Both Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler were mass murderers. They subscribed to ideologies that divided people classes and races, dehumanizing those who had the misfortune of belonging to the wrong groups and killing them in their millions. One difference was, however, that Hitler’s homicidal drive largely spared ordinary non-Jewish Germans — certainly, those who were loyal to him — whereas Stalin exterminated the best and the brightest across the Soviet Union indiscriminately, killing millions of ordinary people, including a great many Stalinists.
Donald Trump completely lacks Hitler’s or Stalin’s ideological commitment, but he too divides Americans into good and evil. Good Americans are those who like him. They are honest Republicans, his African Americans and true patriots who love their country very much. Evil Americans — the Democrat Party, Antifa, the communists and now even Fox News — are those who in any way contradict him or simply aren’t part of his cult of personality. In the service of his cult of personality Trump has murdered hundreds of thousands of Americans, and, like Stalin, he seems to be systematically targeting his own supporters by encouraging them to distrust science, reject masks and social distancing and attend his superspreader rallies.
Trump probably doesn’t know enough history to actually pattern himself on Stalin but instinctively he has adopted a Stalinist term — “enemies of the people” — to attack America’s free press.
Yet, just like Russians who believe by a wide margin that Stalin was their country’s greatest leader, almost 75 million of Americans — close to one-half of those who voted in this year’s election — still support their murderer.
Trump is a populist, and populists treat ordinary people with utmost disdain. They tell them blatant lies, excite their base instincts, and throw them the occasional bone. Liberal democrats, by contrast, are full of respect for “the people” and the popular will, and revere the people’s collective wisdom. If you tell people the truth, their creed goes, they will always choose good over evil. Time and again, however, history shows that populists, not liberal democrats, got it right.
In the early postwar decades, when the United States struggled against the evil of Soviet communism, its strategy combined practical solutions with that kind of extreme idealism of true liberal democrats. While containing communist expansion around the world by military means, America and its Western allies also mounted a major campaign to tell the truth about their own government to the Soviet people. Radio Liberty broadcasting in Russian, Radio Free Europe broadcasting in the fourteen national languages of the Soviet Union, Voice of America, BBC, Deutsche Welle, and other Russian language services had the mission of providing objective news and information and countering the flood of lies produced by the Soviet propaganda. The idea was that once the Soviet people hear the truth they will know it is the truth and reject communism.
In the Moscow intelligentsia bubble where I grew up, foreign radio broadcasts were pretty much the only source of objective information about events around the world and, most importantly, in our own country as its history. Of course, the Soviet propaganda constantly denounced all those broadcasts as Fake News.
Today’s Russian propagandists are lying just as shamelessly as their Soviet predecessors and about pretty much everything — the war in Ukraine, protests in Belarus, the killings of Putin’s political opponents, Russian interference in.US elections, Covid statistics in Russia, etc.
The Putin-era propaganda is more entertaining — if you like that sort of entertainment — but it exists side by side with other sources of information. The Soviet government put a lot of effort into controlling what information Soviet citizens got, exercising strict censorship, persecuting those dissidents who collected information independently and jamming foreign broadcasts.
Putting in an information blockade in the age of the internet, social media, and Skype has become far trickier, but today’s non-ideological autocrats have figured out they don’t have to. “We the People” do it for them on our own, and, it sees, far more effectively. While information is widely available about the true nature of the Soviet Union and about the dreary quality of life under communism, plenty of Russians, including too many young ones, are pining away for it. Stalin’s crimes are also extensively documented, but he is still revered in the country in which he drowned in blood.
Americans have even more sources of information that can be easily accessed. Not just from respected and highly professional domestic reporters, but from media outlets in Canada, Australia, Britain, Ireland, and other English-speaking countries — not to mention international publications that have English-language editions.
Yet one-half of the country’s citizens (subjects?) choose to believe shameless lies and perversions of reality, including patently insane conspiracy theories. All the while they proudly claim that they are “thinking for themselves.”
Even more astounding is that neo-Stalinists in Russia and Trumpists in the United States declare themselves great patriots of their countries. Whatever crimes Stalin committed against other nations ruled by him, he caused far greater damage to Russia proper. He slaughtered the flower of the Russian nation, killed leading artists and writers, set back science, destroyed the peasantry, cut the nation off from the rest of humanity, and traumatized several generations— to list only a few components of his genocidal crime against Russia. As to his victory in World War II, which his admirers believe to be his greatest achievement, it was a war he had started in partnership with Hitler, which he entered being woefully unprepared, having murdered his battle-hardened military leaders, and which he won by sacrificing uncounted millions of ordinary people.
Trumpists also wrap themselves in the Stars and Stripes while worshipping a cult leader who has caused irreparable damage to the United States, its economy, and international standing. The Covid non-response would have been enough to damn him in history, but it came after Trump trashed America’s reputation as an ally and business partner, abdicated responsibility for international leadership, undermined the carefully built global economic system, discouraged the immigration of the best and the brightest, etc.
Especially damaging have been his efforts to divide the country and to sic the poorly educated deplorable social groups on the most enlightened, cosmopolitan and educated ones — on those in fact on which America’s global economic, scientific, political and military dominance vitally depends. A Trumpist America, run by his incompetent buddies and family members, armed backwoodsman militias, Evangelicals, and Proud Boys, will never be a global leader in anything and will be promptly defeated militarily.
It is of course great news for America that Trump has been voted out in a landslide, but it is by no means certain that these people won’t ultimately gain an upper hand.
