[Oleg Atbashian] This is a brilliant study, profusely illustrated with cartoons and propaganda posters. Atbashian explains why Socialism cannot work. He exposes the injustice of "Collective Greed" and shows why Economic Equality is a fraud. The book is an eye-opener as the author illustrates his points with examples drawn from his life in the Soviet Union before 1994 and more recent events in the USA."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, Author of One Party Classroom (2009)
"In his brilliant, witty, and wonderfully illustrated Shakedown Socialism, Oleg Atbashian -- who grew up in the Soviet Union, shows what is happening in Obama's America today, and explains why it 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. This book shows why Obama's statist economic policies are a looming disaster for America and for the spirit of the free human individual."
-- Pamela Geller, author, The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration's War On America
"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. Shakedown Socialism is an essential and inspiring guide to the virtues of the free market."
About the author:
Oleg Atbashian is an American writer and graphic artist. He was born in June, 1960, in Cherkassy, Ukraine, which was then part of the totalitarian Soviet Union. His writings present a view of America and the world through the prism of his Soviet experience. He is the author of Shakedown Socialism and the creator of a satirical website, ThePeoplesCube.com, which Rush Limbaugh described on his show as "a Stalinist version of The Onion." His essays and satires have been translated into many languages and his graphics reproduced in various publications around the world.
Raised in a communist dictatorship, he grew up believing in Marxism and in the communist future. From 1983 to 1986 he worked as a propaganda artist, creating visual agitprop for the local Party committee in a Siberian town. Observing the hypocrisy and corruption of the socialist system, however, he gradually reexamined his Marxist upbringing. Having returned to Ukraine in 1986, he joined the opposition movement, lending his apartment to dissident gatherings and collecting signatures in defense of Soviet dissidents.
His first Russian-language short stories were published in Moscow in 1990. Around the same time his translations of contemporary Russian, Ukrainian, and American poetry were published in the U.S., Russia, and Ukraine. He also wrote articles in Russian and Ukrainian for several newspapers. He now writes exclusively in English.
Atbashian emigrated to the United States in 1994 and settled in New York City, hoping to forget about politics and raise his three children in a country governed by reason and the rule of law. Working across the street from the World Trade Center, he witnessed the 9/11 attacks from a block away. That shocking experience was soon followed by his disenchantment with the American cultural establishment that almost uniformly blamed America for the attacks and used painfully familiar Marxist concepts of "anti-colonialism" and "class struggle." That prompted him to start speaking against the leftist ideology that permeated the American political scene.
Atbashian describes his political views as classical liberalism, with the emphasis on individual freedoms, free market capitalism, and international peace based on free trade.
In 2011 he moved from New York to Florida, where he now resides in the Tampa Bay area.
Here, let me put a local political face on that.