed.
Leftist economist, Paul Krugman can be spouting a variation on this theme regularly in the pages of the New York Times. The nearly-trillion dollar Obama Stimulus utterly failed at what it’s Progressive backers claimed it would do? The answer is MORE STIMULUS cash! See? It’s a Progressive perpetual bloodsucking machine.
Everyone gets poorer in the end–except those favored by the government doling out Stimulus dollars, such as the $800+ million for a study on African genital washing. How many people would chip in to fund such a study in the free market? Not very many–which is the reason the federal government had to take that money from taxpayers and then give it away to the study’s advocates. After filtering it through a number of layers of bureaucracy, each of which took their cuts.
The entire book is like this. Readers can pick a page at random and chances are that the subject will be something that’s been tried and failed in the Soviet Union–but its being portrayed by American Progressives as a “cutting edge” program sure to work this time.
I’d be amiss if I didn’t single out the Appendix for special attention.
“Obama the Pitchfork Operator: Remake of a Soviet Classic” chilled this reader with the similarity of the methods employed by Barack Obama upon taking power and those of another community organizer in the USSR: Nikolai Bulharin, in charge of industrial development in the Soviet Union during the time of Stalin.
The Appendix alone, I felt, is worth the price of the book.
My recommendation? Buy this book–while you still can. The copious graphics alone–provided by Atbashian himself–are priceless.
Readers can purchase this book at SHAKEDOWN SOCIALISM: The Website. Or from Amazon.
ALSO at DBKP:
Shakedown Socialism: Progress to Nowhere
Shakedown Socialism has been endorsed by, among others, David Horowitz–who as an ex-Lefty, knows a thing or two about recognizing the Socialists and Progressive schemers who walk among us.
“Oleg Atbashian has written a timely warning for Americans about the collectivists among us and their plans for the future. I hope everyone reads this book.”
–David Horowitz
Best-selling author, Robert Spencer, also judged Shakedown Socialism as a must-read for Americans just waking to the dangers of those who know better how your money, time and life is to be apportioned than you do.
“Brightly written and filled with entertaining and illuminating illustrations, Oleg Atbashian’s Shakedown Socialism is a clear and eye-opening guide to exactly what is wrong with socialism and state control of the means of production, and how it kills both the economy and human initiative. Atbashian saw it all up close in the Soviet Union, and now he sees Barack Obama making the same mistakes – and sounds this clarion call for economic sanity, before it’s too late. Shakedown Socialism is an essential and inspiring guide to the virtues of the free market.”
–Robert Spencer, author of the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad.
Pam Geller is another author who’s read and heartily endorsed Shakedown Socialism.
“Ayn Rand saw it coming: ‘When government controls are introduced into a free economy, they create economic dislocations, hardships and problems, which – if the controls are not repealed – necessitate further controls, which necessitate still further controls, etc.’ In his brilliant, witty, and wonderfully illustrated Shakedown Socialism, Oleg Atbashian – who grew up in the Soviet Union, shows how that process is happening in Obama’s America today, and explains why that is putting us on the road to ruin. Shakedown Socialism is an enlightening, sobering, and wonderfully clear explanation of why statism kills – and thus also of why and how Barack Obama is killing the American economy. Oleg quotes Putin saying that when the Soviets made the state’s role absolute, the U.S.S.R. became completely economically uncompetitive, and no one wants to see that repeated. No one except Obama, that is. This book shows why Obama’s statist economic policies are a looming disaster for America and for the spirit of the free human individual.”
–Pam Geller, author of The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War On America, as well as a prominent blogger at Atlas Shrugs
Others have found Shakedown Socialism to be an inspiration as well.
I don’t suppose readers can ask for any higher praise than that?
* – Okay, that last “endorsement” is satire, for the humor-challenged.
by Mondo Frazier
images: peoples cube: shakedown socialism
