From Moscow, 1936 to Minneapolis, 2021

2,256 words

“Psychosis”: a severe mental disorder in which thought and emotions are so impaired that contact is lost with external reality. 

You wake up these mornings and ask yourself: how much worse is it going to get today? You skim a news story or an editorial coming out of the New York Times, Washington Post, or the Detroit Free Press. Or, perhaps you turn on CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News. Something is terribly wrong. You ask yourself: Where am I? In Moscow? Is it 1936? Why do I feel terror all around me?

No, tovarish. You are not crazy, and you are not in the USSR of the mid-late 1930s. It just seems like it. The single most glaring point of comparison occurred this past month. It was the completed show-trial of Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis, an innocent man thrown down by the mandarins of the ruling class to appease the mobs. More on this further down.

What you are experiencing — I must switch to “we” — is daily life in a political-social order firmly in the grip of psychosis. Turning to any of the MSM sources mentioned above confirms what we know to be true: we are being gas-lighted at a level of sophistication, scope, and intensity that makes what the Guardians of the Revolution in Stalin’s Moscow were about look downright primitive. We remember how external reality unfolded in the past — a violent, career criminal like George Floyd, high on drugs dies resisting arrest; life goes on as before — one less delinquent to clog up the courts, take up prison space and drive up recidivism statistics. That’s reality as we used to experience it.

The departure from it with Floyd’s death could not be more stunning and far-fetched as in a darkly comedic novel. In a nationwide frenzy of rioting befitting public decorum in the third-world, a big lovable teddy bear, slain by agents infected with an invisible miasma — “systemic racism” — moves into his place in the pantheon of civil rights martyrs — sitting at the right hand of Emmett Till. On his “family,” the authorities immediately shower twenty-seven million dollars accompanied by groveling, tear-drenched apologies. The arresting officer is on his way to prison for many years. The country’s ruling class calls for the submission to arrest by its black citizens to be optional. Black criminals become heroes because black crime is not really crime. War is peace. Slavery is freedom, and ignorance is strength. External reality is nothing other than an annoying impediment when “systemic racism” rises to the top of officially declared, societal evils.

Moscow, then; Minneapolis, now — what’s the difference in how external reality gets excised? The officially enforced psychotic storyline in Stalin’s USSR was that the capitalist rival powers were deeply threatened by this socialist workers’ state with its abundance and equality. They had aligned themselves in plotting its destruction. How was this to be accomplished? Internally, by fifth columnists, traitors, secret hirelings of the capitalists working in various modes of sabotage, assassination plots, and collaboration with enemy powers to turn the workers’ paradise back into a voracious capitalist slave state and move rapidly into a fascist dictatorship. “Fascism” was in Stalin’s unique dramaturgical model the last stage of capitalism. A “fascist” was the Stalinist label for the enemy du jour — very flexible. Very much like “racist.” 

What then were the Russian people faced with such a dire existential threat supposed to do? Everyone, and I mean, everyone, was called upon to identify, expose and denounce the treasonous citizens hiding within. You were either a fascist or an anti-fascist — no in-between. Denounce or be denounced. Sound familiar? Just how many saboteurs and conspirators were there? Turns out, a lot — as in millions of enemies of the state. Well, not really, but the Russian people with the encouragement of the CPSU were encouraged to act as if wreckers, traitors, and fascist collaborators were working away in every nook and cranny of Soviet society. Treason was, dare we say, “systemic.” Denunciation of whomever seemed to be in close proximity became a patriotic duty — fellow workers, family members, friends, anyone handy, anyone insufficiently enthused about the handiwork of Comrade Stalin. Due process for the accused? They had two options: confess immediately and accuse others as accomplices. That strategy might reduce the length of the sentence. Or, they could protest their innocence and resist the interrogators until they were completely broken down by torture. Then confess. 

Thus commenced the Great Terror of 1936-1939, a war launched by the Soviet state and its propaganda organs against its own people. Terror became a regularized instrument to maintain the fiction that the society was riddled with people conniving to betray the Revolution. Which played itself out as a mass psychotic episode in which the great bulk of the population was forced to pretend to believe what was completely contrary to reality. 

