Shakedown Socialism

A couple years ago I read about the website "The People's Cube" on one of the many conservative blogs I visit. The People's Cube uses satire (mostly in the form of pretending to be a neo-Soviet group working "towards the Progressive World of Next Tuesday") to mock Liberalism and so-called "Progressives". The owner of the site, Oleg Atbashian, who posts under the name "Red Square", knows a thing or two about what it's like to live under communism, having been born in the Ukraine under Soviet rule. At one point he even worked as a Communist Party propaganda artist in a Siberian town.

While living in the Soviet Union, Atbashian realized that "Marxism was not the solution, but the cause of the dysfunctional system, and that the communist utopia was only a dead-end exit in humanity's long and stressful journey towards progress." He therefore joined the political underground and used his writing talents to attack the Soviet system. Finally, in the early '90s, he immigrated to the United States. On the official website for Atbashian's recently released book, he describes his experience in coming to the United States:

I moved to the United States in 1994, hoping to forget about politics and enjoy life in a country that was ruled by reason and common sense, whose citizens were appreciative of constitutional rights, the rule of law, and the prosperity of free market capitalism. But what I found was a society deeply infected by the leftist disease of "progressivism" that was jeopardizing real societal progress. So I started writing again, this time in English.

The result is this book [Shakedown Socialism], as well as many more essays, political parodies, and cartoons, published in various media in America and around the world.

I have enjoyed both Atbashian's satirical works on The People's Cube as well as his more serious articles on various political sites. Although his writing is witty and keenly observant, the primary reason why his articles draw my attention is because of his background. Here is a writer who has actually lived under full-blown socialism. Unlike most conservative writers who resist something they've only heard of, Atbashian is trying to warn Americans about a mindset and a political system that he has experienced first hand.

His book, containing dozens of of satirical cartoons and images (many of them created by the author), can be found at Amazon.com.