Well, at least it’s out in the open now.
Although it’s only been for about twenty years that I’ve closely followed the war between the two factions on the right, I’ve been aware of it since childhood, when the “Rockefeller Republicans” went head to head with the Goldwater crew. It’s not exactly the same as today, of course, but it’s another form of something similar. And it’s only gotten more bitter.
It’s well worth reading the whole thing. An excerpt:
Condemning that [Jan 6] riot does not allow, let alone require, echoing false claims in order to render the event more menacing and serious than it actually was. There is no circumstance or motive that justifies the dissemination of false claims by journalists…
Yet this is exactly what has happened, and continues to happen, since that riot almost seven weeks ago.
Greenwald describes the timeline of media distortions of the event, and how the Democrats used the narrative to further then own ends, as well as the Times’ weak “retraction.” He also discusses a similar pattern of misleading MSM and Democrat information about “zip-tie man,” another story very useful to the left.
One would almost think the Democrats and the MSM work in tandem. And yes, that’s sarcasm – the “almost” part, that is.
I have covered these topics many times since January 6th. For a couple of examples please see this as well as this. Note also that both of these posts were written back in January. Even then there was plenty of evidence that the coverage was fishy, and that we actually had no idea how Sicknick had died. Anyone with curiosity and a computer could have discovered that many weeks ago, but few did.
And by “few” I include few on the right. Why did the right accept the narrative of the left, for the most part, ignoring the clues that were in plain sight that the story being told was at best incomplete and at worst false? It’s frustrating to me to know that it took so long for a corrective to occur. I understand why the left didn’t provide one, but I don’t understand why the more influential media outlets on the right (more influential than me, that is) didn’t pick up on the problems.
Rush Limbaugh has died. RIP.
Limbaugh had a huge effect on the right for many decades. I was not a listener, but I’m well aware that an enormous number of people were. I also know people who had their political change experience mostly as a result of hearing his show. His illness and death, although expected, is a blow to the right.
I wonder whether the MSM – who hated his guts – will now say some nice things about him.
ADDENDUM: Mark Steyn on Limbaugh.
There’s weather trouble and resultant power trouble in Texas.
Here’s what’s going on there:
Nearly half of Texas’ installed wind power generation capacity has been offline because of frozen wind turbines in West Texas, according to Texas grid operators.
Wind farms across the state generate up to a combined 25,100 megawatts of energy. But unusually moist winter conditions in West Texas brought on by the weekend’s freezing rain and historically low temperatures have iced many of those wind turbines to a halt.
Apparently there’s no back-up system to cover such an occurrence, and 23% of Texas power is ordinarily generated by wind.
These guys are good.
Here are their recent discussions on the impeachment “trial” and the rule of law (the entire thing is a two-hour video, but I’ve cued up two rather short segments I think are especially fine):
If you have more time, I suggest you hear Barnes on the Kyle Rittenhouse case. He’s been hired on the case but hasn’t started yet, so apparently he’s allowed to talk about it somewhat. Here’s that segment:
Commenter “Philip Sells” asks a good question:
Does not Orwell’s concept of Newspeak presuppose something like Sapir-Whorf?
And commenter “Frederick” responds this way:
Yeah, it did, which lessened the book a bit for me…Reading it now is a little jarring…
For those of you unfamiliar with Sapir-Whorf, it’s a theory of linguistics. Here’s what’s now known as the strong version:
The strong version, or linguistic determinism, says that language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories. This version is generally agreed to be false by modern linguists.
And here’s what’s known as the weak version:
The weak version says that linguistic categories and usage only influence thought and decisions.
The article also points out that the strong version was popular prior to WWII, and the weak version is held by most linguists today. I believe that, when I went to college and learned about the theory, it was during a period of transition from strong version to weak version.
So what of Orwell? The article also states:
In Orwell’s 1984 the authoritarian state created the language Newspeak to make it impossible for people to think critically about the government, or even to contemplate that they might be impoverished or oppressed, by reducing the number of words to reduce the thought of the locutor.