Much ink has been spilled trying to explain why and how such suicidal, collective madness could have been engineered. What in retrospect is clear and certain is that: (a) the ruling class — including the communists staffing the brutal security-enforcement arms extorting the confessions — knew the storyline was false and (b) no serious resistance to the enforced fiction was offered by the entire population. Everyone — accusers and accused alike — played along. Why they did is not so easy to understand. 

Fast forward to 2021, to the USA, to the spectacle of self-lacerating confessions of “racism” and “white privilege,” and to believing what is “completely contrary to reality.” Our own Great Terror is well underway with a psychotic storyline coming from the ruling class and its propaganda organs. Rigorous censorship aimed at enforcing self-censorship has been put in place by the government at every level, schools, universities, and corporations. Accusations of “racism” rain down on people everywhere with dire consequences. Due process? As in Soviet Russia, confession seems to be the standard option, although no mercy follows from it. No matter. Good luck proving you are not a “racist”? It’s in the DNA. . . of white folks (Obama-genetics), which means white folks are the problem. 

You can buy Stephen Paul Foster’s novel Toward the Bad I Kept on Turning here.

The solution? Daily purges to squash individual dissent and send the message: “‘racism” is everywhere; denying it merely affirms it.” Systematic ethnic-cultural cleansing is advancing unopposed with armies of vandals disfiguring and destroying monuments and statues, any object remotely symbolizing “white supremacy.” The Stalinist mania for renaming has been taken up by the social justice warriors — streets, landmarks, schools, our currency likely soon — the goal being the eradication of cultural manifestations of our white, European heritage. “Renaming bases and removing statues that honor racist leaders will help America begin anew” is a recent headline from USA Today. Whether America is better off beginning “anew,” of course, is not a consideration raised by this op-ed writer.

Mass psychosis requires a “cult of personality.” The Russian version was a Georgian psychopath, the man at the top who launched and managed the Great Terror. Americans, for whatever pathological reasons, prefer to reach down and raise up the dregs.

From CNN: “The place where George Floyd died is a now sacred space and a battleground.” It has special rules for white people who would visit. In place now is a moral apartheid to remind white people of their racial guilt and what the posture of their atonement must look like. The “guilty” parties here, as they did in Russia, seem willing to play their assigned role in the official fiction — so the fiction continues to gain momentum as a state-sanctioned Glaubensbekenntnis, a confession of faith. This faith is a jealous one that punishes heretics.

So, we have the “external reality” excised by the propaganda organs: George Floyd, a stereotype of everything gone wrong with black American men: unemployed street thug, drug addict, sperm donor dad for multiple women. In every respect, the man took from the world and gave nothing of value back. 

Then, up stepped the BLM necromancers with the supporting chorus of the mainstream media. Floyd’s criminally instigated, undignified departure from this world suddenly became an act akin to transubstantiation. The mortal “substance” of George’s drug-riddled body and criminal past was mystically transformed into an immortal substance of black martyrdom, an object of adoration, an eternal symbol of black suffering in an oppressive world of whiteness. 

“Behold the ‘Innocent,’ a man of color who suffered and died from the unbounded meanness of white people. Blessed are those called to the worship of George.”

This remarkable apotheosis has been carried out in a massive propaganda campaign in the best tradition of Pravda. Its purpose is to serve the fiction of “systemic racism,” the NYT “1619” version of America’s historical foundations, and the doctrine of the superior virtue of the oppressed. 

To be fair to Stalin, his fiction was perfectly egalitarian — anyone and everyone was a potential traitor, a fascist in disguise. Even the old Bolsheviks who stood with Lenin at the moment of creation were not exempt. Most of them fell victim to the Great Terror. 

