Editor's note: The following essay is excerpted from the co-authors' new book, "Stolen Youth."
My great-grandfather, Aron Gelberg, died in a gulag near the Kuril Islands in eastern Russia sometime in the late 1930s. Gulag stands for Glavnoye Upravleniye Ispravitelno-Trudovykh Lagerey or Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps, a bureaucratic name for forced labor camps maintained during the time of the Soviet Union.
Aron and his wife, Chaya, had owned a bakery in Gomel, Belarus, when private enterprise became illegal under the rule of Josef Stalin.
Other people in the gulags were politicians, intellectuals, artists or simply related to one of those objectionable persons. Some were there because they had said the wrong thing, others because they didn’t say the right thing strongly enough. My grandmother and her siblings were children when their father was taken away, but they learned the lesson: obey.
I was raised with the knowledge that the freedom I have gotten to experience in the United States should not, for a single moment, be taken for granted, but America is in danger. People are not being carted off to work camps, that’s true, but that was also true for much of the Soviet Union as well. Gulags only existed for about 30 of the USSR’s 69 years. And yet the stifling of speech, the fear of committing a crime today that wasn’t a crime yesterday, the indoctrination, the censorship, all persisted in Soviet society until the USSR’s last day.
THE LEFT THINKS YOUR KIDS SHOULD BE THE LEADERS IN PARENTING AND THIS IS WHAT IT MEANS FOR AMERICA
America is in a conformist moment of its own, and the signs are all too familiar for families like mine. There are a lot of terms associated with this time: "wokeness," "cancel culture" and "indoctrination" are all front and center. There is a push from schools, corporations, media and elsewhere for one woke monoculture.
The right way of looking at wokeness and woke culture is as a set of deeply toxic ideas that are force-fed to the populace, in particular to children. Part of the philosophy, and indeed the definition of staying awake to offenses, is to always be seeking new targets for re-education. Racism, sexism and general wrongthink are always lurking somewhere and must be rooted out.
The insidiousness of wokeism isn’t a twist of fate; it’s a strategy of brainwashing that has affected every corner of our culture. Leftism is deeply unpopular in America, which is why this woke language and behavior gets enforced through social and political pressure.
The majority of Americans are not woke, and yet, wokeness has an outsized influence at the top of academia, culture, business and across media. The result: the power of this narrative vastly outstrips its actual popularity and general level of acceptance.
The conformity of totalitarian regimes always had to begin with children. Children were the great hope of the realized utopian future. They belonged to all of society—not just the family to which they were born. If children could be convinced into the ideas the totalitarians wanted, their parents would follow. And if not, the disobedient parent could easily be removed from the equation.
YOUR CHILDREN BELONG TO YOU, NOT A SCHOOL. IF YOU DON'T FIGHT, YOU'LL LOSE THEM
In the Soviet Union, the Communists kept trying to push the idea that family was secondary to the state. Kids were taught to be like the hero child Pavlik Morozov, who had discovered his father was hoarding grain and informed on him to the authorities.
Statues of Pavlik were erected all over Russia. Poems and songs were written about him. Children were taught to be like Pavlik, to put the state above all, even their family. Especially their family. It was an understandably powerful lesson. Do the right thing, listen to authority, believe what we believe, act how we want you to act, and you will be celebrated like Pavlik. Don’t, and you’ll end up in a ditch like his accused family members.
The erasing of problematic aspects of the past is a typical feature of those seeking to stifle dissent. If we have nothing in common, no shared experiences or familiar rituals and ideas, we are easier to sway and control.
This history erasure has come to America. In the riots after the George Floyd killing, removing Confederate statues was the order of the day, but plenty of non-Confederates were dragged in along with them. Statues of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt were removed or defaced. When history cleansing gets going, it’s hard to stop it.
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Across the country, statues of George Floyd popped up. His imperfections were not up for debate. His brutal death, captured on video, had shocked Americans. We had united in disgust and grief over what had happened to him, but even that unity, in our totalitarian-mimicking moment, was simply not enough. "Black lives matter" is an idea as uncontroversial as "the Earth is round." But because everyone already agreed with it, it couldn’t simply be believed. You had to put a sign in your window to signal support for an idea that everyone already favored. You had to imagine there were people to convert to the cause, those who didn’t believe strongly enough or didn’t use the exact right words like "anti-racist" to describe it.
Tyrannical societies have always demanded conformity and spectacle in the same way. Aron died in that gulag, but his family had to learn to endure. When Stalin’s death was announced, Aron’s two daughters immediately got to work making a scrapbook of Stalin’s glorious life.
The spectacle was survival.
The home is the last line of defense. In totalitarian societies, parents have to pretend to believe the lies that kids are taught at school, lest they make themselves or their children a target. In a free country, you don’t have to do that.
Whose kid is this? In the home, you provide the answer: mine.
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Bethany Mandel is the editor of a children’s book series Heroes of Liberty, a former contributing writer for Deseret News and a homeschooling mother of five children. Find her on Twitter: @BethanyShondark and and on Instagram: @bethanyshondark.
