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In the 20th century, you might think the collapse of Russia to communism would warn everyone else off. But it was a contagious ideological sickness, a mind virus. Recall: the Soviet Union of the 1950s had just finished three decades of Leninism, Red Terror, and World War. Then Khrushchev gave his secret speech in 1956 repudiating Stalinism, and Soviet communism started moderating… …right as Chinese communism of the Maoist variety was accelerating! Because the most bloodthirsty years of Mao actually corresponded to the period that Stalinism was declining in the USSR. Millions of Russians had died from acute communism over the 1920s-40s, but millions of Chinese (and Vietnamese and Koreans) died from acute communism only by the 1950s-70s. So: Europe and Russia experienced the most murderous form of communism first, while East Asia and Southeast Asia only experienced it later. Visualize the Russian body politic falling sick to the communist mind virus first, losing extraordinary amounts of blood, and then spreading it to their Chinese neighbor. Even as the Russian got gradually on the mend, Ivan’s Ebola-like splashes of blood had infected his Chinese neighbor…who then started thrashing and clawing at himself in the throes of communism, just as the Russian had. Just like World War Z, the zombieism of communism was contagious. This is what I fear could happen with wokeness, and American culture more generally. The contagious far left ideology that destroyed America, and the rightist ideology that’s arisen in reaction as an overactive immune response, are exactly analogous to what happened in Russia and Eastern Europe in the 20th century. But the future isn’t written. It’s important that the ideological chaos that’s destroyed the West not spread too far beyond America and Western Europe. This century’s Chinese and (to a lesser extent) their allies will be fine. Because they can simply filter the Western mind viruses with their digital borders. However, any country that lets in the unfiltered Anglophone Internet will allow in the same mind viruses that caused American Anarchy. Yet on the third hand, that same free Internet is going to be the basis for just about all economic growth outside Chinese Control. So, Indians and places like Dubai and El Salvador will be on the front lines here. They’ll need to figure out ways to filter out anarchic American ideologies while simultaneously balancing via the Internet against top-down Chinese control. I think men like Modi, Bukele, and MBZ are capable of doing it. But you’ll need leaders who can argue in English, and filter out destructive Western wokeness (and its discontents) while adopting constructive Internet capitalism.