The changes have come on America abruptly, many in reaction to the election in 2016 of Donald Trump as president. And they’re becoming greatly amplified under President Joe Biden.
They include ideological campaigns that require a single-point of view from everyone, public character attacks on those who dare to disagree, a unified government/media voice, spying on opinions, and more.
They are signs that, just perhaps, Americans are becoming “Sovietized,” according to Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution.
In a commentary this week, he lists 10 “symptoms of Sovietism”
He notes that in the Soviet regime, “There was no escape from ideological indoctrination — anywhere.”
And in America today? “Wokeness is becoming our new Soviet-like state religion. Careerists assert that America was always and still is a systemically racist country, without ever producing proof or a sustained argument.”
He also pointed out Soviets “fused” the media and the government, and in the U.S., “In 2017, a Harvard study found that over 90% of the major TV news networks’ coverage of the Trump administration’s first 100 days was negative.”
Third, there was the Soviet surveillance industry that isolated “ideological dissidents.”
In America, he warned, it was revealed the Department of Defense is hunting for “extremist sentiments,” the post office is monitoring “social media postings of Americans,” and “CNN recently alleged that the Biden administration’s Department of Homeland Security is considering partnering with private surveillance firms to get around government prohibitions on scrutinizing Americans’ online activity.”
Then the Soviet’s didn’t teach, but indoctrinated, children.
“Currently, cash-strapped universities nationwide are hiring thousands of diversity, equity and inclusion staffers and administrators. Their chief task is to scan the admissions, hiring, curriculum and administration at universities. Like good commissars, our diversity czars oversee compliance with the official narrative that a flawed America must confess, apologize for and renounce its evil foundations,” he said.
The “pampered” in the Soviet Union ran the country, and were exempt from requirements imposed on others, he said. In America, “Woke Silicon Valley billionaires talk socialistically but live royally. Coke and Delta Airlines CEOs who hector Americans about their illiberality make millions of dollars a year.”
“What unites current woke activists such as Oprah Winfrey, LeBron James Mark Zuckerberg and the Obamas are their huge estates and their multimillion-dollar wealth. Just as the select few of the old Soviet nomenklatura had their Black Sea dachas, America’s loudest top-down revolutionaries prefer living in Martha’s Vineyard, Beverly Hills, Montecito and Malibu.”
Sixth is the ability to rewrite history, and in America it’s exhibited by those society members who “indulge in a frenzy of name-changing, statue-toppling, monument-defacing, book-banning and cancel-culturing.”
The Soviet society was permeated by “fear” and “stool pigeons,” which is seen in America now as thousands scouring the internet “to find any past incorrect expression of a rival?” It’s created “thought criminals,” he said.
Then in the Soviet Union prosecutors and courts were “weaponized.”
“In America, where and for what reason you riot determines whether you face any legal consequences,” he wrote.
And just as the Soviets “doled out prizes on the basis of correct Soviet thought,” the Pulitzers, the Emmys, the Grammys, the Tonys and Oscars reflect “the most politically correct work from the most woke.”
Finally, he explained, “The Soviets offered no apologies for extinguishing freedom. Instead, they boasted that they were advocates for equity, champions of the underclass, enemies of privilege — and therefore could terminate anyone or anything they pleased.
“Our wokists are similarly defending their thought-control efforts, forced re-education sessions, scripted confessionals, mandatory apologies and cancel culture on the pretense that we need long-overdue ‘fundamental transformation.'”
“Ask yourself whether we are headed down this same road to perdition,” he said.
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