By Colin Egan
An Open Letter to Sen. Mitch McConnell and the rest of the GOP leadership from a U.S. citizen who grew up during the Cold War:
Do you remember the Soviet Union and what many Americans thought about it, or more precisely, about its government?
I’m not speaking of the fear of nuclear war, which ebbed and flowed as a theme in our culture for four decades. (I just missed the era of duck and cover in school and the black and yellow Civil Defense signs put up everywhere, but was certainly around for the anti-nuclear movement of the early Reagan years.) Rather, I’m speaking of the mix of amazement, anger and sometimes even dark amusement most of us reflexively felt whenever we heard about the stilted antics of the Soviet government on the nightly news back then.
The leaders routinely told the most obvious lies with totally straight faces. They claimed grand achievements that often were demonstrably not true and denied natural and man-made disasters which we knew had occurred from objective measurements. The Soviets loudly proclaimed that they were a truly democratic government by pointing to legislatures that always rubber stamped what the Communist Party bosses told them to do, and sham elections in which candidates sanctioned by Party bosses had only token opposition, or none at all.
Their denunciations and prosecutions of perceived enemies were extreme and vitriolic, and often so obviously manufactured as to become unintentional parody. Indeed, the Soviet leadership’s pronouncements to their own people and the world were often so absurd as to seem more appropriate to Groucho Marx’s President of the fictional Freedonia in “Duck Soup” than statements from real leadership.
When Nikita Khrushchev was deposed by his fellow Party leaders, they explained he had “retired for his health.” When one of the latter, very elderly Soviet leaders disappeared from the scene for months on end, the explanation offered after much time had already passed was that “he had a cold”; then, finally, they admitted he was dead. And when Soviet apparatchik detained the reform-minded President Mikhail Gorbachev as part of an attempted coup, the best excuse for his disappearance the coup leaders could muster to an assembled throng of reporters from all over the world was that Gorbachev “was sick.”
The laughter from reporters that tore through the room was, for all intents and purposes, the end of the Soviet Union.
The reason the Soviet leaders were so duplicitous is that they did not believe in the concept that’s at the core of British and American governance: the rule of law – the idea that fairness and truth are not only possible, but very real and very necessary in public affairs; that everyone, including leaders, are responsible to society as a whole; and that government is subject to pre-set rules. Instead, Soviet leadership followed the precept stated by the Soviet state’s founder, Vladimir Lenin: the end justifies the means.
Does this sound familiar? It should to you, Sen. McConnell and company, because the Republican Party has made denunciation of communism a core part of its political mantra for more than 70 years, even conflating it with Western liberal political movements.
But the behavior of Soviet leaders should sound familiar to McConnell and other Republican leaders for another reason, too: They have become them — by giving credence to President Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud, and his refusal to acknowledge that Joe Biden’s margin of victory is in line with those of past elections, which prompted swift concession by losing candidates.
Of course, McConnell and the others will protest that they are diametrically opposed to communist economic philosophy. That’s a subject for another day; the germane point here and now is that they are displaying an identical embrace of Lenin’s dictum, and identical contempt for the rule of law.
And that endangers our society as much as any military of philosophical challenge the Soviet Union ever posed.
Colin Egan of Jersey City is director of the Friends of the Loew’s.
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