Parallels with Stalin
Josef Stalin similarly turned the Bolshevik Party into his personal fiefdom. In his case, he did so by positioning himself as the arbiter of Communist ideology. Soon enough, Lenin’s close associates were kicked out of the party and eventually executed.
Career advancement — and very soon physical survival — depended on loyalty to Stalin and not ideological purity. On the contrary, as a matter of physical survival, one had to be able to switch one’s thinking instantaneously, in the very moment the party line changed. (And even that flexibility often was not enough…).
In a manner that would seem to fit in with Trump’s views, Stalin established control of the press. He suppressed all diversity of opinion that had survived after the Bolshevik Revolution and made all newspapers into carbon copies of the Pravda — which in turn did nothing but sing praises to Stalin the Great.
Fake news media
That is the real historic background of Trump branding America’s venerable media outlets as “Fake News”. Ironically, “pravda “ means truth in Russian — which gives the appropriate context to Trump’s fake news claims. Instead, Trump is promoting the sycophantic Fox News and its chief sycophant Hannity.
Stalin also effectively abolished the justice system in the Soviet Union. During the show trials of the 1930s, defense lawyers expressed in court their horror in the face of the heinous crimes their clients had committed and demanded harsh penalties for them. As to sentences, they were decided in advance and passed on to the judges.
This is a system that would please Trump very much, judging by his attacks on the independence of the courts and his Justice Department.
Finally, there’s the career bureaucracy. Experts and professionals both advise U.S. Presidents and keep their occasionally more extreme impulses on a short leash. Even Nixon and Kissinger, who shuttled to Beijing and Moscow based on their own calculations, were always surrounded by foreign policy, military and economic experts.
You see no such experts around Trump, only sycophants and enablers. As he prepares for a summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong un, the United States doesn’t even have an ambassador in South Korea.
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Originally Posted by CCitizen
