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Is the United States the New Soviet Union?
Larry Johnson had on his blog several days ago a provocative post that the United States is becoming the new Soviet Union. Johnson is a former CIA / State Department operative, i.e., a swamp creature of the swampiest precincts. He is a consistent critic of his old bosses. (He points out that the CIA has always been politicized in his own experience. In 1985, he was in charge of the Nicaragua desk and reported on what was happening on the ground with the Contras. His bosses would tell him that those up the chain didn’t want to hear negative things about the Contras and that future promotion would depend on reporting what his bosses wanted to hear. This isn’t in the article, but you can hear it here.)
As a result, he thinks it will be difficult for CIA case officers to recruit new agents abroad because the United States is becoming such an unfree and woke society.
He also points to the FBI as being the equivalent of the KGB with the United States having over twice as many political prisoners as Russia does. These political prisoners have been seized as a result of the political leadership.
Johnson also points to the age of the American leadership, which was older and more inept than the Soviet leadership.
One thing he could have mentioned is that Russia has become a profoundly religious society, while the United States leadership has declared war on religion in the same way the Soviet Union did.
Published in General
Totally didn’t see that coming / sarc
I don’t follow. Did he wake up or is he with the woke?
One line irked me:
If this is the metric then it’s not a new phenomenon. After all, you’d have to go all the way back to Teddy Roosevelt to find an American leader whose popular image approximates that of Putin.
;-)
I don’t think the recruits care about unfree & woke. I think the recruits care that Uncle Sam has learned to cut and run, leaving former recruits hung out to dry .
Let’s keep in mind how we arrived at the particular crisis we’re in: the elections for President and, in Georgia, for the Senate were won by fraud. If not for that, the basic common sense of the American electorate would have corrected the leftist drift by now.
We came to this state by a thousand cuts, and the left has always had the cheater’s edge. Still, these are not the old times. We’ve passed an inflection point and can’t get back by the conservative path.
Eh, I don’t know about that. Certainly Jack Kennedy and his brothers (though especially Jack) tried to appear as healthy men full of “vim and vig-ah.” You know, the sailing, the touch football, etc. Not directly comparable to Putin, but in the ballpark.
Hell, even Reagan in his advanced (for the time) age was more fit and healthy than the leaders in Congress and the parties.
How are we defining “political prisoner” in relation to RUS and the USA?
I had some doubts about that statement. Then there’s the fact that you probably don’t count as a prisoner if you’ve “disappeared.”
Ever heard of January 6?
Yes. How many are being held?
What’s the definition for “political prisoner” as far as RUS goes? How many are being held?
ETA: I looked at the linked post. He does not define “political prisoner” for either country. His source for the Russian total does not define it either.
For the USA, he starts with the 1/6 defendant count, but then implies that there countless others when he says, “And I am ignoring the other damning fact that the United States has more people in prison per capita than any other country in the world. Home of the Free? Not so much.” I’m going to take that with a 50# bag of salt.
Yes and no. I haven’t been to the sources linked (I will), but for decades I’ve noted what I call the “Sovietization” of the military, and for the last decade-plus, of America in general.
The phrase “politically correct” was itself funny because it was such an utterly inappropriate oxymoron carrying clear connotations of commie totalitarian 1984-style thinking. It was a criticism harsh enough to use only in anger if spoken to the target. BOY HAS THAT CHANGED.
Magic words grew magic coattails, the way that “Total Quality _____” would be funded whereas plain-old reliable _____ would not. We called these “management fads,” and refused to go along to the new religion. [Insert entire lyrics of ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ here]
Soviet Gulags and repression, party discipline, internal controls and so forth were no joke. It is appropriate to project our trajectory into that territory, but it would be obscene to arrogate to ourselves that degree of victimhood. So yes and no.
We are certainly much more Soviet than we were short decades ago.
Meanwhile, Putin’s Russia may have some good things going for it, but it remains an warlord poop-hole. It just happens to be a very large one.
I agree. I told my son years ago not to join the military, exactly because of that.
But now it would be because the military cares about everything other than warfare.
This guy is great. He’s on multiple shows. This particular one is on multiple podcast platforms.
I’m also getting into watching Dr. Yuri Maltsev speeches. He has a unique ability of explaining the comparison between the United States and the Soviet union on how the system really just uses people for the system in spite of what they say. Most of the things I’ve seen have been on specific topics and I’m still looking for a general one.
Sounds like he had the same experiences as Ishmael Jones in “The Human Factor” published in 2010. CIA looks to be as sad a group as the FBI. Just think the FBI more overtly political now. Hunter Biden, etc.
The CIA is a flawed organization, and that impression is emphasized by some of the bureaucrats like Brennan who rise to the top. That should not detract from the fact that there are a lot of people in the agency who do important work and whose successes go unnoticed because materials are classified.
Exactly. So keep up the fire, I mean pour it on, Give ’em Hell Boys, and force the good people to defend internally against the bad ones. Well, what’s the alternative? A hall pass given is a walk taken.
The CIA, like the FBI, has always been a flawed organization endangering the nation itself. They are essentially blackmail and dirty trick organizations which wind up, inevitably, being for the benefit for a small group of people to hold power and not for the nation itself.
I have no idea how this can be fixed, which is why I am basically in favor of breaking them apart, and scattering them to be small parts of other agencies, e.g., State Dept., Defense Dept. and not to have these agencies with these huge budgets. They are poison to the very DNA of the country.
We will agree to disagree as to the CIA. By definition it is not possible to weigh the good against the bad, because the good must be left unsaid and bad is broadcast by critics.
“ Is The United Stares the New Soviet Union?”
Nyet Tovarisch!!!!!
I agree that the FBI has become the Stasi of the Democrat party/Progressive uniparty, but I have to shoot down the notion that Russia has become a ‘profoundly religious society’-about half the country is nominally Christian, while close to 40% have no religious faith (though only about 13% are declared atheists). The regime does have a close alliance with the Orthodox Church (and a less than amicable relationship with many other Christian churches), but that does not translate into a religious society.
Our show trials are basically indistinguishable from Soviet show trials. That in itself doesn’t prove we’re the new Soviet Union but it doesn’t speak well of us either. If our citizens wanted to escape to a new shining city on the hill, a new land of freedom and prosperity, where would they go? Soviet subjects could at least dream of escaping to the United States. If we are the new USSR, what is the new USA to which our people may escape?
We won’t know until the next two elections. If we lose, we lost but totalitarians vary. Many who support the democrats do not realize that they are run by totalitarians and while our totalitarians are good at screwing matters up on purpose, can they run the place? Defend us from China.? No to both questions. If we lose the next election we’ll lose the Presidential as well if we think it will be a more or less traditional election, whoever they run, and we’ll have to act prior to that. “Act” is pretty straight forward. Let’s face it, our country is too big to be run from the top, and if we can’t force democrats into a more or less fair election we’ll have to split off, taking whatever military is willing to go, which has to be enough to worry the Chinese.
Is this supposed to disprove the thesis? Because that just tells me we are good and truly screwed.
I think it’s our obsession with being a nation of immigrants and a bunch of Soviet era immigrants that landed in our universities that have brought us to this place.
Didn’t even need those. We have had plenty of commie simps infesting our universities for the last 100 years.
Here’s a take:
He’s on Charlie Kirk every week. Pretty instructive.