When History Is Forgotten: What Mamdani’s Victory Reveals About Our Collective Amnesia

By Natasha H. Pein

The recent election of the openly socialist and Islamist-aligned candidate Mamdani as mayor of New York City is more than a political event—it is a cultural symptom. It reveals the profound educational and historical amnesia of a society that has forgotten the brutal realities of the ideologies now returning under new names and softer branding.

As a child refugee from Dagestan who lived under both Soviet communism and Islamist fundamentalism, I know firsthand what happens when utopian ideologies seize power. When my mother saw the election results, her first reaction was disbelief: “Are people really that stupid?” Her words may sound harsh, but they capture a truth that history itself has confirmed—every time a society flirts with totalitarian ideas in the name of “justice” or “equality,” it ends in oppression, fear, and decay.

The Red-Green Alliance: An Old Ideology in New Clothes

Mamdani represents what scholars have called the Red-Green alliance: a convergence of Marxist and Islamist ideologies. Communism provides the language of economic “justice,” while Islamism supplies the radicalized religious facade to legitimize control. Together, they create an illusion of liberation that seduces the disillusioned and the uneducated. This hybrid ideology cloaks authoritarian goals behind slogans of “equity,” “decolonization,” and “resistance.”

What makes this alliance so dangerous is its ability to disguise control as compassion. It markets censorship as “inclusivity,” redistribution as “justice,” and ideological conformity as “diversity.” The pattern is familiar to anyone who lived under Marxist rule: when truth becomes subjective and morality becomes political, tyranny soon follows.

The Soviet Lesson: Equality Without Freedom Is Slavery

I remember the Soviet years vividly—the endless queues for bread, eggs, even toilet paper. The shelves were bare, the air itself felt censored. Every song, film, newspaper, and classroom echoed the same party slogans. Dissent was not only punished; it was erased.

This was socialism in practice: a society where the promise of equality destroyed freedom, and the absence of freedom destroyed human spirit. My mother, who no longer remembers what she had for breakfast, still remembers the day Stalin died. For millions, it was the day a suffocating terror lifted.

Socialism and communism always collapse for the same reason—they murder incentive, creativity, and individual dignity. They promise paradise but deliver poverty and despair. When hard work is punished and dependency rewarded, the human drive to excel withers.

Boiling the Frog: How Ideological Capture Works

Totalitarian systems rarely announce themselves. They seep in gradually, normalizing control one “progressive” step at a time. This is the danger New York now faces. Mamdani will not impose radical change overnight; he will do it through policy increments—under banners like “free education,” “climate justice,” and “equitable housing.”

Each initiative will sound noble, but together they will erode civic independence and economic vitality. The city’s wealth producers will flee; mediocrity will spread. And as history shows, the vacuum left by decay will be filled by those who crave power, not freedom.

Why Education Matters

The tragedy is not merely political—it is pedagogical. A society that does not teach history is condemned to repeat it. The failure of Western education to convey the true cost of communism, the mechanics of Islamist radicalism, and the warning signs of ideological extremism has created fertile ground for manipulation.

When citizens do not know what Stalinism, Maoism, or the Iranian Revolution did to human beings, they can be persuaded to believe that “socialism” or “Islamic justice” will be different this time. It never is.

Education must do more than teach dates and slogans—it must teach cause and consequence. Only through historical literacy can societies inoculate themselves against ideological infection.

Memory as Resistance

For those of us who fled regimes that fused faith and totalitarianism, Mamdani’s victory is chilling. It is not simply a political win—it is the resurrection of a worldview we thought we had escaped.

New York, the city that never sleeps, is now sleepwalking into the same illusions that once imprisoned half the world. The only antidote is truth—taught, remembered, and courageously spoken.

History’s verdict is clear: communism and Islamism alike promise utopia but deliver servitude. Forgetting that lesson is not just ignorance—it is complicity.

“Those who forget the past,” wrote Santayana, “are condemned to repeat it.”

New York has just forgotten. The rest of us must not.