tag:theconversation.com,2011:/uk/topics/totalitarianism-35405/articlesTotalitarianism – The Conversation2023-11-10T15:20:02Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2155682023-11-10T15:20:02Z2023-11-10T15:20:02ZCzesław Miłosz: what the Polish poet tells us about the ‘westsplaining’ of eastern and central Europe<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/558370/original/file-20231108-27-uwo3r1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Czesław Miłosz (third row, fourth from the left) at the Stefan Batory University of Vilna in 1930.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czes%C5%82aw_Mi%C5%82osz#/media/File:Jacek_Dehnel_collection_-_Czes%C5%82aw_Mi%C5%82osz_i_studenci_Uniwersytetu_Stefana_Batorego_w_Wilnie_P-1158_01.jpg">Wikimedia</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In 1931, when the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz was 20 years old, he spent a summer travelling across Europe with friends. At the French border, as he later wrote in <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/187456/native-realm-by-milosz-czeslaw/9780141392288">Native Realm</a>, they saw a sign that “Prohibited <a href="https://theconversation.com/social-care-how-gypsy-roma-and-traveller-children-face-discrimination-across-europe-and-the-uk-170312">Gypsies</a>, Poles, Rumanians and Bulgarians from entering the country”. </p>
<p>This experience was a vivid reminder that travellers from eastern and central Europe were often unwelcome in the western part of the continent. </p>
<p>Fifty years later, <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1980/milosz/lecture/">in his Nobel lecture</a>, Miłosz pointed out that it was still difficult to speak of a single Europe. There were in fact “two Europes”: western Europe and what he referred to as “the Other Europe”.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"880801873133006848"}"></div></p>
<p>The perceived “otherness” of eastern and central Europe is a complex phenomenon, which Miłosz continued to examine in his writings until his death in 2004. As the literature scholar Eva Hoffman notes in her new book, <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691212692/on-czeslaw-milosz">On Czeslaw Milosz: Visions from the Other Europe</a> (Princeton University Press), his oeuvre is, to a large extent, an exploration of this region that shaped him as a person and a poet. </p>
<p>As Hoffman observes, however, this same region was “imagined as inferior, obscure and altogether insignificant by the inhabitants of what was considered Europe <em>tout court</em>: Europe, which stood for civilization itself.” </p>
<p>The Other Europe that Miłosz wrote about was deeply marked by <a href="https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/timothy-snyder/bloodlands/9780465032976/?lens=basic-books">the excesses</a> of Hitler’s and Stalin’s totalitarian regimes. Miłosz witnessed much of this violence first-hand. </p>
<p>He spent the second world war in Poland under Nazi and then Soviet occupation. In 1951, he defected from the Soviet-controlled Polish People’s Republic and became an exile in France. </p>
<p>His writings from the period are an attempt to make sense of the increasing appeal of political ideologies such as fascism and communism, at a time when religion, as <a href="https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-61530-7">my research shows</a>, had ceased to offer a shared frame of reference. </p>
<h2>The othering of eastern and central Europe</h2>
<p>Miłosz’s 1953 book, <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/57403/the-captive-mind-by-czeslaw-milosz-trans-jane-zielonko/9780141186764">The Captive Mind</a>, provides an incisive critique of Soviet communism. Miłosz was ostracised not only in Poland as a traitor to the New Order, but also in France by intellectuals including Jean-Paul Sartre. </p>
<p>In his youth, Miłosz had sympathised with communist ideals. In France, however, he found himself in the unenviable position of an eastern European exile whose experiential knowledge of an oppressive political regime was rejected because it challenged left-wing intellectuals’ uncritical admiration for the Soviet project. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="An archival black and white photograph of refugees marching." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/558372/original/file-20231108-27-jadsg0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/558372/original/file-20231108-27-jadsg0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=412&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558372/original/file-20231108-27-jadsg0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=412&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558372/original/file-20231108-27-jadsg0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=412&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558372/original/file-20231108-27-jadsg0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=518&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558372/original/file-20231108-27-jadsg0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=518&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558372/original/file-20231108-27-jadsg0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=518&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">People displaced during the German occupation of Poland in 1939.