As you may have noticed from my articles, I’ve been thinking a lot about totalitarianism recently. It’s unsettling, for as I do so, I notice the seeds sprouting in everyday life. These are the same seedlings which, in the past, grew into horrible, magnified obscenities in totalitarian societies.
In particular, I’ve been considering two haunting observations made by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn at the outset of The Gulag Archipelago. The first is the question of why people did not resist more when they were taken away in the night. Why did they not scream, tear up the earth, scratch the eyes of the men who had come to take them?
Ultimately forced to leave their home ― why didn’t they make sure that the people who had come into their home bore the scars of having done so for the rest of their days? Why did the captured even tip-toe down the stairs, as they were asked to do by their captors, in order not to disturb their neighbors?
The answer to this lies in a question. As Solzhenitsyn puts it: “At what exact point, then, should one resist? When one’s belt is taken away? When one is ordered to face into a corner?”
In part, the reason nobody resists is the same one we learned from Communism’s evil twin: if people have no conception of what is about to happen to them, then they will do whatever they think is needed to keep themselves safe and alive to the next stage.
When people were rounded up, they still hoped that this was the beginning of a process that would be resolved or righted at some point, that the “misunderstanding” would cleared up, or that the indignities could not get any worse. Until the whole world knew about what could happen, almost nobody imagined the end they would endure.
Solzhenitsyn relates the tale of one woman in the 1920s, early in the reign of communism in Russia, who was supposed to be seized on a Moscow street. But she started screaming and fighting, and such was the commotion in the middle of a crowd, that the men assigned to take her away abandoned their task.
But even her imagination of what was possible turned out to be limited, for she returned home that evening — which allowed the men to take her away privately, in the middle of the night, and send her to Lubyanka, a prison in Moscow that detainees rarely ever left alive.
Solzhenitsyn’s second question-observation is even more haunting: Why did people not intervene more to stop their friends, family, or simply fellow citizens from being taken away? In some ways, this is the more disturbing observation. We may grant that people have the best perspective on their own fate and will know best what might save them. But when people see women being plucked off the pavement by agents of the state, why do they continue walking?
Solzhenitsyn approaches this question through a bitter contradiction of fact.
“How we burned in the camps later,” he wrote, thinking how different things might have been if the security operative who went out in the night to make arrests could be made to fear he would never return to his family again. What if he hadn’t known whether he would return alive? What if, during the mass arrests in Leningrad, when one quarter of the city was taken away, people had lain in wait and attacked the people who had come to arrest them and their neighbors? What if they had waited on the staircase with “axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand”?
You might say that not everybody is given to physical violence or physical courage. Why, then ― and in some ways this is the worse question ― weren’t the tires of all those Black Maria sitting with a solitary driver (―waiting for the human cargo to be brought out of the building, into the vehicle and from there away ― spiked? How is it that a whole public with such a cause, their relatives and friends being taken away in front of their eyes, couldn’t do what hoodlums easily manage with no motivation whatsoever?
It was, says Solzhenitsyn, because the people “didn’t love freedom enough. And even more — we had no awareness of the real situation.”
It may seem strange, and even slightly obscene, to make a leap from the worst days of the 20th century to the seemingly incomparable situation in the U.S. today, but it is no great leap at all. The behavior of people under totalitarianism is, I think, recognizable today in the normal behavior of normal people in our supposedly normal times.
In a culture that is often described as a “cancel culture” — one in which people are liable to be rendered unemployable, an outcast, at any given moment — these behaviors manifest themselves still. Anyone who doubts this should read the autobiographical story of Mike Tunison. He was a writer and editor for The Washington Post and a published author. He was on top of his profession.
Yet as Tunison writes, he was one of the men whose name was — wholly wrongly — put on a list published online in October 2017 allegedly listing about 70 mainstream writers and editors the anonymous author called “Shitty Media Men.” The document was an unvetted list of largely bogus claims about these men as having a history of using manipulation and violence against women.
The list did the feverish rounds of the internet in the early days of the movement that became known as #MeToo. The media was high on the octane of exposés. Having been silent about cases of real abuse ― Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein ― nobody had time or interest in questioning documents like the list that Tunison was on.
So, with no apparent justification, other than the misfortune of his having crossed the path of someone with a grudge, Tunison’s life was turned upside down. He was made unemployable in the career to which he had chosen to dedicate his life, in which he had been very successful.
