NEWSFEED THURSDAY: The Bland Stalinist Evil of the Impeachment Hearings

J Robert Smith

  • Nov. 14, 2019
  • 3 min read

The burden of proof is on Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank) to do more than secure impeachment, which is all but certain. Their job is to conduct these hearings in a way that moves public opinion to the point that the Senate will convict the president. That means giving Republican senators something that changes their impression of Trump’s conduct of Ukraine foreign policy. What’s alleged may make many members of the GOP uncomfortable, but it doesn’t come remotely close to requiring that the president be removed from office. [bold added]

Los Angeles Times, November 13, 2019

Evil, however, proves to be clever. It is charming, and sometimes handsome and even eager to please. It loves opera and literature. Small children are happily dandled on its knee.

It cloaks itself in the commonplace. Hannah Arendt, observing the Adolf Eichmann trial in 1961, called it banal (Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, 1963). The evildoers of the SS forced the long procession of Jews onto the trains and into the Holocaust. Bland, anonymous faces made sure those trains ran on time.

Kathy Lally, the Baltimore Sun, April 25, 2004

QUICK TAKE

Wednesday’s kickoff of the Trump impeachment hearings proved to be a snooze. The Democrats’ star witnesses were bureaucrats – federal government lifers. The bow ties and three-piece suits are signatures of higher up professional government functionaries.

But don’t let appearances and the droning and grinding tedium of yesterday’s proceedings fool you.

As the L.A. Times opinion writer, Scott Jennings, points out, Trump will be impeached. It’s a forgone conclusion. These hearings have nothing to do with getting at the truth. To hell with a quest for real justice. They’re an attempt to convince enough undecided voters that the Democrats are right to frame and destroy an innocent man. There’s a strong odor of Stalinism to all this.

What House Democrats are orchestrating is a show trial, minus the dramatics – at least, on Day One. Show trials were very much a Stalinist tactic.

The very blandness of the proceedings covers the evil below them. We often think of evil as obvious and recognizable. Hitler comes to mind. Or the deranged Charlie Manson. But evil can masquerade as quite ordinary. It can look just like your next-door neighbor. Or it can look like Russian communist dictator Joseph Stalin.

There’s a very big element of Stalinist evil in the Democrats’ staged hearings.

Stalin was a bland man, in appearance and demeanor. Leading up to and during the Russian Revolution – and in the early years under Lenin – Stalin was considered a drudge by his fellow communist revolutionaries. A worker bee. They feared him not.

But Stalin was a sly man, who masked his cunning under a plain exterior. He used his position as General Secretary of the Communist Party to outmaneuver his rivals. He took power and killed off his competitors – real and imagined. Stalin then went on to become one of the great butchers in history, eclipsing Hitler and rivaled only by Mao.

All the time, Stalin was “Uncle” Joe, the benevolent father guiding Mother Russia. Yet, this was one of the evilest men ever.

The Democrats impeachment effort is a kangaroo court. No, the consequences of the impeachment proceedings aren’t to ship Trump and others off to a gulag or mass graves. Yet there are greater and lesser evils in the world.

What Schiff’s proceedings accomplish is to undermine justice. They’re a means to achieve political ends. As Marxists do, right and wrong are filtered through a political lens.

Right is defined as destroying the president, the Democrats’ enemy. They aim to decapitate the movement of tens millions of Americans that Trump leads. Democrats are questing for power and control of the nation and over the lives of its citizens. They mean to impose their will.

The way Democrats are killing isn’t with bullets or via slow deaths behind barbed wire in camps in Siberia. It’s through false accusations, defamation, and intimidation.

If you oppose Democrats and their allies on the left, and represent a sufficient threat, they’ll come after your job – or if not you, your families. They’ll tar your reputation. They’re hunger for power is that great. It crushes moral right under their boots. What Democrats have become, and what they are doing, is dangerous to our rights and, yes, our very liberty.

Democrats are practicing a lighter shade of Stalinism. It should trouble us very much.

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