Could There Be Anyone Worse Than Arnold's Oppressors?

|

Having written about Arnold Schwarzenegger the politician several times in the past, with slightly cautious but nonetheless very real optimism, I'm pretty receptive to the guy, and certainly familiar with his stump speech.

And, well, I'll just say that at its current rate of development, his I-was-a-child-victim-of-Communism tale will soon involve being kicked by Stalin himself in a Ukrainian gulag. As Comrade Gillespie pointed out, this is an effective and blatant way to place the Bush approach to fighting Islamic terrorism in a Republican continuum of always having the stones to stand up against global nasties (well, with a few exceptions, like the racist but anti-commie Apartheid regime, Schwarzie's invocation of Nelson Mandela notwithstanding). But if Arnold really lived in fear of Soviet soldiers yanking his countrymen out of cars and shipping them to the Gulag, would he mean, let alone say, the following?

My fellow Americans, make no mistake about it: terrorism is more insidious than communism, because it yearns to destroy not just the individual but the entire international order.

Come again? Even if you include all historical terrorism (i.e., the non-theocratic-Islamic variety), it would take centuries of unimaginable chaos to approach the 80 million murders of the 20th century's vilest political science experiment. And I seem to recall that "the entire international order" was precisely what those goatee-boys and their Internationale-singing sympathizers were trying to overhaul. The most generous interpretation of Arnie's moral unequivalence is that he meant it only in the present tense, and even then you could probably find a dissenter or two in China, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Cuba.