On December 26th 1992, the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, the USSR’s most powerful legislative body, issued Declaration 142-Н, effectively ending the nearly 69 year-old Eastern Bloc. The results of the dissolving were evident soon after: one of the largest standard of living drops in history, widespread inflation, scarce resources, and a painful, protracted theft of state assets to oligarchical control. Another byproduct: industrial strength gloating of the Western foreign policy blob who simply wanted to expand NATO and US empire. But the boogeyman of the capitalist world didn’t end in a lot of people’s minds. In 2019, a spectre is haunting liberal memes: the spectre of Trump… being a Soviet?
With the results of the Mueller investigation tanking the ratings of Rachel Maddow and the hopes and dreams of extremely online liberals, let’s take a look back at one of the most politically illiterate things created during this White House: the preponderance of Soviet imagery in Donald Trump memes. Why do liberals keep using Soviet Russia imagery in relation to the Mueller investigation?
It’s tough to imagine in 2019 the power of extreme paranoia the Soviet Union had over America. Cold War ideology (us vs them, fear of infiltration, subversion) was so central to our national narrative for so long at an incredible scale against an empire more similar to our own that many care to admit. Combined with nonstop media propaganda from Hollywood and television concerning the Cold War, it’s easy to get an entertainment-infused perspective. Funny the US has never had the guts to turn that camera around on itself.
The main comparison between the USSR in 1991 and and USA in 2019 is declining empire, a bloated, corrupt bureaucracy bursting at the seams, a protracted occupation of Afghanistan (ended in 1989 for the USSR), with thirsty vultures waiting in the wings for the Melted Cheese Curtain to drop. No one seems to be at the helm of this sinking battleship and one wonders if we could possibly operate without a President at all.
In an act of historic irony, the US now resembles the very stereotype of the enemy they spent billions of dollars and millions of lives to “defeat”. The most important aspect that American liberals seem to selectively remember is that during the Cold War, we were always the good guys and the Soviets were always the bad guys: a dull interpretation suitable for the intellectual poverty of suburban America. Love my foreign policy to resemble the way a toddler examines comic book characters. Rarely did people get something more honest and less clear-cut: that these were 2 imperial forces competing for hegemony in an international theater, with the stakes being the economic and political control of the world’s direction.
The word “communism” used in popular discourse is a confused term, who definition changes drastically depending who you talk to. It has the flexible malleability of “capitalism”, a term shaped by the hands wielding it. I have a very clear Marxist definition of capitalism and communism, which is simply not shared by an ideological opponent of mine. The inheritors of the Russian Revolution defined “owned by the workers” as “owned by the state that represents the workers”, a rhetorical sleight of hand that created enormous industrial efficiency but very little autonomy in how the economy was run by the very working class who turned it into a global superpower. The word “communism” then became synonymous with US propaganda of cartoonishly brutal, authoritarian states where everyone wore, I don’t know, burlap sacks and beat anvils with hammers until they died of not having 12 flavors of Pop-Tarts.
A key component of the liberal use of the word “communism”, regardless of definition, is that it must stand in contrast with liberal capitalism, with capitalism being inherently good and communism being inherently bad. It’s easier if you understand “communist” used by its opponents is a slur rather than a coherent ideology. Redbaiting is the practice of attempting to negate someone’s argument by saying they support anti-capitalist or socialist ideology, with the fallacious idea that this immediately refutes their point. For liberals who create these memes, it’s even simpler than that: Trump likes Russia > Russia bad > Russia used to be Soviet > Trump is Soviet. Also, this is a helpful attack against critiques from actual socialists by connecting them to a dreaded foe. Mental children believe deeply in this Red Scare stuff, generations of soft-headed TV junkies and think tank dullards churning this grist mill.
The paranoid, trigger-happy mindset never really went away, you see. An empire always needs an enemy to justify its bloated borders and feed its hunger for resources and blood. The existential fear of the USSR came and went, with Islamophobic 9/11 mania taking its place. Well, it’s the Red Scare Redux and it’s dumber than ever.
