The Sovietization of the West
The Soviet Union lost the Cold War. For decades it was the scourge of the free world—the bête noir of capitalism and Western civilization. The global struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union left the world teetering on the edge of nuclear war. Thousands died in armed conflict, while millions of Soviets died by the hand of their own leaders. Its ideological warfare continues to wreak havoc across the English-speaking world.
Mikail Gorbechav’s policy of glasnost began lifting the Iron Curtain, but after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, it became clear that it was a facade. We saw a clear picture of it’s true nature: dysfunctional government, unaccountable bureaucrats and intelligence agents, jailing of political dissidents, massive deficit spending, crumbling infrastructure, declining national health, widespread discontent and a losing military.
Francis Fukuyama famously declared the Western victory of the Cold War was the “end of history.” The United States had secured security and hegemony.
Over 30 years later, the victors are looking more like the vanquished. The United States is becoming a hollow superpower. The issues that plagued Soviet Russia before it collapsed are eerily familiar to those facing America. This trend is also evident in the British Commonwealth nations.
What is behind the decline of our nations? Are we headed for a Soviet-style collapse?
This parallelism was pointed out by Niall Ferguson in his column “Are We the Soviets Now?”:
The witty phrase “late Soviet America” was coined by the Princeton historian Harold James back in 2020. … But it only recently struck me that in this new Cold War, we—and not the Chinese—might be the Soviets.
The world is again divided between two power blocs: the West, led by America, and the brics economic bloc, led by Russia and China. The U.S. is not reprising its role as the resilient superpower, but is the modern Soviet Union, limping along in dysfunction under a veneer of strength and prosperity.
The most intriguing and troubling similarity is that now the American education system and government are disciples of communism, just as the dictators of the Soviet Union were. It is tragic irony. The U.S. spent much blood and treasure to defeat the Communist menace during the Cold War, only to be conquered by it ideologically.
One man warned of this exact danger for over 50 years. Commenting on the Communist ideological warfare, the late Herbert W. Armstrong wrote in 1956:
It’s a kind of warfare we don’t understand, or know how to cope with. It uses every diabolical means to weaken us from within, sapping our strength, perverting our morals, sabotaging our educational system, wrecking our social structure, destroying our spiritual and religious life, weakening our industrial and economic power, demoralizing our armed forces, and finally, after such infiltration, overthrowing our government by force and violence! All this, cleverly disguised as a harmless political party! Communism is worldwide psychological warfare!
The Communist infiltration is the main cause of this Sovietization. This is explained in detail in He Was Right.
Ferguson pointed out that many of the issues we face are self-inflicted:
Yet we also need to contemplate the possibility that we have done this to ourselves—just as the Soviets did many of the same things to themselves. It was a common liberal worry during the Cold War that we might end up becoming as ruthless, secretive and unaccountable as the Soviets because of the exigencies of the nuclear arms race. Little did anyone suspect that we would end up becoming as degenerate as the Soviets, and tacitly give up on winning the cold war now underway.
This Communist infiltration has been in play for generations, but in 2008, Barack Obama began a ruthless fundamental transformation of the U.S. into a Communist dictatorship. This is why we have a politicized fbi and Department of Justice that persecutes its own people, mimicking the fsb and kgb. This is why the U.S. virtually has a gulag for January 6 protesters. This is why we have fraudulent elections that install leaders with dementia. This is why lawfare is used to destroy Donald Trump. This is why the mainstream media spouts propaganda for the regime. Similar authoritarianism was displayed in the British Commonwealth, especially during the pandemic, which would have made Stalin smile. This is explained in Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry’s book America Under Attack.
The Communist ideology is also reflected in economic policies around the West. Under the guise of “green” energy and technology, Communist leaders have been slowly dismantling the free market economy through government intervention, regulation and massive deficit spending.
The U.S. and the West are also mirroring the dysfunction of the Soviet military. “We have a military that is simultaneously expensive and unequal to the tasks it confronts,” Ferguson wrote. “As I read [Senator Roger] Wicker’s report [on the state of the U.S. military] … I kept thinking of what successive Soviet leaders said until the bitter end: that the Red Army was the biggest and therefore most lethal military in the world. On paper, it was. But paper was what the Soviet bear turned out to be made of. It could not even win a war in Afghanistan, despite ten years of death and destruction. (Now, why does that sound familiar?)”
The disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan three years ago echoes the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan just before it collapsed: a superpower defeated by farmers with rifles. However, the withdrawal under Joe Biden was much more chaotic and humiliating.
As the Soviet Union unraveled, the mortality rate spiraled out of control due to drugs, alcohol and smoking. American society is also coming apart at the seams. Ferguson wrote:
In 2022 alone, more Americans died of fentanyl overdoses than were killed in three major wars: Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
The recent data on American mortality are shocking. Life expectancy has declined in the past decade in a way we do not see in comparable developed countries. The main explanations, according to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, are a striking increase in deaths due to drug overdoses, alcohol abuse and suicide, and a rise in various diseases associated with obesity.
Between 1990 and 2017, 1.3 million working-age Americans died from drugs and alcohol, and over 500,000 died from suicide. He continued:
The mass self-destruction of Americans captured in the phrase deaths of despair for years has been ringing a faint bell in my head. This week I remembered where I had seen it before: in late Soviet and post–Soviet Russia. While male life expectancy improved in all Western countries in the late twentieth century, in the Soviet Union it began to decline after 1965, rallied briefly in the mid-1980s, and then fell off a cliff in the early 1990s, slumping again after the 1998 financial crisis. The death rate among Russian men aged 35 to 44, for example, more than doubled between 1989 and 1994.
The mirror of history is revealing a troubling future for the United States and British Commonwealth. Thirty years ago, no one would have guessed that the dystopian, tyrannical and dysfunctional legacy of the Soviet Union would become our own. However, a student of Bible prophecy could have seen it coming.
In Mr. Armstrong’s book, The United States and Britain in Prophecy, he explained the two foundational chapters of prophecy to understand the decline of our nations: Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28. These are known as the “blessings and curses” chapters: If you obey God’s laws, you are blessed, but disobey, and you will be punished.
Notice how these scriptures perfectly encapsulate the state of our nations. “But it shall come to pass, if thou wilt not hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to observe to do all his commandments and his statutes which I command thee this day; that all these curses shall come upon thee, and overtake thee” (Deuteronomy 28:15). These curses come from God as a result of our sins.
“Cursed shall be the fruit of thy body …” (verse 18). Our national health would suffer. “He shall lend to thee, and thou shalt not lend to him: he shall be the head, and thou shalt be the tail” (verse 44). By embracing deficit spending, we became subservient to other nations.
Now to Leviticus 26:17: “[T]hey that hate you shall reign over you; and ye shall flee when none pursueth you.” Communists who hate our nation will have power, while our military flees from Afghanistan.
“And I will break the pride of your power …” (verse 19). Our will to use our military power is broken. “And your strength shall be spent in vain …” (verse 20). Our vast wealth and resources would be spent without result.
This is a sobering reality. But there is no need to despair. The Bible warns of this future so we will repent and God can save us. You do not need to repeat history. Read The United States and Britain in Prophecy to know how to change your future.
