MENKEN: The New Stalinism
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Opinion

MENKEN: The New Stalinism

Yaakov Menken

A few days ago, a respected rabbi told me that when he heard Greta Thunberg’s speech before the United Nations, he understood how Joseph Stalin had managed to indoctrinate children so thoroughly that they were willing to report their own parents.

For those unfamiliar with the history of Stalin’s demonic rule over the Soviet Union, children were “educated” to believe that loyalty to country was more important than such antiquated, bourgeois concepts as loyalty to family. If a parent harbored ideas that made him or her an “enemy of the state,” children were encouraged and expected to report them to the authorities. This occurred countless times during and after the “Great Purge” of Trotskyites and others during the 1930s.

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