Employers to which he did apply could see the claims made against him online and stepped silently away. Finally, last year, he landed a job as a janitor at Dave & Buster’s in Alexandria, Virginia. He remains there today, with no options whatsoever to return to doing what he loves.
Is no one interested in this or the injustice it screams?
A similar scenario emerged in the U.K., with the sudden firing of ITV sportscaster Alastair Stewart after decades of work for the network. On the basis of a quotation he used from Shakespeare, which one person online claimed was clear, cloaked racism, a career of decades is over.
Consider the implications of the phrase written above. A case of “clear, cloaked racism.” Is that not an oxymoron? So clear as to deserve the end of somebody’s career, yet done “with the cover” of a quotation. Meaning that the crime, which is so clear, so blazing and so self-evident is also only in the eye of the one offended beholder, only discernible to a particular eye. In other words, not remotely clear.
Some of Stewart’s friends fought for him. But others looked away, like the neighbors of The Taken of whom Solzhenitsyn wrote. They were sufficiently worried about the implications of even being “adjacent” to someone accused of racism they chose silence over truth
Is no one truly interested in the means by which this was done?
The people who suffer these injustices tend not to come out fighting, screaming and scratching their way back to safety. They tend — like Tunison ― to submit to the madness which has washed over them, partly in the hope that they will someday claw their way back. It’s hard to grasp, at the time, that this is it and that they need to fight for everything now.
In the same way, when a nationally famous figure is accused of the great crime of the age, they rarely believe that the people for whom they have worked for decades — the people for whom they gave up their weekends for, their spare evenings, the times they could have been with their family — would drop them in a matter of hours for a crime which cannot be explained nor proven and whose nature is wholly subjective.
The current atmosphere would mean everyone in the world would be able to take out anyone else, if they had sufficient desire to do so. Surely that world would be unworkable.
Well it would be, and it is. But it is possible not only because the victims do not quell and shake and scream enough but because we ― the public ― allow them to disappear one by one. We do not slash the virtual tires of those who take them away. We do not pick up whatever cudgels we have at hand to beat back their accusers. We just sit, as the anonymous lists and the unprovable complaints pile up and up, simply hoping all the time that the dishonest players and anonymous accusers will never come for us.
Besides, who could ever believe that a life could be destroyed, every personal relationship shaken or ended, because of an anonymous list published online?
Yet we have seen this first-hand in the U.S. and Europe, the first phase. The next phase is already beginning.
We see the nurses in New York being fired for refusing a vaccine they see no need to take. Regardless of whether they are right or wrong about the necessity, our Constitution guarantees them the right to make that choice. Yet those rights matter not to the State of New York. Soon, federal employees, perhaps even members of the military, will face the same fate for making the same unvaccinated choice.
Up to now, it has been the mid-level elites who have been “taken,” if not physically then certainly emotionally, mentally and spiritually. Tunison is silenced, never to write again. But it is spreading into the lower ranks of the proletariat. Even average Americans who dare to speak against the accepted storyline of this corrupt, anti-American administration and its millions of brainwashed minions who are being coached to report dissent, will soon find themselves silenced on social media.
Mask and vaccine mandates are just the beginning. If people want to understand why totalitarianism works, the sprouts are all around us for those with open eyes to see. We must eradicate these weeks with loud, raucous dissent ― before the operatives come to take us.
Mike Nichols is a conservative, a patriot, U.S. Army veteran, licensed professional counselor, political enthusiast, sports fan and writer living with his beautiful wife Liz in the Heartland. He has a regular blog at America’s Conservative Voice on Substack and a Facebook presence at Americas Conservative Voice-Facebook.
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A good article and it deserves a reply. I am intensely familiar with what happened in Russia after the Bolshevik coup and of course I have read about Communist take overs and repression all over the world.
The author asks why so few are willing to fight “Wokeism”, which is in fact nothing more than a modernized form of the Bolshevik program. Good question. And here is the answer.
The first thing all real Americans must understand is that the Wokesters and their friends are essentially criminals and sociopaths, and in some cases psychopaths, i.e. criminally insane. No matter where they were born or what their passports say, they are not Americans. They have voluntarily discarded their membership in our nation. They are an alien, completely evil force. They can´t be bargained with, negotiated with, bought off, or reasoned with. They are beyond any of that. They hate you and want you dead. The fact that they are crazy does not means that they do not understand what they are doing, though few of them have the self-awareness to understand why they have descended into madness.
