For all the completely justified loathing and suspicion being directed at Vladimir Putin and his white supremacist kleptocracy’s manipulation of our own far more ineptly run white supremacist kleptocracy, it’s worth noting the influence on US politics, and on what might be called the modern American Scene, by another Russian of infamous renown.
I refer, of course, to Josef Stalin.
Aside from his cherished position in the golden circle of great historical mass murderers of the 20th century, alongside his fellow morally crippled shambling mockeries of life Mao Zedong and Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin pioneered ideas, techniques and the manipulation of the credulous that resonate in the good old USA today, with a broad and telling impact across the political spectrum.
Sure, Fascist Americans still love the swastika, gushing over all the toxically hypermasculine butch swagger associated with their comical misperceptions of themselves as the master race. But let’s not forget how Stalin, inspired by Hitler and his public relations man, Josef Goebbels, ignored the number one Nazi’s intellectual property rights as so many Russians do, and ran off with the big lie theory, taking it in a whole new direction.
To his credit, Stalin not only controlled the present of his world, he rewrote the past, too, in order to manage and corrupt the future. With techniques as crude as photo retouching, he created an entire new subclass of the dead—the unperson. He who was once a treasured ally was now a bitter enemy—or even never existed.
Imagine what he could have done with photoshop, CGI, and all those deepfake video apps.
But you really don’t have to imagine that now, do you? Along with its willingness to sacrifice millions of its constituency in the name of tertiarily syphilitic narcissism, the current administration and its public relations telemedia unit has perfected the modern take on the big lie, and made an art of the accompanying pivot of denial in regard to the stream of bullshit that preceded it.
And unpersons? “Never heard of him.” “Don’t know her.” The evidence surfaces, and the denials persist. And naturally the party, and of course, its serfs, believe. To do otherwise would contradict the tacitly agreed upon narrative, to general dismay and discomfiture among the willing. Amnesia may have been once the primary purview of soap operas, but it’s found a new home in reality, thanks as ever to television and an ethically misshapen creature of that medium.
And nobody did a cult of personality like Stalin. They didn’t call him “Uncle Joe” for nothing. George Orwell called him “Big Brother” as an implicit reminder of the familial link, but with a note of detachment to maintain his grip on what he feared was speculative fiction.
Stalin’s acolytes made a science of sycophantry—and the current criminals in charge of the dying on life support republic in which we live are avid students of those well trained shitstains, more than matching those Soviet masters of supplication in the face of power, bringing ass kissing to an executive class level.
Let’s face it—we all know the only thing stopping these feckless mountebanks from referring to their capo as “Dear Leader” is that North Korea got there first with that one. Kim dies, and I’m willing to bet we’ve got dibs.
But, as noted above, I can’t lay all this on Fascist America alone. We have to acknowledge the impact on the gatekeepers of the modern self identified, and yes, self satisfied progressive left, in particular those who brandish the already tiresome word “woke” as their torch and pitchfork, of Stalin’s extravagantly successful maintenance of his own rebranding and interpretation of Marxism.
The murder of Leon Trotsky, his onetime partner in Soviet crime, not to mention his purges in the 1930s—to my mind, Trotsky’s assassination, and the purges, were classifiable as pogroms, but stay with me here—are a perfect model for the party purity derived, circular firing squad that is so much a daily part of the self-styled progressive left.
In the all or nothing, zero sum game played here, there is no room for doubt, for circumspection, for allies who don’t embrace every aspect of whoever is in charge of the ever-evolving Diktat, that week, that day, that hour.
If you believe, as I do, that Stalin was able to transmute the endless terror and fear of god of his people into religious fervor for a political philosophy ostensibly free of the taint of religion, then we have to acknowledge how the mannerisms and manifestations of worshipful fervor, and, let’s face it, the Inquisition, informs a vast swathe of the belief systems of the left.
Hence the culture of cancelation. Performative morality as a protective shield from potential social assassination. The embrace of victim culture as the red badge of courage, borne by a political class that has made itself into the equivalent of a power bottom.
This intractability of dogma, compounded by the cascading onslaught of the near constant redefinition and readjustment of socially defining and socially acceptable terminology, owes a huge debt to mid Soviet era doublespeak.
Whatever the function for which this bullshit was originally intended, it was most successful at obfuscating into obtuse incoherence any idea deemed worthy of slipping over the transom into the social contract. Whatever might be acceptable today is likely to be deemed problematic tomorrow.
An additional gift of this constantly shifting nomenclaturemania is the cudgel provided to the Gotcha! and Aha! police in their relentless pursuit of those coloring outside the lines, whether intentionally or by missing that day’s evolving memo.
It is, of course, worth pointing out that I credit neither side of these identitarian clown colleges with the knowledge of history, let alone intellectual curiosity, to have come by these notions through study, consideration and analysis of the past. It’s just that totalitarianism has a limited playbook, and these tools only have so many tools with which to further their agenda.
And lest you think this is just the same old relativist, both sides are equally bad nonsense, allow me to disabuse you of that notion.
Fascist America is the clear and present danger. These terrorist clowns are fucking nuts. Despite their swaggering field marshal fantasies, they’re really just lethally armed cannon fodder for their oligarchic owners/masters—with the potential of causing a shitload of damage to their fellow Americans.
With all due respect, like the traitor’s flag they love so much, they are a lost cause, but a lost cause that will not go away through reason.
That said, the nascent authoritarianism that has conquered the progressive left, or, at the very least, has possession of the bullhorn, isn’t doing itself any favors by dint of its refusal to find some common ground—fuck, any common ground—to stand together against this menace.
So here we are. American Fascists are joyfully willing members of a Stalinist death cult of personality, fervently worshiping a man whose primary and what might be sole qualification for such adoration are assurances that he loathes the same people the serfs do.
I’m certain if he actually gave it any thought, he really does share the mobs’ distaste for anyone not them, but it’s clear to anyone with half an ounce of sense that he doesn’t give a shit about anything, his cultists included.
And at the same time, American Leftists are microcultists, cell members of their own identification, devising, judging, accusing, denouncing, cancelling any person or aspect of culture which doesn’t completely agree, and I mean completely agree, with every purity defining aspect of that culture agreed upon as sacrosanct—a plastic and fungible agreement that is just as likely as not to go the route of the Ribbentrop Molotov pact before bedtime, to be rewritten as gospel for breakfast.
So yes, Vladimir Putin and his criminal cartel state have had their hands in the erosive destruction of our republic. He and his crack staff of cyber fucks knew a nation full of suckers when they saw one—and they finally achieved what Khrushchev promised, without a shot, without a missile, without a nuclear detonation—but with social media, fake ads, and the internet.
But credit must be paid to the inspiration, by the osmotic effect on human nature—because let’s face it, neither of these crowds do a lot of research, (google doesn’t count)—of Josef Stalin.
It's Stalin’s approach to politics, as manifested by both sides of the trough, that have facilitated the inside job of murdering our country from within and made our enemies’ job that much easier.
And on that happy note,
As ever, I remain,
Howard Victor Chaykin—a Prince, whose name means “seagull” in Russian, by the way.