Saule Omarova, the proud Komsomol who wrote about Karl Marx on a Lenin scholarship, has withdrawn her nomination and will not be the next comptroller of the currency in the Treasury Department. The Moscow State alum, once arrested for theft, aimed to replicate Soviet banking in America. Senator Tim Scott (R-S.C.) called her out as the worst possible choice, but the craven Soviet apologist proves instructive about what is now going on in America.

During the administration of President Trump, General Mark Milley appointed himself commander-in-chief, told China he would tip them off in event of a U.S. attack, and branded Trump supporters as brownshirts. After a highly questionable election, thousands of troops occupied Washington and the FBI targeted Biden’s opposition as domestic terrorists. This has all the makings of a coup, and invites a look at a democratic nation that suffered a similar takeover.

As Tracy A. Burns explains in “The Communist Coup in Czechoslovakia,” that nation was the last democracy in Eastern Europe, but on February 25, 1948 it was fundamentally transformed into a Communist country. In 1946, the Communist Party received 38 percent of the vote but in 1947 the USSR barred Czechoslovakia from receiving American aid under the Marshall Plan. Non-Communist ministers then began to receive parcel bombs, a sign of things to come.

“The Communist-ridden police claimed they had discovered an espionage scheme carried out by American military attachés in Prague,” Burns recalls. “The Ministry of the Interior put non-Communist politicians under close surveillance. Democratic personalities were arrested for no apparent reason.” Then “violent Communist-led demonstrations erupted. Armed trade unionists rioted in the Prague streets, attacking the offices of the political opposition.” The only force that could oppose the communists was the Army, but “it was run by Communist General Ludvík Svoboda.”

The Soviets marshaled troops at the border and post-war president Eduard Beneš caved to a demand for a new government under the Communist Klement Gottwald. Democratic Minister of Foreign Affairs Jan Masaryk, son of first Czechoslovak president Tomáš G. Masaryk, died a mysterious death. As Burns explains, “he either fell or was pushed off a balcony of the Czernin Palace and was found on the pavement below his office.” A constitution modeled after the USSR became law and no opposition to the Communist Party was allowed, “triggering more than 40 long years of totalitarian rule.”

For a sense of totalitarian rule in practice, consult Czech writer Milan Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. As Kundera relates: “Religion was persecuted by the regime and most people gave the church a wide berth.” The secret police kept busy “staging situations that will compromise us” and “they need to trap people to force them to collaborate and set traps for other people, so that gradually they can turn the whole nation into a single organization of informers.”

Under communism, “more and more people were going to prison for no offense other than upholding their own opinions.” Street names were Sovietized and Czech painters, philosophers and writers were “relieved of their positions and became window washers, parking attendants, night watchmen, boilermen in public buildings, or at best, and usually with pull, taxi drivers.”

As Kundera recalls, if a painter is to have an exhibition, an ordinary citizen to receive a visa to a country with a seacoast, a soccer player to join the national team, “then a vast array of recommendations and reports must be garnered from the concierge, colleagues, the police, the local Party organization, the pertinent trade union, and added up, weighed and summarized by special officials.”

The regime demanded “socialist realism” and art schools manufactured portraits of communist statesmen. And so on, with some parallels already evident in America. That should come as no surprise given the composite character president David Garrow described in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, dedicated to “fundamentally transforming” the United States of America.

The composite character’s biggest influence was the beloved Communist and Soviet agent Frank Marshall Davis, an African American who spent much of his life defending an all-white Stalinist dictatorship. The composite character’s choice for CIA boss was John Brennan, who in 1976 voted for the Stalinist Gus Hall, candidate of the Communist Party USA, and never should have been allowed near the CIA door in the first place.

“Progressive” Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) honeymooned in the Soviet Union and thinks highly of Cuba’s Communist regime. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was so enamored of Communist and Soviet agent Harry Bridges that she praised him in the Congressional Record. The choice of Omarova shows this squad in triumphal mode.

A few Democrats opposed the Lenin scholar but for the coup clan it will be one step back, two steps forward. The Biden Junta deploys white coat supremacist Dr. Anthony Fauci, the Lysenko figure who claims to represent science. The FBI and Justice Department stage compromising situations and target those less than worshipful of the addled Biden.

Military bosses are fighting “climate change” and purging the ranks of patriotic Americans. The Antifa and BLM militias have bloodied their troops and stand ready for action. And as Orwell noted in Animal Farm, rats are comrades.

According to Milan Kundera, the struggle of mankind against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. In that spirit, the Czechs have established the Museum of Communism with the theme “Communism—the Dream, the Reality, and the Nightmare.”

If the coup clan succeeds, a totalitarian nightmare will be America’s fate.