Orwell described Newspeak in an Appendix to the book Nineteen Eighty-four that can be found here [emphasis mine]:
The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought — that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc — should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever…
…Quite apart from the suppression of definitely heretical words, reduction of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be dispensed with was allowed to survive. Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum…
Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centres at all. This aim was frankly admitted in the Newspeak word duckspeak, meaning “to quack like a duck”…
…A person growing up with Newspeak as his sole language would no more know that equal had once had the secondary meaning of ‘politically equal’, or that free had once meant ‘intellectually free’, than for instance, a person who had never heard of chess would be aware of the secondary meanings attaching to queen and rook…
When Oldspeak had been once and for all superseded, the last link with the past would have been severed. History had already been rewritten, but fragments of the literature of the past survived here and there, imperfectly censored, and so long as one retained one’s knowledge of Oldspeak it was possible to read them. In the future such fragments, even if they chanced to survive, would be unintelligible and untranslatable…
…Various writers, such as Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Byron, Dickens, and some others were therefore in process of translation: when the task had been completed, their original writings, with all else that survived of the literature of the past, would be destroyed.
I think that in the novel Orwell was holding forth on two simultaneous views of Sapir-Whorf, both the strong version and the weak. The leaders of the dystopia portrayed in the book obviously had a belief in the strong version, and they expected (or fervently hoped) that many thoughts could be eliminated by getting rid of the words for them.
But note that, at the same time, the book makes clear that it hasn’t happened yet. The novel’s Appendix states that Oldspeak is usually still being spoken in 1984 and that only Party members are using Newspeak very much. So the Appendix is describing a plan, a scheme for the future rather than a fait accompli. And in the world of the book, Winston and Julia are still able to talk about, and to believe in, concepts that Newpeak is some day supposed to eliminate.
Orwell also doesn’t explain how the Newspeak rules will be enforced on an entire populace. We know about the telescreens and the social controls in which every person is spied upon. But even in such a totalitarian state it’s hard to believe that so very many words could successfully be eliminated and others replaced, so that even in casual conversations language changes could be imposed from above so successfully and new words would not crop up spontaneously. Difficult, but not impossible – although I think the reader is left to ponder whether such an effort could ultimately work.
I also believe that Orwell leaves open the question of whether the planners of Newspeak are correct about the strong Sapir-Whorf version, or whether only the weak version could ever be operative in the vast general population. That is, it seems obvious that the control of language can help to shape thought – much as our propaganda does today, with its purposefully morphing of terms like “illegal alien” to “undocumented immigrant” and “migrant.” Orwell is creating a vision of a world in which the strong version holds sway, and his novel is highly pessimistic. But I don’t think he eliminates all hope that the drive towards universal Newspeak will be at least somewhat unsuccessful. In the novel that effort is a work in progress, and the jury is still out.
Our own experiments in leftist Newspeak are obvious, and the political success of such efforts is obvious too. But we’re talking about the weak version here, not the strong. The passage at the end of that last quote from Orwell is chilling and relevant as well, when Orwell speaks of the transformation or banning of the classics. We see that already in our society, and we also see that the language in which those classics are written has become less and less intelligible to more recent generations. At some point Shakespeare may be abandoned, not just through normal attrition but as a result of an effort to cancel his works.
I’ve been writing about the problems with the story about Capitol Police Officer Sicknick’s cause of death since just a few days after it happened. It was clear even then that the report that Officer Sicknick had been hit in the head with a fire extinguisher wielded by rioters and that he died of that injury was shaky from the start, and was contradicted by his family members who had spoken to him after the riot. These difficulties with the reporting could have been easily perceived weeks ago by anyone with a computer and a spirit of curiosity (and see this for a list of links to my posts about it).
But the NY Times couldn’t bother to report on any of this, because there was an anti-Trump narrative to get out and an impeachment to be effected.