The American Stalinists fervently profess the equality of all as a central article of their faith and skepticism about the reality of “race.” Yet, their approach to designating “enemies of the people” is, shall we say, much more “discriminating.” It relies on a race-determinist model which in theory employs nebulous, protean abstractions such as “whiteness, “white privilege,” and the most aggressive and rousing of them all, “systemic racism.” 

In practice, it resorts to all of the original Stalinist methods of ritualized denunciation of the designated targets for destruction with government-supported mobs providing the emotional energy for the lawless assaults on innocent citizens and for the “legal” lynchings. Thus, US House of Representatives member from California Maxine Waters flew into Minneapolis on the eve of the verdict in the Derek Chauvin trial to intimidate the jury and incite the street gangs clamoring for Chauvin’s conviction to riot — lawlessness at the highest government level in subverting the machinery of justice with no repercussions.

This brings us back to the lynching of Derek Chauvin. The kind of show trial that we witnessed of the Minneapolis policeman was the invention of Josef Stalin. What we saw was not a “legal” proceeding: the outcome of the guilt of the defendant was predetermined. The show trial is an intimidation ritual, a scripted spectacle intended to animate the ruling fiction with real-life characters designated to play the villain’s role in a morality play. In the dock are moral monsters. The proceedings are simply to illuminate their culpability, to produce for the masses the frisson of retribution and to vindicate the virtue of the ruling class guardians. Though in reality innocent, the “defendants” are paraded as imaginary cretins, sacrificed to sustain the delusion of an ever-present threat to the survival of a truly just social order — hence, continued vigilance, that is, even more repression. 

From one of the most reliable propaganda arms of the state, PBS: “On Capitol Hill, Republicans as well as Democrats said they were relieved at the verdict and predicted it could give momentum to policing reform legislation that has been proposed in both the House and Senate.” To paraphrase George Orwell: “Some verdicts are more acceptable than others.”

Derek Chauvin was “guilty,” not of a legal transgression, but of being an evil person. His “heart was too small,” proclaimed black special prosecutor Jerry Blackwell to the jury members in his summation. So much for the law. So much for facts when a childish metaphor will do for conviction. Blackwell appeared to be channeling the ghost of Stalin’s prosecutor, Andrey Vyshinsky. Vyshinsky played a starring role in perhaps the most famous show trial of all times, that of Nikolai Bukharin (fictionalized as Nikolai Rubashov in Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon.) Bukharin was a pristine Bolshevik, loved by Lenin, more Bolshevik than Stalin himself. Yet, Bukharin was converted by prosecutor Vyschinsky into a fascist, an “accursed crossbreed of fox and pig” who had committed a “whole nightmare of vile crimes.”

The “size of his heart,” however, was not brought into question. Jerry Blackwell and Andrey Vyshinsky — prosecutors from different eras, of different styles. The modus operandi is the same — affirming the wickedness of the defendant. The outcome, guaranteed. Celebration by the mob and the cry of “not enough.” Newsweek: “Derek Chauvin Conviction Isn’t Enough, Say Minneapolis Activists.”

Incidentally, the imprimatur for Stalin’s “legal” theater was given by none other than New York Times’ Walter Duranty, the NYT’s Moscow bureau chief and Pulitzer Prize winner. FDR’s Ambassador to the USSR, Joseph Davies, physically present at the trial, performed as Stalin’s useful idiot. In his memoir Mission to Moscow, he wrote: “It is generally accepted by members of the Diplomatic Corps that the accused must have been guilty of an offense which in the Soviet Union would merit the death penalty.” 

That the Derek Chauvin travesty of justice was not only received with sadistic howls of joy by the mobs in the street but embraced and relished by those in the highest reaches of power clearly signals that Sovietization, American-style, is fully in place. Most disturbing is the acquiescence of so many white Americans to their growing demonization. This, no doubt, gives Biden, Harris, and their plutocrat enablers the confidence to believe there will be little resistance to the ratcheting up of anti-white inspired retribution, so they are promising more to come. 

Will they misjudge? Who knows? But, making external reality the enemy does not usually produce a happy ending. Look what happened to the Soviet ruling class.