From several horses’ mouths—people who escaped communist regimes—America is closer to totalitarianism than we like to think. From Giulio Meotti at gatestoneinstitute.org:
Refugees from Communism Horrified at America
- “There was no free speech, you could not share values or thoughts if they were not Mao’s values and thoughts….” — Lei Zhang, Carolina Journal, July 2, 2021.
- “You have people who now say, ‘Math is white supremacy,’ or that calculus was invented by this man of this race so it is oppression. This is stupid”. — Lei Zhang, Carolina Journal, July 2, 2021.
- “Most of this crap originated on US campuses. I was at Stanford in the mid-1980s and watched with amazement how political correctness erupted. I had always blamed people like Stalin or Beria for censorship, but now I realized that many intellectuals want it too! Such people will always want censorship; they will always want to be oppressors because they always pretend to be oppressed”. — Vladimir Bukovsky.
- “When they tell kids, kindergarten, 5, 6 years old, that they are bad because they are in this race, or they are oppressed if they are in this group, and children cannot disagree, this is very bad because they cannot change their skin color or where they are from. They did not choose to be this race or that race, they are Americans, we are all Americans, and if we are fighting each other over this ideology, I agree with that when people say that this will destroy America. This is what happened under Mao and the Cultural Revolution….If you disagree or say something different they punish you…. You have no free thought”. — Lei Zhang, Carolina Journal, July 2, 2021.
- “As a community, we face an important choice. We can succumb to extreme left ideology and spend the rest of our lives ghost-chasing and witch-hunting, rewriting history, politicizing science, redefining elements of language, and turning STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education into a farce. Or we can uphold a key principle of democratic society—the free and uncensored exchange of ideas….” — Anna Krylov, who was born in the Soviet Union, and is now a Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, The Journal of Physical Chemistry, June 10, 2021.
- Today, those who fled from Communist regimes see — most dangerously — the same censorship and totalitarian suppression repeated in America’s democracy. They know better than we do what freedom of thought means, and the price we must pay to defend it.
 Garry Kasparov, the former World Chess Champion from Russia, noted the “self-destructive spiral of the West”: it damages its cultural heritage instead of defending it. Regarding the weakness of Western leaders, Kasparov told Le Figaro: “Where are the de Gaulles and the Churchills? I see a crowd of Chamberlain and Daladier…. I was shocked to see the rush to debunk historical figures judged by our current criteria. The West should be proud of them instead of hating itself”. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images) |
Today in America there is a new generation of exiles from Communist regimes fighting a new political correctness, called wokeism.
Czeslaw Milosz, before he was a Nobel laureate for Literature and author of The Captive Mind, fought two totalitarianisms in his native country, Poland: first Nazism, then Communism, which took its place. In 1945, after joining the Polish diplomatic service, Milosz was appointed cultural attaché to the embassy in New York, where he served until being recalled in 1950. In 1951, he defected to France.
STRAIGHT LINE LOGIC 