Some of them are merely resentful ethnic minorities, totally consumed by poisonous envy and atavistic hate.
Thus the incredibly high number of black-on-white crimes. These types are usually mere foot soldiers, only dimly aware of any larger dimension to their crimes. Dangerous? Sure, but minor players.
The core of evil consists of renegade whites and Jews from a particular background, as any serious research shows only too clearly. The pathetic corporate CEO´s and wealthy nitwits who finance these scum are merely laughable, and will hang long before any of us will if the trolls defeat us.
I urge all of our readers to study the history of the Russian Revolution very carefully. All Communist seizures of power have much in common but the Bolshevik coup and its aftermath show more clearly than any of the the others the immense danger that comes from a small but disciplined core group of fanatics stirring up the dregs of society and using them as a weapon against the superior elements.
In Russia the Bolsheviks (most of the leaders were anything but ethnic Russians) made the most of the Russian Empire´s tragic blunders in the First World War to turn mutinous soldiers and sailors, desperately poor workers and farmers, and the lumpen underclass that exists in every country, into formidable weapons against the upper and middle classes (which, of course, were far smaller than those classes in the USA, even today after decades of attacks on the middle class).
To get to the point, middle class, normal Americans (of all races, by the way) are neither crazy nor criminals. Mentally stable middle class people do not participate in BLM and Antifa-type riots, for the same reason they do not join gangs or run around shooting people in Chicago. Psychologically normal people do not become leftist Democrats, either. A recent article in a psychology journal (reluctantly) pointed out that approximately fifty percent of liberal women have mental health issues. Well, no kidding. Anybody who has ever met one knows that.
Our people are not out shooting people – yet – because we are intelligent, rational, law-abiding, decent, SANE people, the exact opposite of the Marxists. Also, a significant number of normal Americans still do not get it, though the numbers are dropping fast thanks to Biden and his cast of lunatics. Jen “Dead Eyes” Psaki is enough to open the eyes of milli0ns of American morons.
In our last civil war Southerners came to the conclusion that they had been demonized by the increasingly radicalized Northern Republicans. The John Brown raid, supported by many prominent Northern leaders and too many credulous ordinary people, was the last straw. They saw that their lives were at stake if the radicals took power, which they promptly did in the 1860 elections (that Lincoln was not a true radical at the time was irrelevant; Southerners knew perfectly well who really held the strings of power).
Did the mainly middle class people of the South fly off the handle and start shooting random Yankees unlucky enough to be in the South at that time? Of course not. Their elected representatives met and issued formal withdrawals from the Union, in accord with what they believed to be a Constituti0nal right.
This done, the people felt they had legal support for their actions and the Confederate government and, more to the point, army, was formed.
With the exception of a few hotheads and fools, our people will not rise up in arms against the Domestic Enemy until the demented old bastard occupying the White House goes too far and Red state governors are forced to confront him, for their own survival. When that happens, everything will change overnight.
Most good Americans understand this at some level. That is why they are buying guns and ammunition. The Domestic Enemies know this only too well. Why do you think they are attacking Florida governor Ron DeSantis in such an hysterical fashion?
It is because they are scared for their lives, as they should be. Once the core American people mobilize, nothing will stop them from erasing the Deep State, the Wokesters, the AOC´s, and rest from the face of the earth.
Remain calm, folks. You will know what to do when the time comes.
So you think the Governors (government) are going to save you?
It is up to the people to separate themselves from the evil that controls America.
The establishment is not going to help the common man. To wait for a governor to take action is akin to suicide.
Most Americans are not taking any action against this evil because they are afraid it will threaten their precious pile of shiny objects. These people have literally thrown their own children and grandchildren to the wolves for material gain.
We are being confronted by evil forces.
The time to take action is now.
Anyone who doubts your statement should just look at the roughly 190 million US Citizens who’ve taken the jab … and the numbers who’ve also volunteered their children — their CHILDREN as young as 6 months old — for the jab …
Why do you believe that number?
” Red state governors are forced to confront him, for their own survival. When that happens, everything will change overnight.”
Ain’t happening.
