Someone once said that history does not repeat, but it rhymes. We need to remember that the Communists in the USSR were brought down by the very workers they claimed to support. It was all a lie.
Here's what the Soviet communists were saying when the workers in Poland revolted. Sound familiar?
Nonetheless we will still need to react—and by that I mean react concretely—to the stunts of hooligan elements now active in Poland, whom the government has not taken any measures to combat. . . . What’s going on there now is they’re defacing the monuments of our soldiers . . . they’re insulting the Soviet Union in every possible manner . . . In other words, they’re mocking us,” Soviet Politburo member Nikolai Tikhonov exclaimed during a September 1981 debate over how to respond to the strikes and headline-grabbing protests by the Polish union, Solidarity.
Another Politburo member suggested using the media to smear the independent Polish union to win the public relations battle: “Both in ‘Pravda’ and in other newspapers we must organize statements of this sort.”
Another warned that the workers’ revolt might spread—thus challenging the legitimacy of a system that appropriated the industrial worker’s hammer crossed with the agricultural worker’s scythe. “Solidarity has decided not to confine itself solely to Poland. It is attempting to impose its subversive ideas on neighboring states and to interfere in their internal affairs.” He added a smear familiar to today’s ears, “This is just what fascists do in creating brigades of stormtroopers.”...
Then, like now, academics and media were a tool of first resort to suppress and smear political opposition.
