American
Republicans are just Russian Bolsheviks!
(Original
version of this post has been published in the summer of 2016 and available here - that page also has some short pieces about politics written mostly in 2016).
The latest on this topic is at: "The Impeachment is Over. What's Next?"
When I came to the U.S. I wanted to become a part of the greatest democracy in the world, so I decided to register as a member of a political party. After checking the general ideas of the two largest parties I decided to become a Republican. In Russia there was only one political party and in order to become a member, one had to get through a lot of scrutiny. The first surprise was that to become a party member here in the U.S one has to do one thing – make a small payment at least once a year. That was easy. So, for a number of years I was a dormant Republican. The Hell broke during 2008 Presidential elections. I personally liked senator Obama as the best of all candidates from both parties. But soon I started getting a lot of crazy letters from RNC, many of those had lots internal contradictions, or no logic at all. Those letters brought a lot of limply plain lies. People who wrote those letter assumed that I was a stupid uneducated person who is angry at everyone and they wanted to make me even more angry (remember, it was the time of a financial crisis and a lot of people were very angry already, including me). The authors of the letters clearly did not want me to think, they did not reason with me, did not lay out any arguments. I saw patterns of brainwashing and emotion manipulation.
Very
similar patterns, indeed.
Very
soon I realized that RNC was using exactly same media technologies Russian
Communist Party has been using for decades. Among many common themes were
“Everyone hates us/U.S. and we must defend ourselves even if we need to
sacrifice our individual freedoms”, and “We must have a strong leader”, “We are
the only people who know the truth, all others are liars and influenced by our
enemies”.
Anyway,
I do not like being manipulated (one of the reasons I left Russia; and one of
the reasons I recognized the patterns), so I quit being a Republican simply by
stopping making my annual payment. However, I have been getting that kind of
letters for a long time. In hindsight, I should have collected them.
A
very similar behavior I observed again in 2016. But this election year was the
craziest of all. I already have posted a couple
of posts on similarities between the current attempt (at least as it is
seen today) of a mob revolution in the U.S. and some of the mob revolutions in
the past. That includes the fact that all of the mob revolutions are based on
emotional manipulating and directing people’s anger to an uncritical support
and destructive actions. Here I want to add a couple of more.
The
majority of people supporting an odious leader do not want to participate in an
everyday social building. They want to have “a strong but fair king/tsar” who
would rule with “an iron fist”, mercilessly eradicating all enemies (of course
the “king” will never turn onto his current supporters, or will he?). Those
people are looking for an easy way out, they want somebody else doing the work
for them – like reading, thinking, comparing, analyzing, communicating,
compromising, writing documents, etc. However, the history proves that the new
“king” never does what he promised, and just uses the opportunity to strengthen
his power by getting rid of anyone who disagrees.
Another
group of people who support an odious leader is ones who are just looking for a
personal political/financial gain (of course, when it happens, it will never go
away, or will it?).
It
has been interesting to see how many prominent Republicans lined up behind a
candidate they all initially ridiculed – not as a candidate but just as a human
being. And now they all praise the same human being they ridiculed and laughed
at. Did they change their views about Trump as a human being? Of course not!
But they swallowed their feelings anyway. One might wonder - why? The main
answer is – because they have become afraid of being pushed out of the politics
by the aggressive Trump supporters who brought him up the ranks. To the public
those high-ranking Republicans say that they do it “for the Party”. Some of
them may be saying it even to themselves – a common version of
self-manipulation (no normal person wants to admit the lack of integrity – even
to themselves).
However,
even this phenomenon is not new in the history. For example, during the purge, in
1937 - 1938 in Russia, more than a dozen formerly prominent party and
government leaders were charged with espionage and treason, and with killing
other prominent Russian leaders. Eighteen former top party members out of
twenty-one were executed (including Nicolai Bukharin who for many years was one
of the closest allies of Josef Stalin). The most astonishing thing was that
they all confessed to the bogus offenses. In personal letters found and
published much later many of them made a statement that they confessed not
because of being tortured (not all of them were) but to preserve the Party
unity, because they wanted to avoid the Party to be broken into factions
fighting for the power, especially in front of looming war (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_of_the_Anti-Soviet_Bloc_of_Rights_and_Trotskyites).
In
hindsight, that purge of the top party members finalized Stalin’s path the
Russian throne.
I
do hope that Donald Trump will not win (when a student asked me who would I
vote for – I said: “For the lesser of the two evils”). However, I hope even
more that the Republican party will be broken in factions, and the aggressive,
racist faction of “deplorables” will eventually shrink down (like KKK did)
taking with it all the current Trump endorsers. But the healthy part of the
party will eventually reconstruct itself as a true conservative movement –
because the democracy needs two strong parties (at least) to function.
BTW:
many of those who in 1938 manufactured bogus trials soon were purged, too.
If you read this post, I suggest to read "The Degradation Of White Male American Elite".
If you read this post, I suggest to read "The Degradation Of White Male American Elite".
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