Like virtually all Americans, including cops and their family members, I was appalled by the footage we saw of George Floyd’s arrest. It tapped into an utterly primal fear, the terror of bullies. It reminded us how dangerous the modern state can be. This institution, between 1914 and 1990, intentionally murdered 170 million civilians, not including casualties of war. That’s why we must cling, bitterly or not, to our Second Amendment freedoms.

Hearing Floyd croak “I can’t breathe” touched our guts with genuine empathy. It also echoed scenes we might recall from classic works exposing the evils of totalitarianism.

Yes, 1984, of course. (“A boot, crushing a human face … forever.”)

Grim Warnings from the Cold War

But there are other works too that are less well-known now than they were in the Cold War. Now with the rise of a violent, fanatical left that acts as the paramilitary wing of the Democrat party, they deserve our attention again. As we prep for this election, I recommend just a few.

Darkness at Noon, by Arthur Koestler. It depicts a loyal Communist returning to Stalin’s Russia. He desperately tries to keep faith with a Party that has chosen to put him to death. He tortures his own mind in the style today’s “Woke” white liberals do, convicting themselves of unconscious racism. The hero knows that he is innocent of treason on behalf of Nazi Germany. But the Party (which is infallible) considers him “objectively” an obstacle to Progress. And the “verdict of History” decrees that he must die. So he is content to. He willingly confesses to a long string of made-up crimes. Then he goes to his death feeling righteous.

The Gulag Archipelago, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. It shows through dozens of ruined lives how radical ideology can dig an earthly Hell so deep you can barely imagine it. The vastness and grandeur of the earthly paradise promised can excuse almost any crime. And empower the cruelest petty tyrants ever to wield a bullystick or pistol.

Mao: The Unknown Story, by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday. This history by escapees from Communist China is perhaps the most relevant now. That’s because the current government of rising power China has rehabilitated Mao. It openly emulates some of his most appalling atrocities. Those Nike sneakers Colin Kaepernick wears while refusing to stand for our national anthem? They may have been made by ethnic Uighur slaves, in prison camps because of their race and their religion.

Mao enslaved almost a billion people, to toil for the comfort of his pet party elites. The mob tactics, public shaming, and ruthless personal destruction of ideological “enemies” like Nick Sandman, Mike Adams, and (yes) Donald Trump were pioneered during China’s fanatical Cultural Revolution.

Films You Can’t Miss

If you don’t have time for novels (make time!), rent movies like The Death of Stalin, The Killing Fields, or Famine 33 — the last one an unjustly neglected work of art depicting Stalin’s artificial famine in Ukraine. It’s the first movie made in Ukraine after perestroika. The thugs who march in and smash up churches and steal grain from hungry peasants will remind you of Antifa. The “social justice” slogans they use as excuses today are echoed by the Marxists of Black Lives Matter. At the end of our class on the twentieth century, I showed it to students I taught in college. I said just this: “Ideas have consequences. These are the consequences of Karl Marx’s ideas.”
 

 
Share these documents to wake your fellow citizens up about the threat posed by angry radicals demanding unaccountable power.

The Democrats’ Plan for a One-Party State

That’s what the Democrats hope to scare us or fool us into handing them in November. Patrick Buchanan warns us exactly how radical their agenda would prove in practice:

By calling the filibuster “another Jim Crow relic” the ex-president [Obama] was putting progressives on notice that failure to get rid of it would be to collaborate with racists.

After abolishing the filibuster, says Obama, Democrats should ram through statehood for Puerto Rico and D.C., thereby expanding the Senate to 104 members, and adding four new Democratic senators.

That new Senate, says Obama, should enact every law possible to enlarge and expand the electorate, including extending the ballot to ex-convicts.

Remember how New York governor Andrew Cuomo said that pro-lifers, biblical Christians, and gun owners should simply leave his state? His party is ready to remake the entire U.S. on the New York model, using virus-fears and race-baiting as the nightsticks they club us with.

Domestic Terrorist Armies Seizing Our Cities

Yes, the death of George Floyd was a moment we should grieve. But it became a pretext for a wave of public violence across the country. Then the seizure of control over the streets of major cities by armed, organized thugs. Men clad in body armor, communicating by pricey earpieces, coordinated and savage. They beat up reporters, dissenters, and ordinary civilians. Some used lasers to blind federal officers. This isn’t a wave of peaceful protesters, but a domestic terrorist army. And Democrats won’t denounce them. In fact, they wield these thugs as weapons.

The New Scapegoat: You

There’s genuine black anger in America, which grows out of very real suffering. As I showed last week, the real source of that suffering isn’t the hapless cops who try to keep order among young, angry fatherless boys. What millions of blacks and blue collar whites endure is the aftermath of the Sexual Revolution. It’s the toxic hangover from Hugh Hefner’s dry martinis and Margaret Sanger’s Utopian fantasies.

The left doesn’t want us to question its sex-trafficking porn sites or ghetto abortion clinics. So it trots out the crackpot conspiracy theory that the U.S. is ruled by “systemic racism.” That’s a lie, as shabby and facile as Stalin’s claims that “saboteurs” and “greedy peasants” were behind the famines and shortages that socialism produces. Lies so at once vicious and politically useful claim scapegoats, and exult in show trials.

Think of how House Democrats treated Attorney General Barr. How the FBI framed Michael Flynn. How the media tried and convicted Brett Kavanaugh and Mark Judge of running a rape gang. Or Nick Sandmann and his friends for acting as “white supremacist” bullies.

Think, if the left gets the one-party state it’s aiming for in November, what people as ruthless as today’s left might do to your pastor, or you.

What Really Happened to George Floyd?

In my next column, I’ll examine the too long-hidden, finally leaked bodycam footage from the arrest of George Floyd. We’ll see if the facts it exposes merit the charges aimed both at the officers involved. And at our country and culture as a whole. Or do they reveal something much more complicated and tragic? Namely, a country where local police cannot possibly contain the chaos unleashed by the left’s willful destruction of the family? 

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream, and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. He is co-author with Jason Jones of “God, Guns, & the Government.”