Bukovsky retells the popular joke about a Soviet nursery school teacher who describes how badly American children live, whereas in the Soviet Union everybody is happy and well off, parents buy their children treats, and the children go to the movies every day. When one little girl bursts into tears, the teacher asks what is wrong. “I want to go to the Soviet Union,” the girl sobs.
Reading a new article in the Claremont Review of Books about Soviet dissidents I was struck by how similar some of it sounded to the West now:
“After long acquaintance with his role,” explained Czesław Miłosz in The Captive Mind (1953), “a man grows into it so closely that he can no longer differentiate his true self from the self he simulates, so that even the most intimate of individuals speak to each other in Party slogans…. Acting on a comparable scale has not occurred often in the history of the human race.”
He should see the West today; it’s worse than merely repeating Party slogans. What the likes of Irish teacher Enoch Burke is experiencing is Orwell’s WrongThink and ThoughtCrime brought to life:
Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.
The real joke was that the whole system undermined itself because everybody lied about almost everything; they lied about production data and quality and labour (thus the classic Soviet joke, “they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work”) all along the supply chains, which added up to a lot of fraud, or “tufta” as the Russians called it. But as Václav Havel pointed out that:
…although it may have felt as if cheating undermined the system, in a lip-service state cheating was the system. The reason that each person accepts lies is that his neighbor does, and the reason his neighbor does is that he does. By speaking prescribed language, “each helps the other to be obedient…. They are both victims of the system and its instruments.” Acting as if they did not object, “individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.” Yes, the system pressures people to lie, Havel wrote, but the pressure only works because they are all too willing to live that way, a willingness marking their “own failure as individuals.”
It was this feature that the dissidents were really fighting against; the reason those dissidents protested openly – knowing that it would make no difference, that it would not change Soviet policy on anything, let alone public opinion (and although they liked those jokes, they knew that such was also were part of the system, part of coping) – was that it was personal:
What mattered most to them was regaining personal integrity. They disdained the cost/benefit approach that would have left them grumbling accomplices of the regime…. Larisa Bogoraz, who had already played a prominent role in the dissident movement, asserted: “To keep silent meant to lie. I do not consider my way of acting the only correct decision, but for me it was the only possible decision.”
There was also a very specific Russian characteristic at work that Westerners should keep in mind and it applies to modern, dead dissident, Alexei Navalny:
When Navalny returned to Russia in 2021, a puzzled Western reporter asked [Natan Sharansky]: didn’t Navalny know he would be arrested and probably killed? For Sharansky, this question betrayed the Western assumption that the point of life is individual well-being. He described his retort as “pretty rude”: “You’re the one who does not understand something. If you think the goal is survival—then you are right. But his true concern is the fate of his people—and he is telling them: ‘I am not afraid, and you should not be either.’”
It seems to me that if the West is escape this trap and destroy our growing system of WrongThink we too might be better off thinking of and arguing about about the fate of our peoples instead of just our individual freedoms.
As always, read the whole thing.
===================
The woke brigade has been dealt a blow as Professor Kathleen Stock’s former university has been slapped with a hefty £585,000 fine for failing to uphold freedom of speech and academic freedom. The Office for Students (OfS) ruled that the University of Sussex’s transgender policy had a “chilling effect” on staff and students, leaving them feeling “self-censored” and unable to express “lawful views.” The university faced a three-and-a-half-year investigation after Stock was effectively hounded out of her job in 2021 for her gender-critical beliefs…
But a few more like this will be needed just in Britain alone. The Euros and Ireland may be too far gone.
No Minister 