Homo Sovieticus: A Warning from History

A 1988 book proves America is on the cusp of plunging the world back to the Stalinist era

Somewhere among the many boxes of books we have stored away “just in case,” is a 1988 title by Mikhail Heller: Cogs in the Wheel: The Formation of Soviet Man. I first read the book in our little apartment in North Charleston, South Carolina, while my boat, the USS Woodrow Wilson, was going a through a nuclear reactor refueling overhaul at the Charleston Naval Shipyard. You could say that I was, at the time, standing guard against the Sovietization of the free world.

I wanted everyone to read the book. Most of my shipmates had no idea just how drab and empty were the lives of people condemned by history to live in the Soviet Union. No one took me up on the offer.

Thirty-six years later, those shipmates still alive are in danger of finding out firsthand what Heller warned us about when we were young.

Heller’s style reminded me of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s, with its rhythmic repetition of points the reader must internalize to fully understand the text. Heller was a historian and a Russian emigre who amplified Solzhenitsyn’s warning to the world about the dangers of Soviet communism and its effects on the human mind and spirit. Unlike The Gulag Archipeligo, Heller’s book was relatively short and focused directly on the dehumanizing effects of communism rather than on the history and structures of the system itself.

Lee Congdon reviewed the book for the Los Angeles Times in 1988, which may seem surprising today. No mainstream media outlet in 2024 would dare publish a review of a book that condemns what Heller’s condemned, “the Bolsheviks’ oft-stated intention to transform human nature, to create a compliant, collectivized New Man: Homo sovieticus.”

Nearly four decades later, a cabal of globalist Republicans, Democrats, Hollywood, acacemia, the US government, and the news industry now conspire to finish that transformation of God’s highest creatures into mere automatons serving the state as cogs in a godless and heartless machine.

Congdon writes a pivotal paragraph (emphases added). As you read the following, you will wonder whether Heller was writing about the old Soviet Union or present-day United States:

Heller devotes the longest section of his book to the “instruments” Soviet leaders have used to form New Men. Along with police terror, educational indoctrination, cultural propaganda, labor organization, and political mythology, he cites the way in which the Stalinist state destroyed family loyalties by inducing children to inform on their parents. And in his finest chapter, on language, he confirms W. H. Auden’s insight that both Hitler and Stalin “recognized . . . that there is something dangerous about language itself and tried to create a pseudo-German and pseudo-Russian in which it would be impossible to make genuine statements about anything.” That impossibility, Heller warns, is no longer restricted to two Indo-European dialects, for growing numbers of people around the world have come to accept Soviet definitions of words and thus, unwittingly, to extend the empire of thought control.

Heller was a prophet. Every instrument used by that Evil Empire to dehumanize and degrade the peoples of Russia and Eastern Europe from 1917 to 1991 are now operating in plain sight on the peoples of Western Europe and North America.

• Police terror: See J6, the anti-Trump lawfare, and the rounding up of pro-life activists.

• Educational indoctrination: Consider that most of the school day in America’s public elementary schools are spent in “specials,” not core subjects. Specials are indoctrination camps.

• Cultural propaganda: Watch four hours of commercial television and count the number of references, in plots or ads, to a stable nuclear family or non-deviant sexual situation.

• Political mythology: For four years Joe Biden was the sharpest mind in Washington and statements to the contrary were “disinformation” that must be outlawed; then Joe Biden is a mentally incapable of running for office and must be replaced by the machine for the good of the country.

Most chilling, think of the destruction of language as a means of communication. That’s gone. Words have no meaning. Any given word means both what it indicates and its opposite at all times. For example, within the last 24 hours, CBS News reported that Kamala Harris never raised money for George Floyd terrorists in Minnesota, even while acknowledging Harris did, in fact, raise money for terrorists. Those who point out CBS’s obvious doublespeak and mutually eliminating statement are branded racists, misogynists, and conspiracy theorists who will be banned from public life when Ms. Harris becomes dictator President (for the good of democracy).

Revolver.news editor Darren Beattie, in this clip from today’s War Room, describes our political moment in terms clearly recognizable in Heller’s warning.

Click to play on X

What we face in 2024 and for decades beyond is the battle between man and machine, between human beings and an evil system for which humans a mere fuel.

Thus, we, as humans, have a dual duty. First, we must fight for humanity and against the machine. Second, we must fight to remain, ourselves, human beings, refusing by any means necessary to become cogs in their Satanic wheel.

The first duty is fulfilled in ways we’ve always known about: support human candidates at every level. Fight the enemy at every turn. Never cooperate with the state or its instruments. Use resistance, silence, shouting, and sabotage to break the system. (Example, never cooperate with the FBI or DOJ no matter the supposed seriousness of the situation or the seeming sincerity of the agents.)

The second duty is fulfilled by even simpler and more ancient methods: pray, live well, and raise your family right.

Lee Congdon closed his 1988 review with inspiring and hopeful words—far more hopeful than Heller’s:

After 70 years of Soviet rule, there remain in Russia many of those incorrigible individualists whom Dostoevsky called “Underground Men.” Willing to pay the price for their errant ways, they insist, in the great writer’s words, that a man may sometimes “wish upon himself, in full awareness, something harmful, stupid, and even completely idiotic. He will do it in order to establish his right to wish for the most idiotic things and not to be obliged to have only sensible wishes.”

Honest historian that he is, Heller does not fail to call attention to Soviet men and women who have acted “idiotically,” even insanely, by official standards: nationalists and religious believers, a trade unionist, a ballerina, a biologist. He would have performed an even greater service had he subtitled his book “The Survival of Homo Sapiens.”

The “idiotic” thing for us to do is to fight the machine. The “smart” money would fall in line and hope for favors. But, contra Green Day, I wanna be an American idiot.

Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec recently published a modern warning: Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and how to crush). It is national bestseller that, not only warns of the dehumanizing effects of communism, but how to recognize the Communist takeover of American that’s in its late stages today. I strongly recommend reading Unhumans now, and if the book doesn’t scare you, follow it up with Cogs in the Wheel, which is still available from used book sellers.

This election is not about the relative position of two political parties; this election is the decision point between life and mere existence, between the human and the machine.

Choose humanity. Choose life. Be an idiot like me.