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_Poland_(1939%E2%80%931945)#/media/File:Bundesarchiv_R_49_Bild-0131,_Aussiedlung_von_Polen_im_Wartheland.jpg">Wilhelm Holtfreter|Wikimedia</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Hoffman, who herself became an exile from Poland in 1959, recounts the not dissimilar experience of being treated with “patronizing scorn” as a graduate student at Harvard in the 1960s because she dared to challenge what she describes as her fellow students’ “naïve idealization of ‘the workers’”. </p>
<p>Her peers, she writes, perceived Soviet communism to be “a radically progressive philosophy” rather than what she knew it actually to be, “an exceptionally repressive, reactionary ideology and form of governance”. </p>
<p>As both Miłosz and Hoffman point out, to be framed as the “other” is to occupy a position of marginality. This is a shared experience of many exiles. Hoffman uses the term “immigrant rage” to describe the feelings that she experienced when she was ignored, misunderstood and marginalised. </p>
<p>Miłosz and Hoffman rejected dominant western narratives of eastern and central Europe, whether they came from the left or the right. This chimes with the long-standing resistance among eastern and central European writers to what political analyst Edward Lucas has called the <a href="https://cepa.org/article/its-time-to-stop-westsplaining/">“westsplaining” of the region</a>.</p>
<p>The perception of eastern and central Europe as a place of essential otherness continues to shape the experiences of migrants from the region today. The discrimination they face, however, often remains invisible. </p>
<p>While eastern Europeans’ whiteness places them in a position of privilege, it is, as sociologist Kasia Narkowicz has said, “<a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369183X.2022.2154913">peripheral whiteness</a>”. Research shows that <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00380261221121218">eastern Europeans are often racialised</a> and perceived through the lens of their <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/23793406.2019.1584048">linguistic otherness</a>. </p>
<p>What’s more, sociologist Aleksandra Lewicki <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369183X.2022.2154910">points out</a> that this racialisation reflects and contributes to the marginalisation of the region in both political and economic terms.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/rnXti0oUz9w?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>All this has serious political implications. The <a href="https://theconversation.com/we-must-stop-looking-at-eu-migrants-as-coming-from-two-europes-the-east-and-everywhere-else-58007">racialised vilification</a> of eastern Europeans played <a href="https://doi.org/10.1108/S0895-993520200000027012">a central role</a> in the unofficial Leave.EU Brexit campaign. It continues to shape eastern European migrants’ <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369183X.2022.2085678">post-Brexit experiences</a>. </p>
<p>More recently, the perceived otherness of eastern Europe has set the tone for the public debates that followed the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Some antiwar campaigns have presented the war as a clash between, as Stop the War has put it, <a href="https://www.stopwar.org.uk/article/a-win-for-peace-ucu-opposes-the-war-in-ukraine/">“Russian and US imperialism”</a>, rather than an <a href="https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/a-letter-to-the-western-left-from-kyiv/">entirely unprovoked aggression</a> against a sovereign state. (Stop the War’s motion <a href="https://bylinetimes.com/2023/06/26/the-lecturers-union-and-the-betrayal-of-the-intellectuals/">was endorsed</a> by the UK’s largest union of university staff, the University and College Union).</p>
<p>The discourse that such campaigns have employed frames Ukraine as a place of essential otherness. It denies Ukrainian people both a voice and a right to self-determination. </p>
<p>As political economist Yuliya Yurchenko aptly points out, westsplaining of the conflict has resulted in <a href="https://www.stopwar.org.uk/peace-now-stop-the-war-in-ukraine-add-your-name-to-our-letter-to-rishi-sunak/">calls</a> for what she terms a “<a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13684310231172721">phoney peace</a>”. By this, she refers to peace as “confused and conflated with faux international stability – peace for some nations at the expense of localised wars for others”. </p>
<p>In practice, Yurchenko states, this amounts to condoning the mass murder of Ukrainians.</p>
