The US is Becoming the USSR
Liberal totalitarianism is turning the United States into something very like its former adversary.
A Personal Story of Then and Now
I am a “Boomer”, born in the 1950’s at the height of the Cold War. I was imbued with the Western narratives that used terms like “the Free World” — of which our President was the leader.
I was told that the Communists, the Soviet Union, represented the “Non-Free World”. They were our mortal enemies, because they stood against everything we stood for.
The Russians, we were told, did not allow free speech. They made everyone toe the Party line. People who opposed the “regime” were persecuted, prosecuted in kangaroo courts, and imprisoned in the most harsh and horrible penal colonies.
The word “Gulag” became common parlance for any horrible place.
America is now the world’s largest penal colony
In 1990, Soviet Russia had 1.06 million people in prison. By contrast, the US has 1.9 million people behind bars.
Many people may be unaware that the United States is the country with the largest prison population IN THE WORLD. This is true not just on a “per capita” basis, but also in quantitative terms.
Beyond the 1.9 million people behind bars, millions more are subjected to the greater “mass punishment” system of parole and probation supervision, living in the community but under restrictive and counterproductive rules. More than 2.9 million people on probation and 800,000 people released from prison on parole must live with the constant threat of being jailed over a minor or even noncriminal “technical” violation. And although these populations have decreased somewhat since 2020, they’re still too high and are already rebounding as pandemic-related delays in the courts subside.
Yes, this means that the US locks up more people even than the “communist” People’s Republic of China. The PRC has a prison population of only 1.7 million, despite having a population FOUR TIMES GREATER than that of the US.
An opaque political system
As I became older, I learned more about the Soviet system: how it was opaque, how it was hard to tell who was in charge, because the titular heads of state were just doddering old men who had earned their positions during the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945.
They were figureheads and nothing more.
I went to high school, I went to college, and I was always taught that the USSR was a static empire led by a sclerotic, elderly elite who cared nothing for the people, a “gerontocracy” that was monolithic and powerless, at the mercy of other dark forces.
I learned the word “Kremlinologist” — these were experts whose specialty was trying to divine the intentions, the machinations, and the “goings on” inside the Kremlin; to “read the tea leaves” and try to discern who was calling the shots, who was gaining power, who was losing power.
America’s Gerontocracy and the failure of democracy
I don’t know if the Chinese, the Iranians and the Russians have their own version of Kremlinologists (Washingtologists?), but they must certainly be perplexed when trying to discern what the elderly “leaders” in D.C. are contemplating.
US actions regarding Ukraine, Israel-Palestine, Taiwan and China, and even America’s own Southern Border crisis seem wholly lacking in any sort of coherent strategy. What is Washington’s aim in these areas? What is their strategy? Who will ultimately decide to use force? Who even is in any position to deploy DIPLOMACY in dealing with other great powers?
It all seems unclear, opaque, and universally out of touch with the will of the American people. Indeed, it seems that for decades now, the US government is acting without democratic influence of any kind. The Washington elites, like the old Soviet Politburo, have become “a self-perpetuating body that itself decided which new members would be admitted and which members expelled”.
Elections in the United States have become farcical, grotesque sideshows that — despite activists calls to the contrary — fail to have any real consequences in and of themselves.
And yet, consequences appear — not just for the people of the world, who must suffer the vicissitudes of a rudderless Hegemon, but also for the citizens of the Empire itself.
An unequal society
I learned that Russian leaders were incredibly corrupt. They only wanted to “feather their own nest” with perks and riches, expensive Dachas and luxuries that were beyond the reach of ordinary Russians. The Party “apparatchiks” got the best apartments; they shopped in special stores that had Western items; their kids went to special schools.
I read George Orwell’s Animal Farm, which was a thinly veiled take-down of the Soviets, and declared that “all animals [men] are equal, but “some are more equal than others”.
“America is an oligarchy”
It is a sad fact that studies have shown that the US stopped being a democracy years ago. America is now most decidedly an oligarchy, whose government responds only to the will of the top elites.
It is no wonder, then, that Western leaders have such low approval ratings. They are not, after all, working on behalf of those people polled. They are relying on propaganda and flimflam to bamboozle the masses into liking them. Identity politics has replaced actual policy initiatives in the quest for votes.
And like the old Soviet leaders, we see US officials enriching themselves from the system. In Congress, grossly illegal insider trading on the stock market is rampant, and goes virtually unpunished. We have also seen Presidents and Vice Presidents use their office to enrich themselves and their families by leveraging foreign partner nations.
Just like in the USSR, these American Apparatchiks are the modern version of Orwell’s “more equal” pigs.
A propagandised people
I was told that the people of the Soviet Union were ignorant; that they only had access to news outlets that were controlled by the state, and that all the mainstream media organisations were simply mouthpieces for the governing elite; that the entire media landscape was dominated by players who merely mouthed what the ruling elite in the Kremlin wanted them to say.
