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In 1936, news shocked the world: E. S. Holtzman, an unknown Bolshevik employee, admitted to having been part of a Trotskyist conspiracy to assassinate Stalin.
That planned plot served as an excuse for the Soviet regime to unleash what became known as the “Moscow Trials”, a brutal campaign of repression and political persecution that took place in the late 1930s against a group of reformist leaders within the Communist Party, who had become a serious obstacle to the transition from socialism to communism.
The enemy to beat was the hard core behind the Russian revolutionary, Leon Trovski. To lend credibility to his repressive pantomime, Stalin needed convincing testimony. And Holtzman became the chosen victim, willing to cooperate with all the falsehoods of that impeachment trial. Possibly without ever having traveled to Denmark, much less having participated in the plot he was accused of, Holtzman then appeared before a court blaming himself for having met in 1932 with Trotsky’s son at the Bristol Hotel in Copenhagen.
The sentence had already been passed: Holtzman was shot along with the rest of the alleged conspirators. A few days after the trial, a Danish newspaper revealed that the Bristol Hotel had been demolished in 1917. Soon after, convincing evidence came to light showing that Lev Sedov had been in Berlin on the day Russian intelligence allegedly placed him in Copenhagen.
Literary experts claim that this passage from the Bristol Hotel and all those related to the process of the “Great Purge” carried out by the Stalinist regime -which revealed the way in which the communist political police rewrote history to consolidate totalitarian power- inspired the English writer, George Orwell, to write “1984”.
72 years after this lucid and moving work, Orwell’s predictions about the existence of a “Ministry of Truth” that makes uncomfortable facts of history disappear according to an ideological agenda, have become a reality in the United States.
American citizens, who for more than two centuries have enjoyed extraordinary freedom to criticize everything, without euphemisms or mincing words, are now watching with concern how the new version of the Democratic Party, in its most totalitarian form, is taking over all areas of speech in a kind of regulatory spider’s web to control society as a whole.
The jail of the single truth
For the first time, American civil society feels in danger. A perverse cage has begun to deploy its surveillance, control, and political repression mechanisms over the population.
History is repeating itself. Totalitarian systems disguised as democracy, as soon as they establish themselves in power, set in motion a project of social engineering. The first step is to impose the rhetoric of a single truth, under an irrefutable interpretation of reality.
The totalitarian elite – the political elite, the technological giants, the universities and the media – know everything. They are the owners of absolute truths and, based on this conviction, they generate a type of authoritarian relationship that subjects society to the whims of the dictatorship. Their priority is to change people’s way of thinking and turn the political adversary into a deserter of the Constitution, to be excommunicated.
There is unrest over election fraud, then, the fault is on Trump supporters considered “enemies of the homeland.” There is polarization and racial tension in the country, the reason must be sought in the homophobic and segregation policies practiced by the Republicans. There is an increase in deaths and contagions by coronavirus, the cause is the previous conservative, reckless and irresponsible government, which did not do its job well.
True to their strategy of holding the opposition responsible for any crisis situation, with the arrival of the Democrats in the White House environmental regulations, immigration, jobs, economic stimulus, racial justice, women’s and gay rights, minorities and leadership on the international board will be assured from now on. The truth doesn’t matter. Only the narrative.
Naturally, this model of government will plunge the United States into institutional disarray, social unrest and economic paralysis, but that is something that today a good part of Americans -especially young college students- are totally incapable of understanding. They are too busy claiming sexual identity, historical memory, state subsidies and egalitarianism, instead of fighting for the defense of liberties, a sophistry fabricated by the right wing to deceive them.
They have too much rage against corrupt politicians and officials -which they only identify in the ranks of the Republican Party-, and too much indignation against the ineptitude of the cops and against the supremacism of the “Proud Boys,” to stop to think that Biden and Harris, far from solving the country’s problems, will tendentiously and tendentiously aggravate them, will tendentiously and irresponsibly aggravate them, if only because in their revanchist and sectarian heads there is nothing other than insane ideas extracted from the revolutionary Marxist mythology that today’s leftist activists teach at will in universities and indoctrinate in media outlets like CNN or The New York Times.