Now that the preferred narrative is firmly set in the public’s minds and the impeachment trial is over, the fact that nearly every newspaper in the US and the House managers lied to the nation about Sicknick’s death can be whispered or at least hinted at. Here the “update”, and it’s pretty subtle. Most of America will probably miss the correction, because it’s attached to the original January 8 article that first reported on the fire extinguisher story told by “officials,” and the headline is still intact, “Capitol Police Officer Dies From Injuries in Pro-Trump Rampage.” The update is posted at the beginning of the article and is dated February 12. Here it is:
UPDATE: New information has emerged regarding the death of the Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick that questions the initial cause of his death provided by officials close to the Capitol Police.
Oh, so those unnamed “officials” who told the fire extinguisher story to the Times originally were not even officials within the Capitol Police. Just “close” to it.
Then in the body of the piece it now says this:
Law enforcement officials initially said Mr. Sicknick was struck with a fire extinguisher, but weeks later, police sources and investigators were at odds over whether he was hit. Medical experts have said he did not die of blunt force trauma, according to one law enforcement official.
Even now the Times has kept this paragraph:
It was unclear where Mr. Sicknick’s encounter with the rioters took place, but photos and a video posted by a local reporter during the night of chaos showed a man spraying a fire extinguisher outside the Senate chamber, with a small number of police officers overlooking the area on a nearby stairway.
They still want you to think this might have happened. And really, they should have written a new article and placed it on the front page. But of course they didn’t.
To refresh your memory, the original Times article said this:
“[P]ro-Trump rioters attacked that citadel of democracy, overpowered Mr. Sicknick, 42, and struck him in the head with a fire extinguisher, according to two law enforcement officials. With a bloody gash in his head, Mr. Sicknick was rushed to the hospital and placed on life support. He died on Thursday evening.”
The bloody gash? Merely corroborative detail – and if you’re not familiar with Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Mikado,” the relevance of the following will escape you. But if you know the operetta, it’s pretty apropos:
Ko-Ko. Well, a nice mess you’ve got us into, with your nodding head and the deference due to a man of pedigree!
Pooh-Bah. Merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.
Pitti-Sing. Corroborative detail indeed! Corroborative fiddlestick!
Ko-Ko. And you’re just as bad as he is with your cock-and-a-bull stories about catching his eye and his whistling an air. But that’s so like you! You must put in your oar!
Pooh-Bah. But how about your big right arm?
Pitti-Sing. Yes, and your snickersnee!
Helen Gilliland & Derek Oldham, 1921 Yum-Yum & Nanki-PooKo-Ko. Well, well, never mind that now.
[NOTE: Some of you may recall that Andrew C. McCarthy hopped on the “Sicknick was murdered by rioters who hit him with a fire extinguisher” bandwagon. There was some discussion here of that in the comments in this thread. I see now that McCarthy has issued a sort of mea culpa. I’ve noticed that McCarthy is one of the few people who can actually say he was wrong without offering a ton of excuses [emphasis mine]:
…I am one of the analysts who uncritically relied on the Times’ initial reporting, deducing from it the conclusion that Sicknick had been “murdered” by the rioters — not a long logical leap if you credit the assertion that a police officer was bashed over the head with a lethal object by rioters who were intentionally and forcibly confronting security forces. Julie Kelly took me to task again yesterday for having “regurgitated” the “narrative that Sicknick was murdered,” which I certainly did do — although I am not, as she describes, a political pundit of the “NeverTrump Right.” Because I repeated a very serious allegation that had not been supported by credible evidence from identifiable sources, I thought it was important to make clear, to the extent it is in my power to do so, that there is now immense reason to doubt the original reporting — while confessing (with a link to the column in which I included the “murder” allegation) that I was as guilty as any other analyst or reporter who amplified the dubious account.
Second, and more significantly, the death of Officer Sicknick became a building block for the House’s impeachment of former President Trump and of the allegations posited by the Democratic House impeachment managers that were publicly filed in their pretrial brief on February 2. By then, there was already substantial reason to question the fire-extinguisher allegation.
