“We’re tired of lying to you. Lie to yourselves!”

I used to marvel at the ridiculous justifications given for the heavy-handed brutality of the Soviet system. Criminality was frequently swept under the rug, especially the major crimes featuring depravity or perversion, because they didn't square with the Soviet narrative of criminality being exclusive to western capitalists.

In a Communist Utopia, crime could not exist because crime is unnecessary; everyone had all they needed, and the Soviet character was incompatible with corruption.

Despite being a brutal authoritarian regime with few (if any) checks on their power, the government still felt the need to maintain the appearance of legitimacy, a fig leaf if you will, providing contextual justifications for the outrageous violations of human rights that were the hallmark of Soviet rule.

Ludicrous accusations were made up out of whole cloth, then corroborated by "witnesses," who themselves feared deadly repercussions if they refused to do so, creating a justice system that made accusation the equivalent of conviction, with a trial determining only the severity of the inevitable punishment.

Why did these largely unaccountable officials even bother with ginning up the charges? Why not simply make their target disappear?

To be sure, targets did indeed simply disappear, but the psychology of collectivist coercion requires more than mortal danger to create reliable behaviors among a vast population.

It requires "excuses" for the disappearances (rational or not) for the people to focus on, enabling them to avoid facing the savage truth of their circumstances; that they lived only because their government had not yet chosen for them to die.

This is a commonality in all totalitarian regimes. You can't keep a boot on every neck, so the population must self-censor/restrain themselves for the system to function. The most effective way to achieve this is the use of pretexts.

Providing pretexts for government abuses permitted the oppressed people to lie to themselves, to believe they could avoid a deadly fate by behaving properly, when the reality is, their fates were wholly dependent on the whims of officialdom.

But why offer such ridiculously flimsy pretexts? Why not at least make the accusations believable?

This was deliberate, to show the people who is in charge; by forcing them to accept an obvious lie, even perpetuate it themselves, the state reminded the serf that even his mind was not his own.

Fast forward to the present day. We know January 6th was no "Insurrection," but it is relentlessly presented as such and participants are being prosecuted as if it were.

We know parents standing up to leftist school boards are not domestic terrorists, but the federal government intends to treat them as such.

We know we cannot "vax" our way out of the pandemic, largely because the pandemic is one of government manipulation, not natural virulence, yet the "authorities" declare their mandates and enforce the unenforceable.

For those who still cling to the fiction "it can't happen here," I simply posit... it already is.