Echoes of Lenin.

"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.'"

However, the rally in Azerbaijan, like similar spectacles in Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, and Lebanon, was not a spontaneous event, but rather one stage-managed by the National Endowment for Democracy, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and Washington-aligned non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

To take one example: The opening phase of Lebanon's "Cedar Revolution," as Mary Wakefield reported from Beirut in the March 12 London Spectator, was "made for TV"--carefully scripted, lavishly funded, and carefully choreographed by NGOs. Organizers wrangled a huge cast of young, arrestingly photogenic demonstrators, tutored them in the proper English-language slogans, and posed them for the cameras. Media outlets in the U.S.--not just the Bush loyalists manning talk radio microphones, but also the broadcast networks, Time, and Newsweek--dutifully invoked the images as validating the administration's world democratic revolution.

The patent phoniness of that revolution is revealed in the Bush administration's reaction to an actual spontaneous uprising against tyranny--the demonstrations recently suppressed in Uzbekistan by Islam Karimov. Touted by the administration as a key ally in the "war against terror," not to mention a valuable asset in the campaign to control Central Asia's energy reserves, Karimov is an "ex"-Communist Party boss who commands an old school, KGB-trained secret police force well-versed in exotic torture techniques.

Karimov's regime, notes the Times of London, is constantly seeking to refine that satanic science, "formulating new ways to poach, grill, tenderize, smoke, and flambe his citizens to death." During Karimov's visit to Washington last March, White House spokesman Scott McClellan tacitly admitted that Uzbekistan is one of the regimes to which the Bush administration has outsourced interrogation of terrorist suspects.

Prominent Uzbek dissidents have literally been boiled alive. On May 13, thousands of protesters calling for democratic reforms were slaughtered by Karimov's security police in the city of Andijan. The reaction of the Bush administration was oddly muted, given its professed eagerness to propagate democracy. "We urge both the government and the demonstrators to exercise restraint at this time," lisped White House spokesman McClellan as Uzbek troops were redecorating Andijan's streets with the blood and viscera of unarmed protesters.

In the fetid figure of Islam Karimov, the revolutions headed by Lenin and George W. Bush converge.