Echoes of Lenin.(democratic revolution)

"I led a blind life, in ignorance and darkness," narrates a young woman over documentary footage depicting her, swaddled in a suffocating burqa, shuffling through the dusty streets of a Central Asian village. The camera captures scenes of apparently insuperable medieval ignorance and destitution: ancient, disintegrating minarets; dejected, impoverished children; turban-clad village elders prostrating themselves in daily prayers toward Mecca; and everywhere, anonymous women in burqas, their faceless, nearly shapeless forms somehow conveying timid anxiety.

"I was a slave without chains," the narrator continues. "But a ray of truth began to shine." Suddenly the women are emboldened to cast off their burqas and join the ranks of youthful democratic activists. Where once the young narrator's luminous brown eyes were cast down in meek servitude even behind her veil, they now greedily devour the printed word. She is shown joining with other young women at the local university and taking part in local civic life alongside the men.

Of her liberator, the narrator rhapsodizes: "He is like a father to us." The global democratic revolution had lit a fire in the minds of oppressed women throughout Muslim Central Asia. The darkness of tyranny had been dispelled by "the dawn of Lenin's truth."

Decades before George W. Bush, acting as a ventriloquist's dummy for the radicals who have seized control of our foreign policy apparatus, proclaimed a "global democratic revolution," Soviet dictator Vladimir Lenin was anointed the apostle of world liberation. The cinematic tribute to liberation described above is "Three Songs About Lenin," a 1934 film by Soviet director Dziga Vertov dedicated to the "leader of the oppressed peoples of the world."

"In Europe, in America, in Africa and beyond the Arctic Circle, people sing songs about Lenin, friend and liberator of the oppressed," declares the prologue to Vertov's film. "These are songs of women who have cast off their veil, of electricity that brings light to the villages, of water that makes the desert recede, of the illiterate who have become literate.... These are songs of the October Revolution, and of the Revolution and Lenin being one."

Just like Lenin before him, Bush and the Glorious Democratic Revolution are one, at least according to those who subscribe to his cult of personality. "A reader living in Moscow," commented Jay Nordlinger of National Review, "sent me a photo from a rally in [the former Soviet republic] Azerbaijan, which showed a youth holding up a poster of President Bush with the words, 'We Want Freedom.'"

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