Democrats rewriting history
What was precisely one of the first decrees signed by Biden?
The repeal of the “1776 Commission”, an educational initiative signed by President Donald Trump to teach in schools the history of the United States from a patriotic perspective based on national identity and a republican civic culture, contrary to the thesis of the left that wants to anchor the slaveholding past in a biased, divisive and conflicting conception of historical memory.
Instead, Biden endorses the “1619 Project” -subscribed by The New York Times- which aims to rewrite American history, depicting the United States as an inherently racist nation, with slavery as the backdrop and main engine of a capitalist society founded on social injustice.
Shielding himself in political issues and revanchist temptations, Biden will create a new, Orwellian “Ministry of Truth” in order to systematically and from power, misinform and hide from students those characters and events in American history that do not conform to the radical agenda of the left. Specifically, the population must be convinced of the evil and racist nature of the founding fathers, and that slavery was the work of the right wing and never of the Democratic Party, as history truly recognizes.
Biden’s decision is perfect for understanding the fundamental mechanism of totalitarianism. It is not the triumph of one ideology over another, but the systemic subjugation of one sector of society by another that has a monopoly on power and uses it unchecked to instill fear and indoctrination against free information.
How do you become part of the empire of truth? How do you become an accomplice of totalitarianism? Very simply: by accepting the narrative and becoming a promoter and defender of the official discourse.
Totalitarian regimes are transversal dictatorships. The flock has to be submitted. Whoever chooses a different path is a political enemy. And whoever tries to contribute a different interpretation of the official reality is a subversive.
Twitter, the new thought police
In its role as a front man for the power of the left, Twitter – the same communication platform that arbitrarily suspended the account of the President of the United States and blocked the information provided by The New York Post on the alleged links with Ukraine of the then Democratic candidate for the U.S. presidential elections – has already created the first cage to control those who do not agree with the official truth.
It is called Birdwatch, a “community application to tag false information,” as it says on the social media account, but in reality, it is a maneuver against public freedoms to establish an Orwellian-style totalitarian state of information, in which the digital Big Brother protects citizens from all free information that Twitter – and the left-wing inquisitorial thinking – consider harmful and that could make them uncomfortable.
For their part, the media in the service of totalitarianism, turned into a cell of agitation and propaganda, play their role of doomsayers to justify interventionist practices in citizens’ freedoms by the government.
Using Trump as the perfect political excuse, Thomas B. Edsall, a columnist for The New York Times, has lamented that the president’s “fake news” has sparked a debate among legal scholars to analyze how far “sacrosanct free speech” needs constitutional protection when it goes against the interests of the people.
Under the headline “Have Trump’s Lies Wrecked Free Speech?” Edsall sets the stage for us to start accepting and repeating the official speech.
From now on, if the American public opinion does not react, people will most likely prefer to shut up their true criteria and learn to disguise their opinions in order to survive.
If that were to happen, it would already be very difficult to break free from the tyrannical bond.
The mechanism is perverse: once the person makes the official discourse his own and repeats the “truths” of the new owners of power, the process of Stockholm syndrome is unleashed. Those who suffer from it live tormented between believing one thing and manifesting something quite different.
It is amazing to confirm that this diabolical process begins when our opinions are stolen from us. It happened in “1984” to Winston Smith in the totalitarian state of Oceania, where the party imposed its official truth through omnipresent surveillance, constant propaganda and the annihilation of anyone who, even in private, rebels against the devices of power. Something that could happen now to the American people.
“I do not believe that the kind of society I describe will necessarily come to pass, but (…) something similar could happen,” wrote George Orwell a few days after his book went to press. That is why his warning message is more decisive than ever.
Juan Carlos Sánchez, journalist and writer. His columns are published in different newspapers in Spain and the United States. He is the author of several books and is preparing the essay "Nación y libertad en el pensamiento económico del Conde Pozos Dulces" // Juan Carlos es periodista y escritor. Sus columnas se publican en diferentes diarios de España y EE.UU. Autor de varios libros, tiene en preparación la obra de ensayo “Nación y libertad en el pensamiento económico del Conde Pozos Dulces”