Going through the rituals - parallels between the Soviet Union and liberal America

Excellent comments on the media response to the Trump-Putin meeting from America- based Russian, Vladimir Goldstein

Parallels between the Soviet Union and comtemporary America

Vladimir Goldstein, via Facebook

Back in the Soviet Union, there was a well-scripted and well iron-out routine of public dismissal and shaming. Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Daniel and Sinyavsky -- whenever they did or publish something "dangerous" -- there were a whole chain of meetings, speeches, denunciations, articles and so on.

It became such a routine, that it began to be applied from top to bottom. When my family decided to emigrate in 1979, the place where I just got a job as a computer programmer, also had to go through the same motions.

There was a special session of Komsomol organization of this research institute where I got a a job, and there were speeches by the Secretary of Party organization, and the secretary of Komsomol organization, and the secretary of Trade-Union .... all denouncing my treacherous decision to leave the great socialist paradise.

It was a pure nothing burger. I drank with these guys, cracked up jokes; Komsomol secretary telling how envious he is of me, going to the west, while he still can't get his permission to visit the fricking Poland), some wanted me to write how it was out there beyond the iron curtain and so on, yet we all had to perform in the play written by some mediocre writer for the show trials of 1930s.

This public denunciations of Trump reminds me of the same old, cynical script which people are forced to perform. With McCain playing the role of Ideological enforcer, with Lindsey Graham as the Secretary General of the Republican Party, with Adam Schiff, in the role of young Komsomol, sorry, young Democrat Leader, Ash Carter as a hard-nosed KGB security guy, who pretends to know more than he does, along with the nincompoops of the press, cheerleading this idiotic attack on Trump, who dares to deliver this great capitalist paradise to the Russian Hackers.

All this is both funny and pathetic. And if history is a guide, the US is on the slippery slope toward Perestroika. Just do the invasion of Afghanistan, or North Korea, or Syria, or something more serious, where the country can get bogged down, and the rest is history, as they say.