Politics, media, and entertainment have reached a point where they have fully merged into each other. For many liberals, seeing the right Marvel movie and having the right political opinions about its content or representation is seen as, if not more, important than what values they really represent. Captain Marvel can be a $175 million ad for the US Air Force (a colossal waste of resources and money, also an arm of US imperialism) as long as it’s got a female empowerment message and a cute cat named after another imperialist-friendly movie character. (If you remember, the Soviet MiGs were the baddies in Top Gun as well.)
This group of media-saturated illiterates experience politics as pop culture, social media clapbacks, Instagram inspirational quotes, or through televised media personalities, yet also perplexingly fancy themselves the smartest people in the room. They laugh at lower-class Trump voters as hilljacks and morons, but base a great deal of their Russia paranoia around a phantom USSR a literal quarter century gone. This intelligence is self-appointed and present in the figures they tend to idolize: tech billionaires and clean-cut media darlings, a party of the professional class. Wealth is seen as earned, not stolen, and society is ideally run when the “right” people are given the reins. Nothing is systemic and just the product of poor management.
Reminiscent of the post-Soviet pillaging of state assets, these liberals decrying Trump as Stalin 2.0 would have been right at home with the Russian Federation’s thieves, championing their “entrepreneurial spirit” or some horseshit like that. Let’s not forget the July 15th, 1996 cover of Time Magazine, proudly proclaiming Yanks to the Rescue, literally broadcasting international interference with a foreign election. Vladimir Putin is a also a former KGB counterintelligence officer before entering politics in 1990. In American pop culture, what’s more evil than that?!
These memes, cartoons, and posts are a combination of desperately stupid libs, a few trolls, and grifters who just want to make merch. The effect is the same: the audience eats these up while the rest of us gawk in disbelief as this collective delusion or are simply too exhausted from life to care about the Mueller investigation.
Anything deeper than the most superficial of connections or narrative is going to skip off MSNBC liberals’ brains like a flat stone on a lake. This is a narrative they desperately needed to manufacture. Making a nuanced argument about the US versus Russia as global antagonists in the context of modern day geopolitics is going to turn their psyches into goo, so it’s just easier and more visual to slap the Soviet logo and color something red. The PAC Mad Dog even put up an actual billboard replacing the O in GOP with the Soviet hammer and sickle surrounded by laurels near Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.
Remember, this is a political constituency who loves pageantry and spectacle. An immediately identifiable symbol that carries historically negative connotations will be popular. Nevermind that the US flag in many parts of the world is seen as the symbol of a violent, rogue imperial monster, a symbol of professional, well-branded terrorism.
Another interesting product of the Cold War is now that Russia is a gangster capitalist fiefdom run by murderous thugs, but also when the USSR broke up, its nukes stayed right where they were. In fact, some former Soviet republics like Kazakhstan simply gave their nukes back.
Russia is the largest nuclear power in the world in total warheads, with a tie for number of deployed warheads. It’s also a major world exporter of oil and natural gas. Combining these two factors makes Russia impossible to put in the US’s imperial pocket. Russia can set its own demands, and still sees itself as a competitor against European and US economies. Hence the easy alliances with political and economic adversaries of the United States: China, Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela, Iran, Iraq, and Syria.
RussiaGate fulfills a much-desired need for liberals horrified by Trump’s disgusting personality and humiliating electoral college victory over Clinton. It provides a narrative that didn’t require them to analyze their own politics, or strategic failures of Clinton (who received 2.3 million more votes, but in the wrong places). It gives them a historic and undemocratic enemy of the US, a pre-made set of recognizable iconography, and a media pipeline that popularizes sensationalist crap.
The #Resistance, folks. These are people we’re supposed to consider the adults in the room, trusting in law enforcement and the intelligence state to come to the rescue against an authoritarian, when they’ve literally never done this in the past. Now that Mueller won’t swing down like Captain America to save them, what will they do now? Create a new fantasy world where they’ll be another fake hero to salvage their sense of normalcy in the world, and ignore the reality of what’s happening? Or will they just wake the fuck up and realize what year they’re in, and that the stakes are very real, and Cold War cosplay simply will not save them.
Carl Wilhoyte is the co-editor and co-founder of Zero Balance. His work has appeared in Street Fight Radio, District Sentinel, Abomination Magazine, Bourbon Penn, and Farmhouse Magazine.