by Armando Simón (September 2024)
To destroy a people, you must first sever their roots. —Alexander Solzhenitsyn
The most effective way to destroy a people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history. —George Orwell
The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster. —Milan Kundera
When Communists completely take over a country, they always and immediately begin a cultural cleansing (sometimes going hand in hand with an ethnic cleansing), dismantling that country’s history, art and literature. They do so through sheer brute exercise of power, of course, but it is always accompanied by a torrent of seemingly reasonable verbal diarrhea throughout that country’s controlled media voiced by sympathetic intellectuals. Books are burned, paintings torn up, monuments toppled, statues broken up. To all of them, the existence and purpose of history, science, sports, art, theater, films was/is to glorify and justify the regime, particularly the dictator, and to support the ideology.
In the United States, the Communists liberals and social activists jumped the gun. They began their cultural cleansing before actually securing total power. This is mostly due to the fact that in 2016 Trump was elected president, and his perpetually defiant, in-your-face, politically incorrect statements have sent them into an uncontrollable, hysterical frenzy. Likewise, the mainstream media has prematurely dropped its mask of “objectivity” and “impartiality” with Trump’s candidacy and election into the White House and revealed itself to be simply a conduit of propaganda, a hivemind. The result has been a premature forecast of things to come.
In universities, the attacks on free speech go on relentlessly, as both students and professors are persecuted for voicing different opinions. Sometimes these attacks are done by other professors, or by indoctrinated students, or by college administrators, and they range all the way from verbal condemnation and slander to actual physical attacks or loss of jobs. Hand in hand with censorship and persecution are mandatory sessions at indoctrination, euphemistically labeled as DIE (Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity) workshops or some such rot. And there is also the favorite pastime of leftists, distorting the past in order to legitimize themselves and justify their crimes, something for which the former Soviet Union was infamously known for doing. In Orwell’s anti-Communist novel, 1984, one of the totalitarian regime’s principles stated, “Whoever controls the present controls the past. Whoever controls the past controls the future.”
The Communist Antifas, liberal “activists,” and their supporters at various levels of the government have begun dismantling or vandalizing historical monuments that they do not like, protected by liberals in positions of power at both the local and state level. And conservatives and libertarians have responded by, as usual, shaking their heads in disapproval and scratching their rear ends while they mutter their mantra, “They’ll take my gun from my cold dead hands. Meanwhile, the mainstream media portrays the American version of the Red Guards as heroic and idealistic (you may remember that the Red Guards, portrayed as heroic and idealistic by many Western liberals, went around China destroying cultural monuments and priceless historical and archaeological artifacts in their campaign against The Four Olds).
It is only a matter of time before the Communist liberals/Antifas go one step further into museums to destroy and vandalize works of art and historical artifacts that they deem racist, fascist and symbols of patriarchy and white supremacy. After all, University of Iowa professor Sarah Bond has declared that white marble, used in sculpture, is racist. And Antifa and other liberals yearly deface/destroy statues of Christopher Columbus because of crimes he did not commit.
Who knows? Perhaps Mt. Rushmore will be dynamited before too long. After all, Professor Bart Knijnenburg of Clemson University has already advocated tearing down statures of George Washington, called Republicans “racist scum,” and advocated violence against them or anyone else that he does not like, with the slavering approval of fellow liberals.
Cultural cleansing is still ongoing. And it’s not going to stop there. Fernand Amandi, a Democratic pollster and frequent guest on MSNBC’s “AM Joy,” declared that anyone who is a member of the Republican Party should be imprisoned. And numerous individuals have called for the end of free speech, not only in colleges but everywhere in society, writing elaborate essays in The New York Times and elsewhere for that purpose. Indeed, The New York Times has published so many essays against free speech that one can only conclude that it is favoring censorship, not that disturbing when one takes into consideration the political makeup of the newspaper. It deserves the moniker of The New York Pravda.
So buckle up, friends, the totalitarian train is traveling at full steam. Only speed bumps ahead.
Table of Contents
Armando Simón is a retired college professor and is the author of A Cuban from Kansas, Orlando Stories, A Prison Mosaic, The U, The Cult of Suicide and Other Sci-Fi Stories, as well as numerous stage plays.
Follow NER on Twitter @NERIconoclast
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One Response
What would happen if the Right of Free Speech was coupled with Responsibility to Speak the Truth?
Would the thunder and crash of Silence leave us dumbfounded and dumbfoundered?
Suppose our opening remark had to state that what to follow was simply opinion or adequate evidence-based truth?
Are the words ‘proof” and ‘evidence’ permitted in polite or thug society?