<p>Having witnessed crimes against human rights, Miłosz argued that poets who hailed from the Other Europe were in a unique position to be “bearer[s] of memory”. In his Nobel lecture, he mentioned two of his contemporaries, the poets Władysław Sebyła and Lech Piwowar, who were murdered by the Soviet secret police in the <a href="https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203447048">Katyń Massacre</a> of 1940. </p>
<p>Their deaths were obfuscated by a <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-13507-2_6">conspiracy of silence</a> for almost half a century. The Russian government would only acknowledge Soviet responsibility for the crime in the 1990s. </p>
<p>Today, Ukrainian poets and writers bear witness to the suffering of the victims of the Russian aggression in occupied Ukraine. Their testimonial voices – such as that of the author <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/03/poem-about-a-crow-a-work-by-the-killed-ukrainian-writer-victoria-amelina">Victoria Amelina</a>, who was killed in a Russian missile strike in July 2023 – offer an important counterpoint to the public debates that continue to take for granted the otherness of eastern Europe. </p>
<p>Listening to them would be an important step in mending the rift between “two Europes” that Miłosz’s writings confront us with.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/215568/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Joanna Rzepa does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The perceived “otherness” of eastern and central Europe is a complex phenomenon, which a new book on the Polish Nobel laureate’s oeuvre brings to light.Joanna Rzepa, Senior Lecturer in Literature, University of EssexLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2096792023-07-13T07:47:46Z2023-07-13T07:47:46ZMilan Kundera’s ‘remarkable’ work explored oppression, inhumanity – and the absurdity of being human<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/537244/original/file-20230713-17-xnb9nb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C10%2C3568%2C2414&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A youthful Milan Kundera</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Vacha Pavell/AP</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Milan Kundera, that remarkable novelist, essayist, poet, philosopher and political critic, has died at the age of 94. It feels too soon, perhaps because in everything he wrote, he opened up new ways of thinking, writing and reading. In his literary presence, the world seemed tuned to a higher frequency. </p>
<p>Kundera was born with immaculate timing, on April 1 (1929): April Fool’s Day. From the start, he was exposed to, and immersed in, the absurdity of human culture. He grew up in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, then lived under Stalinist rule, where he was an active member of the Communist Party. </p>
<p>I have been reading him, quoting him and teaching from his writings for decades, after bumping into his work in 1988. I was living then on an isolated sheep station in the Western Australian outback, a world of bleak beauty. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/537253/original/file-20230713-29-ldz05g.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/537253/original/file-20230713-29-ldz05g.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/537253/original/file-20230713-29-ldz05g.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537253/original/file-20230713-29-ldz05g.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537253/original/file-20230713-29-ldz05g.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537253/original/file-20230713-29-ldz05g.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537253/original/file-20230713-29-ldz05g.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537253/original/file-20230713-29-ldz05g.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Someone visiting the property pressed on me a copy of <a href="https://literariness.org/2022/10/09/analysis-of-milan-kunderas-the-book-of-laughter-and-forgetting/">The Book of Laughter and Forgetting</a>, and I was immediately and utterly captivated. This, Kundera’s third novel, affirmed my own anxiety of the absence of a stable truth, and of my incapacity to resist the longing to belong, even to the most damaged society. </p>
<p>In one section of the novel, a group of the Communist faithful, dancing together in a circle, rise into the air and soar over the city. They laugh the laughter of angels while below them, the executioners are killing political prisoners. Says the narrator of this section, who necessarily cannot be part of that group:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I realized with anguish in my heart that they were flying like birds and I was falling like a stone, that they had wings and I would never have any.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Interrogating totalitarianism, with humour</h2>