Prosecutors have an obligation, rooted in due process and professional ethics, to reveal exculpatory evidence. That includes evidence that is inconsistent with the theory of guilt they have posited. Even if Sicknick’s death was causally connected to the rioting, prosecutors would be obligated to correct the record if it did not happen the way they expressly represented that it happened. The House impeachment managers had not done that last week when NR published my column raising that issue, and to this day, although the impeachment trial is now over, we are still in the dark about the circumstances surrounding the officer’s tragic death, at age 42.
In his article McCarthy offers a pretty good analysis of what the Times did and what the House managers did. And I don’t think McCarthy is happy with himself, either.
McCarthy is correct that he’s not a NeverTrumper, and he’s a smart guy and I think a basically honest one. But I wrote this in a previous thread about what I think is going on with him:
I think McCarthy has long had a couple of problems. The first is that he’s somewhat naive and trusting (for example, of Comey, against whom he finally turned but it took a long time). The second is that he has an aversion to Trump. That doesn’t mean he won’t defend him at times – he will, but he has to overcome his natural aversion to the man in order to do so, and he’s often willing to think the worst of him. It’s almost a relief to him to think the worst of him, I think, so in this case he jumped right back into it for a while. But his basic honesty led him out of it again.
It would be nice if this incident finally cures McCarthy of his naivete. He should never “uncritically” accept anything he reads in the MSM, especially if it’s ascribed to unnamed officials.]
I’m not that old, but pedagogical practices in my youth seem absolutely archaic compared to whatever passes for education these days. For starters, we had Washington’s Birthday and Lincoln’s Birthday, and they were on their actual real birthdays: Lincoln on February 12, and Washington on February 22.
Two days off! But they didn’t necessarily fall on Mondays; they fell whenever they fell, and sometimes – alas – they fell on a Saturday or a Sunday.
We also had to memorize terrible patriotic poetry back then, and lots of it. When I say “terrible” I’m not referring to its patriotism, I mean that it just wasn’t very good poetry. I suppose kids weren’t supposed to care about that aspect of it. Also, in those days I was very quick at memorizing poetry and so those early poems have tended to stick. Therefore I have a relatively large load of memorized doggerel to draw on.
One of those poems was about George Washington. To give you an idea of the flavor of what I’m talking about, it started this way: “Only a baby, fair and small…” and then filled the reader in on all the stages of Washington’s life, verse by verse. I had never looked it up online and was skeptical that it could be found, but voila! Here it is; isn’t the internet great?
And I now present it to you as an example of what the New York City schoolchild used to have to memorize and recite. I seem to recall this was in fifth grade:
Only a baby, fair and small,
Like many another baby son,
Whose smiles and tears came swift at call,
Who ate and slept and grew – that’s all,
The infant Washington.
I’ll let you go to the site and see it for yourself. The next verse is for the schoolboy Washington, then we have the lad Washington, then finally man/patriot and a lot of generalities with the only specifics being “surveyor, general, president.” Why so much emphasis on Washington’s boyhood I don’t know; maybe to go with the cherry tree story. But still, at least we were taught to think highly of Washington.
And Lincoln had a poem for memorization, too. It was a better effort than the Washington one, I think, although still not very good and rather creepy at that. I see now that the poem was by Rosemary Benet, apparently the wife of Stephen Vincent Benet.
I have no idea why the poem they had us memorize about Lincoln was not about his accomplishments at all, but rather about the mother who died when he was nine years old. In the poem, she comes back as a ghost and inquires about him. But here it is:
If Nancy Hanks
Came back as a ghost,
Seeking news
Of what she loved most,
She’d ask first
“Where’s my son?
What’s happened to Abe?
What’s he done?”“Poor little Abe,
Left all alone.
Except for Tom,
Who’s a rolling stone;
He was only nine,
The year I died.
I remember still
How hard he cried.”“Scraping along
In a little shack,
With hardly a shirt
To cover his back,
And a prairie wind
To blow him down,
Or pinching times
If he went to town.”“You wouldn’t know
About my son?