They’re scared because they’re scared of everything, but your red governor down to your red dogcatcher will sell you out in a heartbeat. Everyone remotely anti-gov and plenty who aren’t will basically be ‘nazis’ and ‘terrorists.’ And they will have international corporations, international agencies, and more militaries than just ours after you. I’m sure the ADL is all prepped for commissars as well.
This isn’t going to look like the Civil War, it’s going to look like a multi-generational Afghanistan, at best.
Straight dope right from Q-idiots central casting.
jebus, another ad nauseum diagnosis. When what time comes? Get off my lawn, line in the sand time? EYES FUCKING ROLLING outta my fcking skull onto the floor.
Who makes up most of Biden’s cabinet? Who comprises the core of AntiFA? Who propagandizes for them in the media, across the board? Who funds this shit?
They nearly all belong to one group, and it’s laughable at this point to pretend this isn’t another Jewish operation, from top to bottom. They want another Soviet Union, but without a Stalin this time.
It’s no coincidence that at least two of the three AntiFA Kyle Rittenhouse shot, were Jewish convicted sex offenders. This is the core membership of AntiFA, and it always has been.
“and it’s laughable at this point to pretend this isn’t another Jewish operation, from top to bottom.”
Never fear my friend, the tbp cyptos will see to it that the ruse lives on.
Your characterization of the criminally insane wokesters is apt. And you courageously named their leadership. I think you may have underestimated how effective they have already been in emasculating the resistance. They began their campaigns against the empowered and growing Alt Right resistance in 2017 and have since extended their weapons confiscation and preemptive assaults to conservatives and libertarians this week. The weapon is the spoken or written word and the right to free assembly. They remove the threat before it grows. This week it was announced they are going after people with accounts on Protonmail. There are already thousands of political prisoners. Remind me of the history, but during the RR, didn’t the gulags come after the revolutionary violence? They have started early here.
We’re not at the point of no return yet. Not at the point where ‘pulling the trigger’ and changing your life forever is worth the sacrifice…and looking around at these fucking sheep/npc/brain dead cunts I’m not even sure if it ever will be. They do not see the danger and they turn away disinterested when you tell them. They gladly take their vax and make sure their covid pass is good to go – so they can go to the hockey game, or fly somewhere or eat indoors at mcd’s. They don’t care for naught. They’re ‘allowed to participate in society’….In their eyes…I’m the schizo. Bill Gates is right. 80%+ need to go regardless. I have literally no interest in these people anymore. Not one iota. Zip.
IF the vax and boosters wipes them all out then maybe I’ll fight with the survivors…but really I have no idea what is going to happen ‘this dark winter’. We’ll find out together I guess. I had no idea it was this bad until Covid.
‘
‘F’ the cancel culture..as long as you are anonymous they have no power over you.
Believe that and follow it at your own risk …
You forgot to say “Trust the Plan.” Smells like controlled opposition(like Trump is) trying to defuse meaningful efforts.
I don’t think that what we’re witnessing in the US right now is comparable to Stalin’s Russia. In Stalin’s Russia it was physical terror for the sake of terror or more likely for no particular purpose at all. The majority of the people who got taken were not threatening “the regime” in any way , yet they were physically abused and often killed. Here a few people are pushed out of their careers to make an example for everyone else that we’re indeed living in feudalism, where the majority of good-paying jobs are provided for us by the overlords. The people being pushed out are typically those who do not yet understand this simple fact. In order to be able to voice one’s opinion in the US, one has to be financially independent from the “system”. These people are few, and for most part they are left alone by the system, unless they actively engage in fighting that system.
Australia called, they’d like to talk to you about visiting Melbourne this week.
The Soviet Union was less shitty after Stalin kicked the small hats to the curb – they were truly evil, Stalin merely less so. When you hear stories about how bad Stalin was, take a close look at who is doing the telling.
…
As I have said many times, if you are unwilling to kill your enemy your enemy will kill you.
I am anonymous and retired so the whole ‘woke’ cancel culture thing has no direct impact on me. It is actually a source of some amusement to me. I especially like to watch the cackling witches on ‘The Brew.’ Ultimately, though, the cancel culture wants to cancel all remnants of white European culture including some of the greatest works of art that represent the highest aspirations and achievements of the human spirit. In this sense it is both absurd and dangerous. We need to eradicate it like a bad weed.