Trump takes break from fascism: Plays Stalin on race

  

Trump isn't merely a fascist. In the purge to remove DEI and wokeness, Trump is embracing Soviet Totalitarianism with a vigour Stalin would envy.  

The actions of Trump and Musk in enforcing DOGE and purging anything they view as Diversity, Equity and Inclusion have rightly been called fascistic. But Trump isn't a fascist 24/7, heavens no. He's also flirting with Stalinist totalitarianism. The Trump administration has shut down Spanish language government pages, declared English the naional language of the U.S., and removing mention of Black soldiers, such as the Tuskegee Airmen, from the Department of Defense website, all in the name of "equality" by eliminating race. 

    Under Trump, there is to be only one race in America - English speaking Americans who hew to the MAGA view of the world. But this isn't equality. It's Stalinism. Eliminating all other races, cultures and identities to impose national unity is exactly what Stalin did in Soviet Russia. 

    We've heard all this before. Trump is subsuming and destroying by fiat in the name of a unified national identity - just as Stalin did before him.

After the purges of the 1930s, Stalin decided to find new ways of being a complete prick, and that the Soviet Union needed unification - or else. Ethnic minorities were shipped off to Siberia, schooling in languages other than Russian was prohibited, and the cultural institutions of local communities - printing presses, newspapers, theatre and the like - were banned. Citizens of the USSR were not to think of themselves as Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Kalmyks, or any other identity any more. They were Soviets, that was all. That was it. 

    These policies were applied with a special harshness on Soviet Jews. In the 1920s, the USSR established Birobidzhan as part of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in far eastern Siberia, near the Chinese boder, and encouraged Jews to migrate there. The land was so poor - rocky, prone to flooding - and the area so isolated that in the early years, more than half of all Jewish migrants to Birobidzhan turned around and went straight back again, despite that what they left behind were the pogroms of Ukraine and Belarus. Gradually however, a distinct Jewish identity evolved in the area; schools taught in Yiddish, and Yiddish newspapers, theatre and books allowed a local culture to flourish. In the aftermath of World War Two, Holocaust survivors from Eastern Europe were shipped to Birobidzhan whether they wanted it or not. (The story of Birobidzhan is a fascinating and sad one; I recommend Masha Gessen's excellent book on the subject).

    But if Soviet Jews were out of sight, they weren't out of mind. Russification was coming for them too.    Teaching and use of  Yiddish in schools was banned, thousands of Yiddish books burned, the Jewish town councils disbanded, with most of their leaders executed for good measure. And Russification didn't just extend to language and mass murder. 

In Stalinist Russia, the publishing of lists of Jewish war heroes was declared illegal. When the editor of the local Birobidzhan was carted off to Moscow for trial, the investigator demanded:

“Why is the list titled ‘Honor and Glory to the Jewish People’? Are you unaware that this definition—the Jewish people—contradicts the nationalities policy of the Party and the government?

For these and many other actions, the USSR came to be known as the "prison of peoples" - all nationalities to be subsumed by Russian nationalist orthodoxy.  And by declaring English the national language of the United States, removing any goverment funding, department, program or opportunity aimed at a particular race, Trump may be seeking to "promote unity, cultivate a shared American culture for all citizens", but is smothering freedom and opportunity, imposing his will on the people and destroying much of what truly does make America great. Uncle Josef would be proud.