“I thought back then that communism would last for the next thousand years,” he tells me. “The truth was, it did not. And that is something for us to hope for today, under this soft tyranny of political correctness. It will end. The truth has power to end every tyranny.”
Palko and the others were in good company. Nearly all Western experts, scholars who had spent a lifetime studying Soviet communism failed to predict its rapid demise. We never know when history will produce figures like Lech Walesa, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Karol Wojtyla, Václav Havel, and all the lesser known heroes of the resistance. They stood up for truth and justice not out of an expectation of achievable victory in their lifetimes, but because it was the right thing to do.
You don’t have to be a grizzled Cold Warrior to see that a notion of progress that depends on labor camps, police informers, and making everybody equally poor to achieve justice and equality is phony. It is much harder, though, to stand against the softer version. It seems to flow naturally from the Myth of Progress as it has been lived out in our mass consumerist democracy, which has for generations defined progress as the liberation of human desire from limits. But that is exactly what traditional Christians must do, though for many of us it will mean having to unlearn political myths that we have uncritically absorbed in a culture that until fairly recently thought and reasoned in broad Christian categories. Consider that the civil rights movement of the 1960s was led by black preachers who articulated the plight of their people in Biblical language and stories.
Those days are over, and we will not be able to take the measure of the long struggle ahead if we don’t understand the essential nature of the opposition.
It regards Christians as the most significant remaining obstacles on the Grand March, bearers of the cruel and outdated beliefs that keep the people from being free and happy. Wherever we hide, they will track us, find us, and punish us if that’s what it takes to make this world more perfect. This brings us to the final factor critical to understanding the radical challenge facing Christianity and discerning strategies of resistance: the power and reach of surveillance technology.
CHAPTER FOUR Capitalism, Woke and Watchful
Kamila Bendova sits in her armchair in the Prague apartment where she and her late husband, Václav, used to hold underground seminars to build up the anti-communist dissident movement. It has been thirty years since the fall of communism, but Bendova is not about to lessen her vigilance about threats to freedom. I mention to her that tens of millions of Americans have installed in their houses so-called “smart speakers” that monitor conversations for the sake of making domestic life more convenient. Kamila visibly recoils. The appalled look on her face telegraphs a clear message: How can Americans be so gullible?
To stay free to speak the truth, she tells me, you have to create for yourself a zone of privacy that is inviolate. She reminded me that the secret police had bugged her apartment, and that she and her family had to live with the constant awareness that the government was listening to every sound they made. The idea that anybody would welcome into their home a commercial device that records conversations and transmits them to a third party is horrifying to her. No consumer convenience is worth that risk.
“Information means power,” Kamila says. “We know from our life under the totalitarian regime that if you know something about someone, you can manipulate him or her. You can use it against them. The secret police have evidence of everything like that. They could use it all against you. Anything!”
Kamila pointed out to me the scars along the living room wall of her Prague apartment where, after the end of communism, she and her husband had ripped out the wires the secret police used to bug their home. It turns out that no one in the Benda family uses smartphones or emails. Too risky, they say, even today.
Some might call this paranoia. But in light of Edward Snowden’s revelations, it looks a lot more like prudence. “People think that they are safe because they haven’t said anything controversial,” says Kamila. “That is very naive.”
After the fall of the Berlin Wall and Germany’s 1990 reunification, the German government opened the vast files of the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police, to its victims. None of the Soviet Bloc states had a surveillance apparatus as thorough as East Germany’s, nor had any communist rivals developed a culture of snitching with roots as deep and wide in the population. Historians later discovered that vast numbers of East German citizens, with no prompting by the government, volunteered negative information about their friends and neighbors. “Across the country, people were on the lookout for divergent viewpoints, which were then branded as dangerous to the state,” reported the magazine Der Spiegel. This practice gave the East German police state an unparalleled perspective on the private lives of its citizens.
Should totalitarianism, hard or soft, come to America, the police state would not have to establish a web of informants to keep tabs on the private lives of the people. The system we have now already does this—and most Americans are scarcely aware of its thoroughness and ubiquity.
The rapidly growing power of information technology and its ubiquitous presence in daily life immensely magnifies the ability of those who control institutions to shape society according to
