Today, though, she speaks openly about what communism did to her dad, especially to the university students she teaches. She is also campaigning to have his name posthumously cleared. This too is a matter of telling the truth.
“It has been a constant struggle for me to make people acknowledge what happened to my father. People don’t want to listen. They don’t want to know about that,” she says. “Whether you live under oppression or not, it’s an ongoing and constant struggle for truth.”
Pastor takes comfort that one of her sons has taken up the cause for which his grandfather essentially gave his life: the plight of persecuted ethnic Hungarians. Yet this woman who lived through the destruction of her family over her father’s recklessly brave decision to take a stand for the truth says that there is a lot to be said for passive opposition.
“Sometimes silence is an act of resistance. Not just standing up for the truth by communicating loudly—keeping silent when you aren’t expected to be silent. That, too, is telling the truth.”
See, Judge, Act
The dictatorship of thought and word under construction by progressives is a regime based on lies and propaganda. Most conservatives, Christian and not, recognize that to some degree, but too few see the deeper ramifications of accepting these lies. “Political correctness” is an annoyance; these lies corrupt one’s ability to think clearly about reality.
Once you perceive how the system runs on lies, stand as firmly as you can on what you know to be true and real when confronted by those lies. Refuse to let the media and institutions propagandize your children. Teach them how to identify lies and to refuse them. Do your best not be party to the lie—not for the sake of professional advantage, personal status, or any other reason. Sometimes you will have to act openly to confront the lie directly. Other times you will fight it by remaining silent and withholding the approval authorities request. You might have to raise your voice to defend someone who is being slandered by propagandists.
Judging when and how to confront the lie depends on individual circumstances, of course. As Father Kaleda says, the faith does not require one to actively seek opportunities for martyrdom. Most of us will be forced by circumstances and responsibilities to our families to be something less than a Solzhenitsyn. That doesn’t necessarily make us cowards.
But take care not to let reasoning prudentially turn into rationalization. That is the basis of ketman—and to surrender to that kind of self-defense will, over time, destroy your soul. Your consent to the system’s lies might buy you safety, but at an unbearable cost. If you cannot imagine any situation in which you would act like Havel’s fictional greengrocer, and live in truth no matter the cost or consequence, then cowardice has a greater claim on your conscience than you know.
A society’s values are carried in the stories it chooses to tell about itself and in the people it wishes to honor. Havel’s greengrocer is a myth that teaches a lesson about the importance of bearing witness to the truth, no matter what; the real-life stories of national heroes like Mária Wittner, and lesser-known resisters like Pastor Yuri Sipko and Father Kirill Kaleda, tell the same story. All of these stories are also important to tell and retell as a guide to others, including those generations as yet unborn. Totalitarians, both soft and hard, know this, which is why they exert such effort to control the common narrative.
CHAPTER SIX Cultivate Cultural Memory
Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
THE PARTY SLOGAN, NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR
Recently, a bright-eyed and cheerful twenty-six-year-old California woman told me that she thinks of herself as a communist. “It’s just so beautiful, this dream of everybody being equal,” she gushed. When she asked me what I was working on, I told her about the struggles of Alexander Ogorodnikov, a Christian dissident imprisoned and tortured by the Soviets, whom I had recently interviewed in Moscow. She fell silent.
“Don’t you know about the gulag?” I asked, naively.
Of course she didn’t. Nobody ever told her. We, her parents and grandparents, have failed her generation. And if she develops no curiosity about the past, she will fail herself.
She’s not alone. Every year, the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a nonprofit educational and research organization established by the US Congress, carries out a survey of Americans to determine their attitudes toward communism, socialism, and Marxism in general. In 2019, the survey found that a startling number of Americans of the post–Cold War generations have favorable views of left-wing radicalism, and only 57 percent of millennials believe that the Declaration of Independence offers a better guarantee of “freedom and equality” than the Communist Manifesto. The political religion that murdered tens of millions, imprisoned and tortured countless more, and immiserated the lives of half of humanity in its time, and the defeat of which required agonizing struggle by allies across borders, oceans, political parties, and generations—this hateful ideology is romanticized by ignorant young people.1
Writing in the The Harvard Crimson in 2017, undergraduate Laura Nicolae, whose parents endured the horrors of Romanian communism, spoke out against the falsification of history that her fellow Ivy Leaguers receive, both in class and in the trendy Marxism of intellectual student culture.
“Depictions of communism on campus paint the ideology as revolutionary or idealistic, overlooking its authoritarian violence,” she writes. “Instead of deepening our understanding of the world, the college experience teaches us to reduce one of the most destructive ideologies in human history to a one-dimensional, sanitized narrative.”2
Forgetting the atrocities of communism is bad enough. What is even more dangerous is the habit of forgetting one’s past. The Czech novelist Milan Kundera drily observes that nobody today will defend gulags, but
