Victor Davis Hanson asks,
When did we begin to resemble our old Cold War enemies—to the delight of our current enemies?
A social media lynch mob, born and bred in America, equates incorrect thought with felonious behavior. Our online American Red Guards act as judge, jury, and executioner canceling out careers and lives in the manner of a virtual online gulag—in hopes of deterring all incorrect thought and expression. Ministries of the U.S. government sic the FBI, as if it is the KGB, on incorrect expression at school board hearings. The IRS both targets and exempts the elite on the basis of ideology. The CIA and Pentagon are likewise weaponized, as attuned to the dictates of social justice ministers at home as thwarting enemies abroad.
Does anyone really believe that Governor Andrew Cuomo (D-N.Y.)—serial sexual harasser and virtual killer of thousands of elderly who were the victims of his insane policy of transferring the COVID-infected into rest homes—deserved an Emmy award for his talents?
Or was it his daily anti-Trump agitprop and race and gender virtue-signaling that delighted his Hollywood aficionados? Can a comedian still joke about anything he pleases, a professor lecture without fear of disruption, or a CEO publicly doubt critical race theory?
As we learned from the impoverishment of the Soviet Union and Maoist China, eventually the ideological pandemic results in poverty in the streets. Or in our current terms, nine months of constant woke bullying and government ideological recalibration really do result in internecine racial animus, empty shelves, sky-high gasoline and natural gas prices, stagflation, soaring debt, high labor non-participation, military mediocrity, international humiliation, and a national state of fear and paranoia.
Notice how both the former Soviet Union and the former Maoist Chinese are reacting to our own regressions into systems that they once embraced, but finally discarded when they resulted only in poverty, civil strife, and ultimately mass death.
So, the new Communist-state capitalist Chinese naturally gloat over our wokeness. Whereas a Putin sees fundamentalist diversity, equity, inclusion religion as suicidal Bolshevism worthy of celebration, the Chinese are more adroit. They prefer not to mock but to tap into what they see as our fatal strategic disadvantages. In other words, rather than boasting that even the former Soviet Union is tired of destructive ideological wokeism, Beijing eggs it on—albeit in America.
During the COVID-19 pandemic that China likely birthed—even if accidentally—and helped to spread, the Chinese hierarchy replied to any criticism with accusations of “racism!” An accusatory China was hardly shamed that it is one of the most racist countries in the world and institutionally discriminates against non-atheists and the non-Han Chinese residing in its midst. Instead, Chinese propagandists brilliantly egg on U.S. wokeism in the surety that it is both weakening the economic, military, and political sinews of the country, and useful in deflecting its own racist, imperialist, and colonialist policies by accusing America of just those sins.
In a strange transference of domestic witch-hunting to foreign policy, the American woke detested the Russians in a way they never did the Communist Chinese. And yet by any fair measure, Trump was harder on the Russians than was any prior administration. But according to woke party lines, he was considered soft on Russia and excessively hard on China.
The Cold War has been over for over 30 years. But who really won that war of ideas may be the real question of the new millennium.
After all, America is now seeking to emulate the crude modalities of the old Soviet Union and Maoist China that the now-gleeful autocratic Russians and Chinese at least realize nearly destroyed them.
Read more here: https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/31/who-eventually-won-the-cold-war/
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