The Lie

"In our country the lie has become not just a moral category, but a pillar of the state."
Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn

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"Of Potentates, the Lie and Altered States of Reality"

Of Potentates, the Lie and Altered States of Reality

Russian writer and Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote in 1974: "In our country the lie has become not just a moral category, but a pillar of the state." Think about that profound statement for a while!

The Berlin Wall was raised by the Soviets for a purpose: it marked the border between the real world and the altered state of reality that the Communists had created. The manuscript of his book The Gulag Archipelago had to be smuggled out. This is how the public in the West learnt what was going on. But not everyone wanted to. Some had erected their own altered states of reality.

I am reminded of Solzhenitsyn's profound statement with every encounter with Orwellian Newspeak. That is, with increasing frequency.

For novices to the phenomenon, Newspeak is politically correct language and a tool for thought control. Often a word is used in a way that it means the opposite (as in German "Democratic" Republic, "the religion of peace", "social justice" as synonymous with the freedom of property, or that ethics consists in good intention and never in bad outcome).

Subjectivism is based on a fallacy - that truth "as such", does not exist, but entirely depends on your perspective. This fallacy is the enemy of reality, fact, objectivity, wisdom, truth and ultimately, of liberty itself.

From the error a string of fallacies ensues, amongst others about the nature of language, and even of thought itself. Thought and language become ends in themselves, and are perceived to create reality, rather than understanding and describing it: a reversal of the cognition process.

There is an uncanny relationship between tyranny and the lie. All tyrants are subjectivists. Truth and reality are the given, and as such much be accepted but once malleable, this opens up entire new vistas to those who seek control.

Bullies and potentates - seeking power for themselves or for the sake of the common good - want as much control as possible; so the ability to change reality in the perception of the people is a tool they can't pass up. First they resort to coercive measures. Political correctness, relativism, incrementally shifting definitions, and Newspeak fall into the Nudge category. Later on there are other means at their disposal: punishment, violence, terror, purges, oppression, arbitrary rules and regulations, forced labor and lunatic asylums.

If the nudges are properly executed - which is true today - reality will be turned on its head, truth turned inside out, and mental and intellectual chaos result. This dis-ease is known as cognitive dissonance: the feeling that all isn't well, without being able to pinpoint the precise trouble spot. I believe it is responsible for much of the psychological trauma people experience today.

Yesterday it was reported that the cast iron sign over the gate of the Auschwitz Memorial, "Arbeit Macht Frei", was stolen but recovered, cut into three pieces. Arbeit Macht Frei (work will set you free) in relation with a death camp is a powerful symbol of the Newspeak utilized by philosophical and political psychopaths.

Leonard Peikoff in "The Ominous Parallels" makes the case that the Nazi death camps may have been controlled experiments in mass mind control: what does the absurd, something that bears no relation with known reality whatsoever, do to the human mind ... absurd, as in Vienna walzes accompanying human beings to the gas chamber?

This is why I have devised the "Arbeit Macht Frei" banner, to be used whenever there's a Newspeak alert, to remind ourselves of what is at stake when truth and reality itself are being manipulated to suit the purposes of evil.



Related:

-  The Newspeak Dictionary
- Sparknotes: "The Principle of Newspeak"
- "The Left's Default Position: Coercion" (series)
- "Postmodern Ravages" (dossier)
- "Pomo Lingo" (dossier)

Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Facing Evil

“Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence. Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle.” --Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Actually, it started with a lie and the war on existence. The comments section to following article contains some wonderful personal anecdotes ...

BBC: "Alexander Solzhenitsyn dies at 89 "

Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who exposed Stalin's prison system in his novels and spent 20 years in exile, has died near Moscow at the age of 89. The author of The Gulag Archipelago and One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich, who returned to Russia in 1994, died of either a stroke or heart failure.The Nobel laureate (...) (a)fter returning to Russia, (...) wrote several polemics on Russian history and identity. (...) >>>

The Obituary includes video material: "... an old-fashioned moralist who saw the world in black and white" - relativists, being stripped of ethics as a philosophical field, fail to understand that a compromise between good and evil does not exist: a compromise in this case would be a mere 55 million victims of Left and Right totalitarian experiments instead of the full 110 million. Any concession - even the smallest - would still be evil.

"The good has nothing to gain from evil, evil has everything to gain from the good." --Ayn Rand

Bryan Caplan at Econ Blog has an excerpt worth quoting in full:

Econ Blog: "The Best of Solzhenitsyn"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's passing reminds me of my favorite passage from his writings:

"But let us be generous. We will not shoot them. We will not pour salt water into them, nor bury them in bedbugs, nor bridle them up into a "swan dive," nor keep them on sleepless "stand-up" for a week, nor kick them with jackboots, nor beat them with rubber truncheons, nor squeeze their skulls with iron rings, nor push them into a cell so that they lie atop one another like pieces of baggage - we will not do any of the things they did! But for the sake of our country and our children we have the duty to seek them all out and bring them all to trial! Not to put them on trial so much as their crimes. And to compel each one of them to announce loudly:
"Yes, I was an executioner and a murderer." --The Gulag Archipelago

If you can read this aloud without tearing up, you're made of sterner stuff than me. Alas, three and a half decades after the publication of The Gulag Archipelago, it looks like we'll never see the Russian analog of the Nuremberg trials. (...) >>>

More excerpts of Solzhenitsyn's brilliant work in the comments section >>>

- Filed on Articles in "Communist Crimes in Trial" -