JD Vance Exposes How Europe Has Become a Concentration Camp

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Back when I was a Russian linguist in the U.S. Army and posted to West Germany, 1979-82, we went on maneuvers near The Wall with East Germany. This was not the Berlin Wall, but similar to it. I could see the guards bearing rifles in their towers, ready to shoot anyone who tried to escape the communist regime of censorship and total control, to freedom in the West.

In contrast to the verdant West German farms, the socialist East looked bleak, which is why the East Bloc of communist countries – Poland, Hungary, etc. – were called the Gray Republics. The enemy I was fighting against clearly was before my eyes. And when I tuned one of the Army radios and listened to the Soviet Army, I could hear the oppression directly.

That changed just over 35 years ago when the Berlin Wall fell and a great burst of freedom spread around Europe, and much of the world. Unfortunately, since then West Europe’s elite gradually strapped on their people massive regimes of censorship and tyranny.

That’s why JD Vance’s denunciation of the European tyrants sent them squealing. They believe they’re defending against “fascism,” when they have turned into the STASI – the dreaded East German Staatssicherheit secret police, their version of the KGB, the Gestapo or, under Biden, the FBI. A great movie was made about them in 2006, “The Lives of Others.” It makes you feel the stultifying atmosphere of living under a total security state, where everyone is spying on everyone else.

At least in communist East Germany the STASI had to physically bug your phone or install microphones in your home. With modern social media, you incriminate yourself with every social media post. CBS’ “60 Minutes” just ran a piece showing a STASI – excuse me, free Germany’s Polizei – raid on someone who put up offending speech on social media.

The show called it “a pre-dawn wakeup call from the police” – what Solzhenitsyn called “the knock in the middle of the night” from the NKVD under Stalin. In “The Gulag Archipelago,” he described how that’s done because the person is disorganized upon just waking up and neighbors are asleep. The same thing. The CBS announcer says: “The crime: Posting a racist cartoon online.”

But we’re never shown the cartoon. Was it mocking other Germans, the way Bavarians insult Prussians as martinets, or Prussians return the favor by saying Bavarians are lazy drunks? Or insulting the French? Or Slavs, especially Poles and Russians? Germany has a lot of Turks, Syrians and other immigrants now, who would be natural targets for insults. Or maybe the people arrested were immigrants making fun of Germans. We don’t know.

Or were posts put up of the late American insult comic Don Rickles, who made fun of everybody? Or the late Richard Pryor? Or almost any modern American comic? Or video excerpts of “Blazing Saddles”?

If you’re an American, you know you just have to put up with this stuff as the price of being free. Although the First Amendment has been expansively interpreted since the 1960s end of censorship, most of us, even a conservative like me, don’t want more censorship. Indeed, it was the Biden regime that was intent on increasing censorship, especially of conservatives.

As Marc Andreessen told Joe Rogan, a year ago the Biden people called in the Tech Bros from Silicon Valley and outlined a vast system of censorship and control of social media and the burgeoning AI industry – by the Democrats. That’s when he and some, but not all, the Tech Bros move toward backing Trump who, in his usual business transactional way, promised them freedom if they helped get him elected. And here we are, still free, unlike in Europe.

I’m a non-interventionist and want the U.S. to get out of NATO. But on their way out, our 35,000 troops still in Germany should be tasked by Trump to ride to Berlin, park outside the Reichstag, and order the krauts to restore freedom by adopting a First Amendment, Second Amendment and the other eight planks in our Bill of Rights. That’s what America did to them after World War I, World War II and the Cold War. It would be our parting gift.