“Nothing like a little blast from the past, especially when it comes from a nearly 20-year-old Butthole Surfers album,” writes James Goodwell at the Left of the Dial blog.
There does indeed seem something strikingly Soviet about the US government as of late, as I and others have periodically noted over the past couple years. Among those who see the parallels is William Rivers Pitt, who writes in Bush’s Soviet State:
It’s funny in an awful sort of way. The defining events of the last fifty years all centered around the Cold War and the eventual demise of the Soviet system. Toward the end of the Soviet regime, their government was often forced to grossly overstate the size of grain harvests or the preparedness of their military in order to maintain an illusion of strength and order. In other words, intelligence and facts were fixed around the policy. In essence, fixing the facts became the policy. Self-deception was piled upon self-deception.
MORE BELOW:
Rather than address the systemic problems within the nation, the Soviet regime chose instead to massage the illusions until the problems became too huge to overcome. Pretending everything was fine became the chosen course of action, and the state’s ability to manufacture a pleasing reality became a perfect circle of inaction and delusion. By the time the tanks rolled and the Wall fell, the deal had already gone down. Sound familiar?
[…]
Willful blindness is an appropriate phrase. It captures not only the fact that we are manufacturing threats to our security every day we remain in Iraq, but the fact that virtually everything associated with Bush administration policy depends on self-delusion and the manipulation of data to fulfill political desires. Even the most fundamental underpinnings of conservative political philosophy have been ground up in the gears of this grand fantasy.
Truth no longer matters. Ethics no longer matter. Facts are there for the twisting. Decades-old conservative ideals regarding the budget and the size of the Federal government have been thrown under the bus because they are no longer convenient, and get in the way of the manufacture of reality. Soviet self-delusion led that nation into Afghanistan and disaster. The Bush administration’s self-delusion has led us into Iraq. Res ipsa loquitor.
The parallel between this Bush administration and the old, failed Soviet regime can be taken one step further. …
Read all of the Pitt excerpts at Left of the Dial blog.
Goodwell’s “”U.S.S.A. … U.S.S.R.” concludes:
As I mentioned in Consequences, this White House is hell-bent on maintaining its illusions at all costs. Their success in maintaining those illusions centers on maintaining control of the means of political discourse, power, and the means of communication. Indeed, one can make a good case that indeed this is the current sorry state of our nation. At some point, however, the illusions will be shown for what they are. It is only a matter of time. Eventually, the old Soviet politburo had to face the demise of the Berlin Wall and the complete collapse of its hold on power even within Russia’s borders.
Eventually, in Sartre’s No Exit, Garcin meets up with his Ines who tears away his mask of false bravado and reveals a life-long coward. Sooner or later, the same will happen with the White House and its inhabitants and with its enablers. Let’s hope for sooner rather than later – and let’s continue to work dredge up those inconvenient truths that our own politburo would just as soon not face.