<p>Kundera knew about oppression and inhumanity. His first collection of (not very good) poetry, Man, A Wide Garden (1953) – published when he was only 24 – was decidedly Soviet in tone and content. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/537252/original/file-20230713-15-fn0yq9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/537252/original/file-20230713-15-fn0yq9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/537252/original/file-20230713-15-fn0yq9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=907&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537252/original/file-20230713-15-fn0yq9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=907&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537252/original/file-20230713-15-fn0yq9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=907&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537252/original/file-20230713-15-fn0yq9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1140&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537252/original/file-20230713-15-fn0yq9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1140&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537252/original/file-20230713-15-fn0yq9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1140&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But when he wrote his first novel, <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Milan-Kundera,-translated-by-Michael-Henry-Heim-Joke-9780571166930/">The Joke</a> in 1967, then wrote <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Milan-Kundera,-translated-by-Aaron-Asher-Life-is-Elsewhere-9780571197774/">Life is Elsewhere</a> in 1969 (published in 1973), both of them shot through with political satire, and he was expelled from the Communist Party and subsequently fled into exile. </p>
<p>In what is perhaps his best-known novel, <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Milan-Kundera,-translated-by-Michael-Henry-Heim-Unbearable-Lightness-of-Being-9780571135394/">The Unbearable Lightness of Being</a> (1984) – adapted in 1988 as <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096332/">a movie</a> starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Juliette Binoche – he continues his interrogation of totalitarian politics, exploring the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Prague-Spring">Prague Spring</a> and the brutality of Soviet control of Czechoslavakia. </p>
<p>This theme sounds deeply earnest. But in each novel, Kundera offers some humour – often bitter, but capable of leavening the otherwise bleak, and densely reported, content. </p>
<p>In Unbearable Lightness, for example, the narrator discusses Nietszche’s <a href="https://philosophybreak.com/articles/eternal-recurrence-what-did-nietzsche-really-mean/#:%7E:text=Loeb%20argues%20that%20in,and%20history%20will%20repeat%20itself">doctrine of eternal recurrence</a> – the possibility we live the same life over and over. But he also develops an erotic narrative that seems to suggest lighthearted sex can allow us to live fully in the moment. We can exchange the weight of eternal recurrence for the lightness of being alive, here and now.</p>
<p>Weight and lightness, laughter and forgetting, repetition and change, politics and sex: his first four novels incorporate such dualities. Perhaps this capacity to hold contradictory thoughts can be explained by something <a href="http://www.kundera.de/english/Info-Point/Interview_Roth/interview_roth.html">he said</a> to Philip Roth:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Totalitarianism is not only hell, but also the dream of paradise – the age old drama of a world where everybody would live in harmony.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/pG2Gsoet7p0?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Unbearable Lightness of Being.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-power-of-ordinary-people-facing-totalitarianism-73589">The power of ordinary people facing totalitarianism</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Author in exile</h2>
<p>His dream of paradise was not realised, of course. In 1975, he fled his home for exile in France, and continued writing works of fiction that mostly followed the signature structure he first developed in The Joke: multi-part, multi-voiced novels, where the narrator interpolates critique, commentary and philosophical statements in the text. </p>
<p>This makes for a restless story, one that shifts to and fro across locations, times and contexts. Characters flicker in and out. The logic of beginning, middle and end is barely acknowledged. And the sorts of issues that appear so often in fiction – a quest for the self, the telling of a tale, the achievement of resolution – are set aside. </p>
<p>The focus of Kundera’s novels is their wrestle with questions of knowledge, the complexity of being and a constant uncertainty. This can be an unsettling style: a disruption, rather than a simple pleasure or an aesthetic experience. For a 21st-century woman, too, his tone and style in the writing of sex scenes – and the representation of women more generally – can present as outdated masculinity. </p>
