The author of this article is a self-proclaimed Democrat and liberal. She is also from the Ukraine, and knows the unspeakable horrors perpetrated by Communists on her home country.
She bemoans the fact that that Americans dropped our guard against Communism after the Cold War. Even the “woke” generation calls out Naziism, but what about its evil totalitarian twin brother, Communism?
In particular she calls out the “Group Think” pressure that permeates many of our institutions. That itself is Communistic.
We need more people like her to remind us that if we fail to recognize and harness the totalitarian impulse in ourselves, it could enslave us..
We still have time.
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“A better explanation is that Americans and others across the West have simply forgotten about it all, or never learned about it in the first place: the Soviet dictators, the purges and terror, the dissidents and refuseniks, the gulags and famines and genocides, the millions shot, starved, worked, and frozen to death. All of it hardly exists in our common imagination. Most Americans have no idea what Soviet communism, which was still around relatively recently, actually looked like.”
“When nearly 70% of college students believe that professors should be reported for saying something that students find “offensive,” is it surprising that nearly the same percentage of Americans are afraid to share their political views with each other? We are discovering the lesson that the Soviets and their victims learned long ago—that fear of social disapproval, especially when it’s enforced by government and the media, breeds self-censorship and obedience, and robs society of its ability to discuss and assess reality. When the monolith of progressive politicians, journalists, academics, experts, and self-proclaimed fact checkers spent over a year excoriating anyone who considered the possibility that the pandemic began as a lab leak in China, it was hard not to think of the privileged Western press in Moscow in the 1930s, led by The New York Times’Walter Duranty, destroying the credibility of Welsh journalist Gareth Jones for telling the truth about the famine in Ukraine.”
“For a lifelong liberal, it feels quaint to raise alarms about political movements that remind me of the communist era, like simultaneously pearl-clutching and Red-baiting. Even referring to the words “communist” and “Bolshevik” as pejoratives makes you sound old-fashioned and uncool. But anti-communism was never cool. It was simply correct. It’s time to remember why.”
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/communism-mary-mycio