The leftist panic over Republican governors like Wisconsin's Scott Walker (and this week, Ohio's John Kasich) curbing union power has the bloggers at the Daily Kos is producing all the typical fringy fulminations. See the article headlined "Totalitarian Capitalism stages a show trial for teachers." Since "Anyone to the left of Atilla the Hun is regularly demonized as a communist, socialist, atheist, subversive traitor," the Kosmonaut with the byline "Arendt" is teasing out all the apparent connections between American Big Box Store Capitalism and Soviet Totalitarianism:
We have not yet arrived at true totalitarianism - with its industrial-scale elimination of "superfluous" people; but we are on the road to it. The governmental assault (by both parties -- Obama has been for Charter Schools since before Day One. Can you say Arne Duncan?...) on teachers and unions tracks the beginnings of collectivization and the atomization of society in Stalin's Russia...
Since the Kosmonaut found that "The baseless indictment of school teachers, ACORN, and minority voter fraud by the corporate media and GOP operatives are nothing more than show trials for the elimination of class enemies," this U.S.-to-U.S.S.R. connection somehow naturally follows: "Has anything changed in 80 years? A Fox News host would be perfectly at home being a prosecutor at a Moscow Show Trial. They have the same relentless, one-sided, accusatory attitude and total disregard for the facts."
Outrageously, the Kosmonaut quoted from Solzhenitsyn's anti-communist classic The Gulag Archipelago and compared it to Wisconsin:
Is this not exactly what is going on in America today? Are not the educated being held up for mockery and scapegoating while their rights, their organizations, and their jobs are being summarily smashed? Are not teachers and unions being blamed for all the country's financial and social ills? The banks? The tax cuts? The endless wars? All of these real causes have been disappeared under a tsunami of denial and whipped up cultural hatred.
Contempt for any kind of thinking is a hallmark of the rage-filled Tea Party and the theocratic fundamentalists. The same was true of communists.
The blog post ended with the slogan "Welcome to the open-air Gulag that is America today".