<p>I vacillate between feeling offence at what feels like <a href="https://theconversation.com/cultural-misogyny-and-why-mens-aggression-to-women-is-so-often-expressed-through-sex-157680">misogyny</a>, and reading it as a searing critique of misogyny. And <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/may/22/milan-kundera-immortality-jonathan-coe-novels-women">I’m not alone</a> in this. </p>
<h2>‘Things are not as simple as you think’</h2>
<p>Where I uncomplicatedly follow Kundera’s lead is not in his novels, but in his essays. Here, his deep understanding of the background to what we now know as the novel, or the long traditions and changes that characterise artistic practice, genuinely illuminate the field. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/537246/original/file-20230713-23-3o6jk8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/537246/original/file-20230713-23-3o6jk8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/537246/original/file-20230713-23-3o6jk8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537246/original/file-20230713-23-3o6jk8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537246/original/file-20230713-23-3o6jk8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537246/original/file-20230713-23-3o6jk8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1185&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537246/original/file-20230713-23-3o6jk8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1185&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537246/original/file-20230713-23-3o6jk8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1185&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Milan-Kundera-Art-of-the-Novel-9780571227495/">The Art of the Novel</a> (1986), he outlines a history of how novelists unpacked various dimensions of existence. He starts with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_de_Cervantes">Miguel de Cervantes</a> and moves through the lists of generative fiction writers to fellow Czechs Franz Kafka and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaroslav_Ha%C5%A1ek">Jaroslav Hasek</a> – who, he claims, show that a strength of fiction is that it tolerates uncertainty, in a way politics and religion cannot. For Kundera, what fiction does so well is say to the reader: “Things are not as simple as you think.” </p>
<p>For Kundera, the novel is a technological object that allows new ways of seeing, and of making meaning. And this seeing and meaning is embedded in its context. For example, in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/04/books/review/Banks.t.html">The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts</a> (2006), he points out what fiction can do that earlier forms could not. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Homer never wondered whether, after all their many hand-to-hand battles, Achilles or Ajax still had all their teeth. But for Don Quixote and Sancho teeth are a perpetual concern – hurting teeth, missing teeth. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Writers like Cervantes (author of Don Quixote), Henry Fielding (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Tom_Jones,_a_Foundling">Tom Jones</a>) and Laurence Sterne (<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/76527.The_Life_and_Opinions_of_Tristram_Shandy_Gentleman">The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman</a>) introduce the small things of everyday life, and illuminate the meaning and import they have on us, Kundera points out. </p>
<p>But, he hastens to observe, contemporary writers cannot and should not write as those giants did: rather, writing is a matter of continuity (in terms of form, voice and style in a particular period) and discontinuity (finding something new). </p>
<p>In these essays, too, he offers a workshop in how to write. How to manage voice, perspective, temporality. How to have fun with language and form – and let the imagination run wild. And how to deal with thought and concept, materiality and politics. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/ethics-and-writing-63399">Ethics and writing</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Teller of inconvenient truths</h2>
<p>A writer of such gravitas and such technical brilliance should, one might imagine, have won the Nobel Prize in Literature at some point in his long life. He won other prizes, after all, among them the Jerusalem Prize in 1985 and the Herder Prize in 2000. </p>
<p>Perhaps it was his writing style that meant the Nobel committee saw him nominated on a number of occasions, but never awarded him the prize. </p>
<p>After the last novel he wrote in Czech – <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Milan-Kundera,-translated-by-Peter-Kussi-Immortality-9780571144563/">Immortality</a> (1991), which teases out questions of sexual and personal relationships – he wrote four more novels, which garnered less attention, less critical reception. So, in <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Milan-Kundera-Slowness-9780571179435/">Slowness</a> (1995), <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Milan-Kundera-Identity-9780571195671/">Identity: A Novel</a> (1999), <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Milan-Kundera-Ignorance-9780571215515/">Ignorance</a> (2000) and finally <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Milan-Kundera-Festival-of-Insignificance-9780571316496/">The Festival of Insignificance</a> (2014), you <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/12/world/europe/milan-kundera-dead.html">can see</a> his star begin to fade. </p>
