Are Americans Becoming Sovietized?

American Greatness ^ | 5 May, 2021 | Victor Davis Hanson

[MtnClimber]

What ultimately ended the nihilist Soviet system?

Was it not that Russians finally tired of the Kremlin’s lies and hypocrisies that permeated every facet of their falsified lives?

Here are 10 symptoms of Sovietism. Ask yourself whether we are headed down this same road to perdition.

1) There was no escape from ideological indoctrination—anywhere.

TV commercials, a job in the bureaucracy, or military assignment all hinged not so much on merit, expertise, or past achievement. What mattered was loud enthusiasm for the Soviet system.

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.

2) The Soviets fused their press with the government. Pravda or “Truth” was the official megaphone of state-sanctioned lies. Journalists simply regurgitated the talking points of their Party partners.

In 2017, some university and independent media monitoring centers found that 93 percent of American network media coverage of the early Trump Administration was negative. The most inflammatory of the media’s political assertions—Trump-Russia collusion, Hunter Biden’s laptop was a product of “Russian disinformation,” and Capitol Officer Brian Sicknick was murdered by a Trump rioter inside the Capitol—were all false.

3) The Soviet surveillance state enlisted apparatchiks and lackeys to ferret out ideological dissidents. Recently, we learned that the Department of Defense is reviewing its rosters to spot “insurrectionary” sentiments.

The Postal Service recently admitted it uses tracking programs to monitor the social media postings of Americans.

Left-wing 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’ expression. From 2015 to 2017, the FBI, CIA, and Justice Department engaged in efforts to monitor and injure the Trump campaign and then sabotage a

[MtnClimber]

“You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

[DarthVader]

Some are and some are not!

[AZJeep]

Yes, the US live has the feeling of the Soviet citizen in the late Brezhnev, Gorbachev time.
Everybody knows it is a failure, nobody believes the ideology, but the system keeps itself afloat by stealing elections, exploring divisions, canceling opposition, using selective prosecution, sending IRS on targeted nonconformists, ideological re-education, and controlling the the business, communication and media.
I hope it will end up like that too, when suddenly everybody realized how they were fooled and that basically everybody actually believed in what was described as extremist minority viewpoint.
But it may also end up with “Cultural Revolution” with quarter of the population wiped out and all the rest un utmost misery.

[El Cid]

Self-ping

[Boogieman]

Nope, they’re not embarrassed because they’re too stupid (or miseducated) to understand why totalitarianism is a bad thing.

[Boogieman]

Ah yes, two countries who historically have been swiftly conquered by every power that comes into or out of Europe. Perhaps not the best places to seek refuge in troubled times...

[Retain Mike]

Since the emergence of independent colonies and for all time Americans would be defined as sovereign individuals finding their identity in exercising pre-existing intangible liberties within bounds of voluntary self-restraint and accompanied by the hazards and uncertainties of personal freedoms. Their ethnicity, gender, class, and race would always be secondary expressions of humanity. Anyone who does not understand that concept is not an American.

Quang Nguyen who escaped from Vietnam and founded Caddis Branding Agency is an example of that understanding and said, “In 1982, I stood with a thousand new immigrants, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and listening to the National Anthem for the first time as an American. To this day, I can't remember anything sweeter and more patriotic than that moment in my life…..You see, America is not just a place on the map, it isn't just a physical location. It is an ideal, a concept. And if you are an American, you must understand the concept, you must accept this concept, and most importantly, you have to fight and defend this concept. This is about Freedom and not free stuff. And that is why I am standing up here.

[Uncle Miltie]

I’m not waiting 60 years.

[exinnj]

Rhetorical question...

[DiogenesLamp]

Agree. Absolutely.

[nascarnation]

Big govt / big media / big education / big labor / big tech

All singing from the liberal hymnal.

[Retain Mike]

if you don’t read the title carefully, it would be easy to substitute sodomized for Sovietized.