Being Oppressed

Moore Watch delivers a fine rant about the Little Red Book scandal...

You know the one -- the College kid who requested a copy of Chairman Mao's Little Red Book and was visited by agents from the US Department of Homeland Security...

You do know that this was a hoax do you?

Here is Lee at Moore Watch:

Oppression is for Cool Kids
Here we see the latest victim in the eeeeeevil fascist Bush's war against dissent in his never-ending quest to implement a fascist state.

It rocketed across the Internet a week ago, a startling newspaper report that agents from the US Department of Homeland Security had visited a student at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth at his New Bedford home simply because he had tried to borrow Mao Tse-Tung's "Little Red Book" for a history seminar on totalitarian governments.

The story, first reported in last Saturday's New Bedford Standard-Times, was picked up by other news organizations, prompted diatribes on left-wing and right-wing blogs, and even turned up in an op-ed piece written by Senator Edward M. Kennedy in the Globe.

Wow, that's pretty bad, huh? I mean, I have a copy of the Little Red Book, and even a statue of Chairman Mao, on display on a bookshelf in my apartment. This concerns me greatly. Are Bush's fascist stormtroopers going to be kicking down my front door soon?

But yesterday, the student confessed that he had made it up after being confronted by the professor who had repeated the story to a Standard-Times reporter.

The professor, Brian Glyn Williams, said he went to his former student's house and asked about inconsistencies in his story. The 22-year-old student admitted it was a hoax, Williams said.

"I made it up," the professor recalled him saying. "I'm sorry. . . . I'm so relieved that it's over."

What? A left-winger lying about being oppressed? What? what? what the hell is the world coming to?

Williams said the student gave no explanation. But Williams, who praised the student as hard-working and likable, said he was shaken by the deception.

"I feel as if I was lied to, and I have no idea why," said Williams, an associate professor of Islamic history. He said the possibility the government was scrutinizing books borrowed by his students "disturbed me tremendously."

I'll tell you exactly why he did it, because this is a point I have made repeatedly for years. The left views the world in terms of two groups, oppressors and the oppressed. There is no middle ground, you are one or the other. If you're a middle class working Joe, you're still an oppressor, because you buy products at Wal-Mart and other stores, and they're made in Guatemalan sweatshops, where peasant labor is used. Thus, by being a middle class consumer, you are unwittingly an oppressor. The only people who aren't viewed as oppressors are the very people who make this accusation, the radical lefties.

And it just gets better... A short rant but spot on.