<p>This is not because they are less “good” books. <a href="https://quillette.com/2023/07/11/milan-kundera-the-nobel-prize-for-literature-winner-we-never-had/">Robin Ashenden suggests</a> he “had become a teller of truths inconvenient to the modern age”, and maybe there is something in that. </p>
<p>He is terribly direct, very hard-hitting. And he refuses the consolations of sentimentality or morality, in favour of what <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Milan-Kundera-Art-of-the-Novel-9780571227495/">he describes</a> as the morality of knowledge: the imperative to see and say what previous writers did not/could not see, or say. And to build fresh understandings of the world.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/209679/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jen Webb receives funding from the Australian Research Council.</span></em></p>Milan Kundera, the celebrated Czech author best known for The Unbearable Lightness of Being, has died, aged 94. His work interrogated totalitarianism and explored ideas – leavened with bleak humour.Jen Webb, Dean, Graduate Research, University of CanberraLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1799902022-03-24T17:47:19Z2022-03-24T17:47:19ZUkraine Recap: game theory and psychology shed light on negotiations<p>As the war approaches the one-month mark, this week a lot of the thinking has shifted to how negotiations might bring the violence to an end. As western leaders gather in Brussels to discuss what might be done to pressure Russian leader Vladimir Putin to call a halt to hostilities, negotiators from Ukraine and Russia continue to meet, and there have been some reports of progress.</p>
<p>But still the killing continues, and it’s hard to think how the two sides can get any closer round the negotiating table while the Russian military continues to bombard civilians in many of the large cities. Amelia Hadfield, an expert in Russian politics, considers what <a href="https://theconversation.com/ukraine-war-what-game-theory-can-tell-us-about-how-negotiations-might-go-179784">game theory might tell us</a> about how negotiations might proceed.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/ukraine-war-what-game-theory-can-tell-us-about-how-negotiations-might-go-179784">Ukraine war: what game theory can tell us about how negotiations might go</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has called on Putin to meet him for one-on-one talks. The Kremlin has indicated its willingness for the two leaders to get together but only after the text of an agreement had been inked in and signed by the foreign ministers of both countries. Zelensky has eyeballed Putin before and will be aware of the kind of man his opponent is. </p>
<p>Psychologists Magnus Linden and George Wilkes have studied Putin’s “dark personality” and have <a href="https://theconversation.com/putin-the-psychology-behind-his-destructive-leadership-and-how-best-to-tackle-it-according-to-science-179823">given us a rundown</a> on the sort of man who brought a big dog into talks with the former German chancellor, Angela Merkel – who famously hates dogs.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/putin-the-psychology-behind-his-destructive-leadership-and-how-best-to-tackle-it-according-to-science-179823">Putin: the psychology behind his destructive leadership – and how best to tackle it according to science</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>A lot of labels have been used in association with the Russian leader and his regime: revolutionary, totalitarian and fascist to use but three. But language is key to understanding, and Richard Shorten, an expert in political theory, has parsed all these labels and tells us Putin is in fact a <a href="https://theconversation.com/putins-not-a-fascist-totalitarian-or-revolutionary-hes-a-reactionary-tyrant-179256">reactionary tyrant</a>.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/putins-not-a-fascist-totalitarian-or-revolutionary-hes-a-reactionary-tyrant-179256">Putin's not a fascist, totalitarian or revolutionary – he's a reactionary tyrant</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="Ukraine Recap weekly email newsletter" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/449743/original/file-20220303-4351-1xhaozt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/449743/original/file-20220303-4351-1xhaozt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/449743/original/file-20220303-4351-1xhaozt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/449743/original/file-20220303-4351-1xhaozt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/449743/original/file-20220303-4351-1xhaozt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/449743/original/file-20220303-4351-1xhaozt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/449743/original/file-20220303-4351-1xhaozt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><strong><em>This is our weekly recap of expert analysis of the Ukraine conflict.</em></strong>
