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highplainsdem

(48,731 posts)
Thu Jan 18, 2018, 11:04 AM Jan 2018

Khrushchev's great-granddaughter: Trump's America in some ways worse than Russia during my childhood

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/donald-trump-s-not-quite-joseph-stalin-his-fake-news-ncna838456


Nina Khrushcheva: Donald Trump's not quite Joseph Stalin. But his 'Fake News Awards' should scare us.

Trump’s America is in some ways even worse than Russia was during my Soviet childhood.



-snip-

As a former Soviet citizen, I am frequently overcome by a horror-movie feeling of fear and disbelief. It’s almost as if I don’t know where I am. In cosmopolitan New York? Or back in monotonous Moscow, listening to Soviet leaders boasting from the Kremlin about Communism’s drummed-up victories and denouncing their illusory enemies?

Arizona Senator Jeff Flake delivered a pre-planned speech from the Senate floor on Wednesday criticizing the president’s attacks on the press. “Mr. President, it is a testament to the condition of our democracy that our own president uses words infamously spoken by Joseph Stalin to describe his enemies," Flake said. Frankly, Trump’s America is in some ways even worse than it was during my Soviet childhood. When I was growing up in Moscow in the 1970s, not even Pravda used such menacing language for the Kremlin’s critics.

In the early years after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, and particularly under Joseph Stalin’s despotic regime in the 1930s, “enemies of the people” emerged as the regime's most terrifying label. During Stalin’s Great Purges of 1936-38, the term vragi naroda (enemies of the people) branded all those who disagreed with the Kremlin — whether about the planned economy, unfree press or predetermined election results. That label, which defined Soviet reality, typically resulted in immediate death or imprisonment within the Gulag of harsh labor camps.

This changed when Nikita S. Khrushchev, my great-grandfather, denounced his predecessor Stalin during a 1956 speech to the Communist Party. Khrushchev dismantled the Stalinesque system of the Gulag camps, and, perhaps as important, the vragi naroda became a tragedy of the past. The term itself was retired; Khrushchev considered the hateful language damaging to the Soviet Union’s fragile recovery from totalitarianism.

-snip-

Not only does Trump appear less democratic than the Soviet autocrat Khrushchev, but his anti-free speech rhetoric places him in unsavory company; the current pantheon of world rulers who share his disdain for the free press include Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, China’s Xi Jinping and the Philippines’s Rodrigo Duterte.

In democratic societies, a free press guaranties that the state’s menacing language can never turn into menacing actions against its people — as Stalin’s Gulags did. That’s how many dictatorships have thrived. Where would Nazi Germany be without Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, who dubbed the Jews the “sworn enemy of the German people” because they doubted Adolf Hitler’s Aryan agenda?

Of course, the flashy real-estate tycoon-turned-reality-TV-star-turned-foulmouthed president is arguably more like Charlie Chaplin’s buffoon character in “The Great Dictator” (1940) than the real Hitler or Stalin. Or perhaps Trump is more like Hollywood’s mean clown “Pennywise” — "Trumpywise" — insulting some, punching others and scaring the rest.

But the danger of this nightmare is that it gets more real every day. And the longer it lasts, the harder it will be to wake up.




Khruscheva is professor of international affairs at The New School.
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Khrushchev's great-granddaughter: Trump's America in some ways worse than Russia during my childhood (Original Post) highplainsdem Jan 2018 OP
More: Leghorn21 Jan 2018 #1
Message auto-removed Name removed Jan 2018 #2
Someone finally says what I had been thinking WyLoochka Jan 2018 #3

Leghorn21

(13,520 posts)
1. More:
Thu Jan 18, 2018, 11:10 AM
Jan 2018

Yet, when Trump tweets, or when speeches or ads attack the news media, this still can amount to the conditions of state censorship. Before Michael Wolff’s book “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House” was released, the president’s personal lawyer filed suit to stop its publication. As the book garnered widespread attention this month, Trump indignantly objected to the “current libel laws [that] are a sham and a disgrace, and do not represent American values or American fairness.”

Fairness for who? This kind of pronouncement is designed to instill intimidation and fear. It creates volatility — threats shouted from the top, even without the threat of physical harm, can restrict public debate and influence public policy. Such actions reinforce social and political inequalities, and foster an atmosphere of mistrust and animosity between political parties and social groups. As a recent report from the think tank Freedom House argues, “basic rights and political freedoms in the United States are deteriorating at a faster pace under President Donald Trump, exacerbated by attacks on key institutions like the press and the courts."

Response to highplainsdem (Original post)

WyLoochka

(1,629 posts)
3. Someone finally says what I had been thinking
Thu Jan 18, 2018, 11:25 AM
Jan 2018

I remember the late 50's and the 60's - the stories that came out about Stalin and the ensuing worldwide condemnation.

I kept thinking, surely someone who would know, someone who was there will speak up about the similarities of trump 's rhetoric to stalin's.

Thank you, Nina Khrushcheva

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