Did he grow tall?
Did he have fun?
Did he learn to read?
Did he get to town?
Do you know his name?
Did he get on?”
The urge that rose in me was to shout, “Yes, YES, don’t you know?” into the void.
Instead of that one, we might have been asked to memorize this poem – or at least the very last part of it, which I’ve always liked:
And when he fell in whirlwind, he went down
As when a lordly cedar, green with boughs,
Goes down with a great shout upon the hills,
And leaves a lonesome place against the sky.
Or what about this old chestnut by Walt Whitman? Schmaltzy, but it still gives me a little shiver when I read it:
O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head!
It is some dream that on the deck,
You’ve fallen cold and dead.My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
Here’s a little residual post-Valentine’s Day angst. I am struck by the similarity of the theme of both of these songs. I guess there are only a finite number of things you can say about heartbreak:
Neil Young’s voice shouldn’t really work. But I like it.
Now, Gene Pitney is a singer from my youth that I had totally forgotten, along with his songs. And yet when I encountered a video of him by accident on YouTube, quite a few of his songs came flooding back:
Looking Pitney up now, I see that not only did he sing quite a few good songs, but he was a songwriter who wrote a couple of good songs for others (although they also were songs I had forgotten till I saw their titles): “Rubber Ball,” “Hello Mary Lou,” and “He’s a Rebel.”
And by the way, I’m not sure that only love can break a heart. For example [emphasis mine]:
I walk through the long schoolroom questioning;
A kind old nun in a white hood replies;
The children learn to cipher and to sing,
To study reading-books and history,
To cut and sew, be neat in everything
In the best modern way—the children’s eyes
In momentary wonder stare upon
A sixty-year-old smiling public man…What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap
Honey of generation had betrayed,
And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape
As recollection or the drug decide,
Would think her son, did she but see that shape
With sixty or more winters on its head,
A compensation for the pang of his birth,
Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Solider Aristotle played the taws
Upon the bottom of a king of kings;
World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
What a star sang and careless Muses heard:
Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.Both nuns and mothers worship images,
But those the candles light are not as those
That animate a mother’s reveries,
But keep a marble or a bronze repose.
And yet they too break hearts—O Presences
That passion, piety or affection knows,
And that all heavenly glory symbolise—
O self-born mockers of man’s enterprise;Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
But the US Congress has covered itself with shame, as far as I’m concerned.
A friend of mine likes to say, “No matter how cynical I get, it never seems to be cynical enough.” That’s the way I often feel, too. And it’s the way I feel today.
This entire episode was a proceeding that was obviously unconstitutional. Lawyers can find arguments for anything – that’s their job – but some arguments are bad ones, and anyone who said this was constitutional is just rationalizing what he or she wishes were so. That five Republican senators managed to do just that is bad enough, but since there were actually seven Republican votes for conviction – Burr, Cassidy, Collins, Murkowski, Romney, Sasse, and Toomey – that means that two of them, Burr and Cassidy, managed the neat trick of voting “guilty” in a trial that they think is unconstitutional.
That kind of mental gymnastics is worthy of today’s politicians. Or maybe politicians have always been like that.
The case for voting “guilty” was tremendously weak, but that was no impediment to every single Democrat senator casting such a vote. I guess that’s an example of the Democrat way of unity and healing.
I like the title of the post by William Jacobson of Legal Insurrection that I linked earlier: “Trump Acquitted – Nancy Pelosi Becomes First House Speaker To Bring Two Failed Impeachments.” I would add the following to that title “Both of Which She Knew Ahead of Time Would Fail.” It is my fervent hope that the overwhelming hypocrisy of the Democrats that was revealed in yesterday’s presentation by Trump’s legal team will come back to bite Pelosi and company politically, but past experience tells me that’s unlikely.
