When Nina Kaminska was a teenager in Stalin’s Moscow, she came home late after a party and discovered that she had forgotten her key. She rang her family’s apartment doorbell and waited … and waited.
Her father finally answered the door in a full suit and tie. He had always expected his doorbell to ring in the middle of the night, and he had dressed to be taken away by the secret police. When he saw that it was only his daughter, he slapped her face.
Every dictatorship tells neighbors to turn in neighbors if the authoritarian leaders call for it. There is always an excuse. In Nazi, Germany, they often used the threat of the communists.
Neighbor turning against neighbor. People who have known each other for years, whose children have played together, suddenly divided by rising cycles of suspicion, hate, and violence.
One of the most chilling aspects of the Holocaust, and of other genocides, is the recurrence of this dismal phenomenon in virtually every culture in which genocides have taken place. In this year’s lecture series we explore how such a thing could become possible – the psychological, social, and cultural factors that turn long-standing acquaintances (and some old friends) into victim and perpetrator.
In today’s America the Kulaks are the Donald Trump supporters and those who question the narrative regarding “the virus”.
The forces supporting government overreach at all levels are the modern-day Bolsheviks and neo-Bolsheviks. They believe that America is an awful, rotten, racist country. They plan to punish anyone that gets in the way of their cultural revolution.
Those authoritarian (s)elected officials don’t like workers that can think for themselves and the Bolsheviks don’t like the masses to be independent of government control.
They form kind of an unholy alliance to turn the whole country into a giant version of Baltimore with a tiny number of rich people and a lot of poor people.
Unless you grew up in the 1940s or 50s, you never get to see World War II era films on espionage and intrigue.
There were a ton of those movies made and they always showed the ordinary German citizen being frightened about saying anything critical about the Nazi government in front of their children or at work or at school.
The Nazis encouraged children especially, to report anything “suspicious” that they might hear their teachers or parents say and report it to their Nazi youth leader or directly to the Gestapo.
The ‘Report your neighbor’ theme was used by American film makers at the time to illustrate the difference in the climate of freedom found here in American versus the heavy hand of fascist repression found in Nazi Germany.
It is time to voice our complaint about the entire propaganda push by the Gestapo-like politicians and their minions which encourage Americans to rat on their fellow countrymen.
To infringe on our freedom of assembly, our freedom to worship, our freedom of movement, all in the name of “concern” and “the greater good” should be called what it is…TYRANNY!