We laughed at the news media like Pravda (“The Truth”) and Isvezia (“The News”) — outlets that only disseminated government propaganda. How ignorant could these Russians be, to think that they were getting the actual truth? To believe that what they were reading was actual news?
We all knew that Russians had no idea what life was like outside of Russia.
Americans are ignorant — by design
While Russia had Pravda and Isvezia, Americans have MSNBC, CNN, the Washington Post and The New York Times.
Since Bill Clinton’s disastrous Telecommunications Act of 1996, the US media landscape has shrunk from hundreds of independent outlets down to only six corporations run by billionaire oligarchs. This means that, no matter which network Americans tune to, no matter which national broadsheet they read, they will always get the same narrative. the same viewpoint, the same opinion.
This “media oligopoly” has also played a role in what can only be described as the “great dumbing down of America”. Today it is the Americans who are ignorant of the “outside world”.
The result of this information “bubble”?
Only 20% of Americans hold passports. Many Americans cannot find the USA on a map.
Moreover, when it comes to the 20-year long military commitment in Afghanistan, National Geographic reveals:
“In a nation called the world’s superpower, only 17 percent of young adults in the United States could find Afghanistan on a map, according to a new worldwide survey released today”.
The US has spent over 130 billion dollars supporting a proxy war in Ukraine, and yet 84% of Americans cannot even find Ukraine on a map.
This is a cruel, cynical and damning statistic when one thinks that homelessness in America could be completely eradicated for only $20 billion.
Americans are being destroyed; physically, mentally; emotionally and financially so that the Empire can abide.
Dissidents are jailed or exiled
We in the USA are very proud of our First Amendment, the part of our Constitution that guarantees “freedom of expression” and “freedom of the press”. Constitutional scholars from Thomas Jefferson on down have repeatedly averred that the First Amendment is the most supreme because it allows and enables all the other Amendments found in the Bill of Rights.
When I was growing up, the words “Soviet Dissidents” were often in the headlines. These people were portrayed as heroes in the West, but inside the USSR they were persecuted and condemned to the harshest of punishments. Dissidents in on the USSR were subject to exile, imprisonment or even death, and often they were discredited as insane and sent to menta hospitals.
According to Wikipedia:
“Political opposition in the USSR was barely visible, and apart rare exceptions, it had little consequence, primarily because it was instantly crushed with brute force…being outspoken in opposition to the authorities, demonstrating for reform, writing books critical of the USSR were defined in some persons as being simultaneously a criminal act, a symptom and a diagnosis”.
Indeed, the Gulags I mentioned above were most famously portrayed by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, perhaps the most famous Soviet Dissident, whose writings about his years of imprisonment and exile were well publicised globally in the 1970’s.
Another famous Soviet Dissident was Andrei Sakharov, a physicist who worked on the Soviet nuclear weapons program. Sakharov used his position in the government to become an activist for human rights and was punished with exile to Nizhny Novgorod, an isolated and “forbidden city” in central Russia.
America kills the First Amendment
If the Soviets had Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the West has Julian Assange. Assange’s is a case where the US and UK governments — with a critical assist from the right wing regime in Ecuador — have fought for a decade to silence a critical bastion of press freedom. Assange is being persecuted because he dared to publish the truth about America’s war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, and faces 175 years in prison for doing so.
And if Julian Assange is the “American Solzhenitsyn”, then Edward Snowden is the US version of Andrei Sakharov. Snowden used his position in the government to expose the fact that US intelligence agencies, specifically the NSA, were spying on American citizens. For this he was exiled, his passport revoked. Snowden now lives in Russia, unable to return to the United States for fear of prosecution and imprisonment.
In addition to silencing the press, modern Western societies are now suppressing free speech through social media. The Twitter Files report by Matt Taibbi was an in-depth analysis of the interference by US government agencies in the functioning of the Twitter platform, using tools to lower the visibility of some accounts, and boost the visibility of others.
The Twitter files revealed what many in media thought was happening: platforms like Twitter (now X), Facebook and YouTube were suppressing certain types of information in favour of other narratives that were more in line with the prevailing, or “dominant narrative” pushed by the US government and the Corporate Media Establishment.
The all-important First Amendment is itself under attack. Katherine Maher, the new CEO of National Public Radio (NPR) has gone on record saying that the First Amendment was the “number one challenge” in American journalism during a panel discussion put on by the Atlantic Council, the official Washington DC think tank for NATO.
Maher, who is herself a denizen of the Deep State, said that the First Amendment provides “a fairly robust protection of rights”. This, she lamented, made it “a little tricky to address some of the real challenges of where bad information comes from”.
In 2022, Maher delivered a TED Talk titled “What Wikipedia teaches us about balancing truth and beliefs”, in which she suggested that:
“…our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that is getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done. That is not to say that the truth doesn’t exist or to say that the truth isn’t important,” but “one reason we have such glorious chronicles to the human experience and all forms of culture is because we acknowledge there are many different truths”.