The Legal Insurrection post also helpfully lists the political situation of the 7 who voted for Trump’s guilt:
Burr – not running for re-election
Cassidy – just re-elected
Collins – just re-elected
Murkowski – up for re-election in 2022
Romney – up for re-election in 2024
Sasse – just re-elected
Toomey – not running for re-election
A special note on Romney – I think he had already burned his bridges with the Utah electorate and would have been primaried in 2024 anyway, even without this vote. That’s if he ever wanted to run again in the first place. I’m not sure, because it seems to me that he hates Trump so much that I wouldn’t be surprised if Romney’s main motive for running for the Senate in 2018 was just to take revenge on Trump. Mission accomplished.
So far in this whole sorry business, two senators who have impressed me are Rand Paul, who earlier led the fight to declare the trial unconstitutional, and Lindsey Graham, who was more than ready to bring in a long line of witnesses for the Trump side if the Democrats insisted on calling witnesses.
It is glaringly obvious that the Democrats have no reluctance to further anger and alienate the 75 million people who voted for Trump. In fact, they seem eager to do so. Apparently they don’t think they’ll have any need for them in the future.
About six weeks ago, I wrote a post about walking songs, and in it I included a clip of Whitesnake singing “Here I Go Again.” A discussion – let’s just call it “lively” – ensued as to the pros and cons of the group and the song.
And despite all that, here I go again, this time with what I think is a wonderful Valentine’s Day story that happens to feature the song in a supporting role (I’ve cued it up to show just the relevant part):
This next song has nothing to do with the other one, but I’ve been on a bit of a Brenda Lee journey and I am so impressed by the depth and power of her voice (she was only 4’9″, by the way, and in this clip she is about 17) that I wanted to post it:
Here’s a counter to all that loneliness, a blast from the past I’d pretty much forgotten until this moment:
Alone or together, have a wonderful walk down that road tomorrow on Valentine’s Day!
Several people have recommended that I read this extraordinarily powerful article by Natan Sharansky on the mental doubling that a person had to do in order to survive in the Soviet Union in which his father lived for most of his life and became disillusioned by, and in which Sharansky himself grew to young manhood. Please read the whole thing.
Here’s Sharansky’s basic theme [words in brackets mine]:
Life in a dictatorship offers two choices: either you overcome your fear and stand for truth, or you remain a slave to fear, no matter how fancy your titles, no matter how big your dacha…
Once I had [declared his intent to move to Israel, which marked him as a dissident], once I was no longer afraid, I realized what it was to be free. I could live in history, a real history, with ups and downs, fits and starts, not the bland, ever-changing history-like-putty dictated by the authorities. I could live with real people and enjoy real friendships, not the cautious, constricted conversations of winks and nods among fellow doublethinkers. Most important, I could live without that permanent self-censorship, that constant checking of what you are going to say to make sure it’s not what you want to say. Only then do you realize what a burden you’ve been carrying, how exhausting it is to say the right thing, do the right thing, while always fighting the fear of being outed for an errant thought, a wrong reaction, an idiosyncratic impulse.
That was in 1973, and there was no turning back for Sharansky. During his imprisonment from 1977 to 1986, he kept that sense of inner freedom even as his outer freedom was more curtailed. Here’s one example he gives:
And that was why, during nine years in prison, when the KGB would try tempting me to restore my freedom and even my life by returning to the life I once had, it was easy to say “no.” I knew what they wanted. They wanted to take me back to this open-caged prison of doublethink…
It was easy enough to remind myself and them who was really free and who is a scared doublethinker. All I had to do was tell some joke about the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev…As I’d tell my interrogators a joke, I’d laugh. And, as normal Soviet doublethinkers themselves, they would want to laugh. But they couldn’t, especially if two of them were there together. Laughter would end their careers.
Sharansky got the last laugh on them. But now he’s seeing the old phenomenon of the doublethinker imposed in a different manner:
In the West today, the pressure to conform doesn’t come from the totalitarian top—our political leaders are not Stalinist dictators. Instead, it comes from the fanatics around us, in our neighborhoods, at school, at work, often using the prospect of Twitter-shaming to bully people into silence—or a fake, politically-correct compliance.
Indeed.