I've got good news and bad.  I'd apologize for the bad except we all need to know it.  It's better to temporarily discourage people with the truth than to lie to give them false hope.  Lies have limited shelf life.  Sooner or later, they are exposed.

The good news is that those lying to you today will be revealed as frauds.  The bad news is, that may be just the beginning of the story.

Sadly, fraud is the byword of our world.  The vaccine is safe and effective.  COVID is a pandemic of the unvaccinated.  Two weeks to flatten the curve.  It was mostly a peaceful protest.  I am not a crook.  I did not have sex with that woman.

Perhaps the most blatant example is Dr. Anthony Fauci.  He perfectly embodied the fraudulent spirit of the age when he proclaimed to naysayers, "I am science."

Those with the slightest grasp of history may recognize the hubris.  Vladimir Lenin likewise proclaimed nonsense to establish his bona fides.

"Communism is omnipotent because it is true," Lenin declared as a foundational tenet of Marxism.

The logic behind Lenin's and Fauci's nonsense is simple.  They need their dogma to be recognized as the truth before anything anyone else's views may even be uttered.  Any deviation from Lenin's or Fauci's talking points then can be reduced to bourgeois lies or "fake news." 

Lenin's legacy of omnipotent government replaced religious truth and, at least in Russia, succeeded for seven decades.  All points of view that conflicted in the slightest with communist dogma were banned.  It literally was life-endangering to publicly disagree with the dogma's absolutism.

Likewise, Fauci needed to shut down dissenting voices that suggested he could be wrong.  He did it by equating himself with "science," the new god of our age, ironically thanks in part to Lenin.  You've probably noticed, to disagree with him publicly has been to invite career ruin and ostracization — and yes, there are even modern budding totalitarians who want you imprisoned.

Lenin's and Fauci's obvious frauds also share this: they must be enforced without mercy, without exception.  Any chink in the armor can be fatal to a closed system, which we saw in the early 1990s as Russians began to openly question communist dogma.

Just as Lenin and his communist cohorts found it necessary to eliminate doubters, so too have Fauci and his like-minded brethren.

The Russian track record was covered in blood, with as many as 20 million shot, strangled, starved, beaten, and worked to death.  In America, countless dissenting doctors, researchers, scientists, and patients have been muzzled and intimidated by the totalitarian system that allows no objectors.  In Russia as in the United States, complicit media reinforced the thought-policing.

George Orwell warned of all this.  Communist China has expanded on the concept beyond Lenin's wildest dreams.  And our nation dutifully follows the example as wannabe Lenins and Faucis jockey for position to be the next supreme leader who can do no wrong.  Think omnipotence and science.

Here's the good news: the frauds of Lenin, Fauci, and those who model their utopias after them all contain the seed of their own destruction.

For fraud to prevail, truth must be suppressed.  But truth eventually will be known, and when it is compared to the fraudulent lies, people will understand that they have been manipulated.

It was difficult for Lenin to hermetically seal a nation of 140 million to shut down dissent, but he and those who followed him succeeded.  They did it the old-fashioned totalitarian way.  They killed dissenters or sent them to gulag forced labor camps.  They forced everyone else to accept the fraud as reality, or else.

As Russian expert David Satter puts it, "the Soviet experiment in total dominance ... was the product of a purely modern form of megalomania, the notion that human affairs can be ordered without the help of transcendental rules."

Lenin's Russia was the first state in history based explicitly on atheism.  To fill that gaping void, the Soviet Union gave itself the attributes of God.  From religion, the communists adopted the concept that God cannot be wrong.  To do that in a historic Christian nation required force.

Similarly, every nation-state modeled after Marxism is ruthlessly totalitarian.  Even milquetoast varieties, such as so-called democratic peoples' republics with their communal welfare states, are merely watered down totalitarian systems.  Think not?  Try opting out and find out.  Have you noticed that 87,000 new tax collectors are going to be armed?

People instinctively recoil at behaving unproductively.  Or they starve.  But they can be forced to remake reality in their mind.  In the USSR from 1917 to its collapse in 1991, citizens were assured that this Sisyphean task, impossible to complete and performed at vast and tragic human cost, was their future because, as Lenin proclaimed, "communism is omnipotent."  Those who disagreed were eliminated.  By the millions.

Satter's five books on Russia record the consequences of that approach.  His book titles alone give a chilling insight to what life was like in God-forsaken, man-made utopian Heaven on Earth:

• Never Speak to Strangers and Other Writing from Russia and the Soviet Union
• The Less You Know, the Better You Sleep: Russia's Road to Terror and Dictatorship under Yeltsin and Putin
• It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past

While totalitarian evildoing will end, there's a catch: people probably will have to learn the hard way.  A national behemoth takes a long time to die.  It took the USSR 74 years.

There's another catch.  Even after their eyes were opened to see communism is a lie, Russians had no Plan B.  Satter writes that the Soviet "people were in thrall to an absurd ideology.  With the advent of Gorbachev's perestroika, the Soviet population was liberated from the ideology and the state hurtled to its inevitable collapse."

But, Satter notes, "when independent Russia emerged from the wreckage, the failure to replace the missing ideology with genuine moral values led to Russia's complete criminalization."

Totalitarian tsarist Russia was replaced by the totalitarian communist USSR, which was replaced by the Russian Mafia and oligarchs, certainly totalitarian in their own right.  Worse yet, Satter writes, gangsters achieved "legitimacy and even a form of respectability."

"[T]he population was left without moral orientation," according to Satter.  "The resulting moral vacuum often had murderous consequences.  In the years 1992–1997 in Moscow alone, 20,000 people sold their housing and then disappeared.  In the country as a whole, the number for the period was many times higher.  A significant percentage, if not the vast majority, of these people were believed to have been murdered for their apartments."

Lenin banished God in the USSR to make room for communism.  People can't worship both.  We may have yet another parallel between the dystopian worlds of Lenin and Fauci.

Today we're faced with what will follow after the Potemkin Villages of Fauci, Joe Biden and the World Economic Forum are exposed. Will we survive these totalitarian threats only to discover that we, like the USSR, don't have a Plan B?

God has been shoved to the fringe of our society.  There were scant religious exceptions granted to the mandated vaccines.  How often do you hear government leaders invoking God's will as their standard?

Here's something to consider.  In 2021, Anthony Fauci received the American Humanist of the Year award.  If you're unaware of the American Humanist Association, its motto is "Good without a God."  How'd that work out in the USSR?

Mark Landsbaum is a Christian retired journalist, former investigative reporter, editorial writer, and columnist.  He also is a husband, father, grandfather, and Dodgers fan.  He can be reached at mark.landsbaum@gmail.com.

Image via Pxhere.