And so, like in the Soviet Union, “free speech” is no longer free; “truth” is now a relative concept, and every facet of our public lives is now being shaped around liberal precepts such as “intersectionality” and “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” (DEI).
A warlike people
We knew that the Russians hated us. We believed that they were being taught to hate us, that the Soviet propagandists were working night and day to convince the Russians that they were the righteous ones, that the Westerners were evil, corrupt, and “decadent”.
They glorified the military.
The movies were filled with stereotypes of Russians decrying us as “capitalist pigs”.
The hyper-militarised American people
There is no country on earth that is more militarised as the USA — and I include North Korea. While the Americans do not go in for the giant parades featuring missiles, tanks and other hardware of war favoured by regimes like the USSR and DPRK, Americans have their own way of glorifying and fetishising their armed forces.
For example, the US Department of Defense (DoD) spends multiple millions of dollars each year to promote itself through the National Football League (NFL)
Indeed, hyper-militarism and hyper-patriotism are inextricably linked to the public life of all Americans, even though the “professional army” policy means that only the poorest segments of society end up serving in uniform.
Hollywood is another way that the American people are kept hyper-militarised. Film franchises such as the Marvel Comics and DC “cinematic universes” all rely heavily on the cooperation of the DoD in securing things like helicopters, warships and othe military equipment for their movies. In return, the DoD gets final say over every script, to ensure that the military and war itself are portrayed in a positive light.
An unhealthy society
Everyone knew that “Russians were always drunk”. Alcoholism was a scourge upon their society. People were consuming vast amounts of vodka to soothe their tortured souls, because their lives were so miserable and they had no way of making them better.
If you were born into an Apparatchik family, one of the elites, you were set for life. But if you weren’t born at the top, you had no way to get there. You were locked into your miserable worker drone life.
The average Russian had a very poor diet, an unhealthy lifestyle, and life expectancy lagged far behind that of Western countries. This trend only reversed itself after the election of Vladimir Putin and the ensuing renaissance of Russian culture and the Russian economy.
The Soviets had vodka, the US has fentanyl
The life expectancy of average Americans is declining. That’s right, it is going backwards. Americans’ life expectancy at birth is now lagging far below that of other “comparable” countries.
While COVID caused life expectancy to drop around the globe, the US has been unable to rebound like other countries. This is due to unhealthy lifestyles and the prevalence of underlying chronic health problems, but it is also due to the drug overdose crisis, which kills over 100,000 people each year.
The reason for the epidemic of drug overdoses are many and varied: depression, alienation, financial hardship, lack of a future — in short, the opioid users in today’s USA are suffering from the same bleak socioeconomic outlook as the vodka drinkers of the USSR. Militarisation, fear, paranoia and other factors generated by the government to keep people in line are also taking their toll.
So-called “deaths of despair” are on the rise in the United States. According to Statista:
Diseases of despair, or deaths of despair, refer to the impact of drug overdose, suicide, and alcohol abuse on people and communities who experience a prolonged sense of despair due to their social or economic circumstances. Death rates from all three of these behavior-related medical conditions have increased in recent years in the United States. Deaths from these three conditions have risen so much that they have been cited as a major contributor to the recent decline in the overall life expectancy in the United States.
According to a research paper from JAMA Psychiatry, such deaths are rising significantly in the US, but not in other nations. A US National Academy of Sciences report notes that mortality is decreasing in a control group of 16 wealthy nations (including countries in Western Europe, Canada, Australia, and Japan).
As a way to explain why the US is an outlier among all other industrialised nations, the JAMA report notes:
“…human beings are constrained by evolutionary strategy (ie, huge brain, prolonged physical and emotional dependence, education beyond adolescence for professional skills, and extended adult learning) to require communal support at all stages of the life cycle. Without support, difficulties accumulate until there seems to be no way forward”.
Is the US headed towards collapse?
Ronald Reagan once called the Soviet Union the “Empire of Evil”. In many ways, it can be argued that, as the lone communist superpower, the USSR was a sort of empire, with proxies and resources and assets distributed around the world to oppose its global adversary, the United States. Eventually, the Soviet Union could not continue to extend itself around the globe. It became over extended, and it collapsed.
Today, as the world’s “lone superpower”, the US is also indisputably an empire. And like every empire before it, the US is hollowing itself out. While the US Congress vote to send billions upon billions to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, the American people suffer from disintegrating infrastructure and a total lack of support programs, the likes of which are needed to combat the deaths of despair plaguing American society.
In October 2023, President Biden gave an interview to CBS 60 Minutes, where he was asked whether the wars in Israel and Ukraine were “more than the United States can take on at the same time?”
Biden reacted angrily:
“No. We’re the United States of America for God’s sake, the most powerful nation in the history — not in the world, in the history of the world. The history of the world. We can take care of both of these and still maintain our overall international defense”.
I am sure that 1600 years ago a Roman Emperor was equally disgruntled when asked whether Rome could take on the Vandals and the Goths at the same time.
Well, we all know how well that worked out for Rome.
#End
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