<br><em>The Conversation, a not-for-profit news group, works with a wide range of academics across its global network to produce evidence-based analysis. Get these recaps in your inbox every Thursday. <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/newsletters/ukraine-recap-114?utm_source=TCUK&utm_medium=linkback&utm_campaign=UK+Newsletter+Ukraine+Recap+2022+Mar&utm_content=WeeklyRecapTop">Subscribe here</a>.</em> </p>
<hr>
<h2>Bogged down</h2>
<p>Meanwhile, the war isn’t progressing as Putin would have planned. As we noted last week, the lightning advance in Ukraine prompting Kyiv’s capitulation failed to materialise. Instead, Russian troops have become bogged down and have adopted attritional siege tactics, using airstrikes and artillery to reduce some cities to rubble. </p>
<p>In the process, Russia is incurring a lot of casualties, including – incredible as it might sound – five generals, according to Ukrainian reports. <a href="https://theconversation.com/ukraine-war-why-are-so-many-russian-generals-being-killed-179517">Jonathan Jackson reports</a> that, despite attempts at reform, Russia’s military remains inefficient and corrupt. The presence of generals on the front line is affording Ukrainian snipers opportunities to strike at some of their enemies’ most senior officers. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/ukraine-war-why-are-so-many-russian-generals-being-killed-179517">Ukraine war: why are so many Russian generals being killed?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Things have apparently become so bad that there is speculation that Putin is putting pressure on Belarus to enter the war to support Russia. There’s little doubt that Belarus president, Alexandr Lukashenko, is more than responsive to Putin’s will. But sending his troops into Ukraine would leave Lukashenko dangerously exposed at home, <a href="https://theconversation.com/ukraine-the-complex-calculations-that-will-decide-whether-belarus-enters-the-conflict-on-russias-side-179816">write Stefan Wolff and Anastasiya Bayok</a></p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/ukraine-the-complex-calculations-that-will-decide-whether-belarus-enters-the-conflict-on-russias-side-179816">Ukraine: the complex calculations that will decide whether Belarus enters the conflict on Russia's side</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Zelensky, meanwhile, continues to implore Nato leaders to do more to help. Yet still they resist, arguing that the dangers of the war in Ukraine escalating to a bigger conflict involving Europe and the US are too great. </p>
<p>The risk is already high. Last week Russian shells struck a military base just a few kilometres from the Polish border, and Putin has said he considers convoys supplying arms and equipment to Ukrainian forces from Nato countries to be fair game. Kenton White, who has researched Nato politics, tells us that there are also <a href="https://theconversation.com/ukraine-what-might-happen-if-the-war-spreads-to-a-nato-country-179434">differing opinions within Nato</a> as to how different countries might react to an attack on an ally. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/ukraine-what-might-happen-if-the-war-spreads-to-a-nato-country-179434">Ukraine: what might happen if the war spreads to a Nato country</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Butcher’s bill</h2>
<p>Every day brings a fresh butcher’s bill. Many of those paying the price are civilians either trying to escape to safety or trapped in cities under fire. Russia steadfastly refuses to admit targeting civilians in Ukraine, but this was very much part of its playbook after Putin intervened in Syria in 2015, <a href="https://theconversation.com/ukraine-war-how-russian-denial-of-civilian-casualties-follows-tactics-used-in-syria-179583">says Lily Hamourtziadou</a>, an expert on the death toll of war who runs the Iraq Body Count site monitoring civilian deaths there. She also says the US has often been less than candid about the civilian casualties of its military interventions, instead coining the euphemism “collateral damage”.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/ukraine-war-how-russian-denial-of-civilian-casualties-follows-tactics-used-in-syria-179583">Ukraine war: how Russian denial of civilian casualties follows tactics used in Syria</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Another group of people under daily threat from the Russian violence are the aid workers who are trying to help the trapped civilians. There’s a depressing irony that some of the most endangered people in modern wars are the humanitarian workers who are committed to neutrality, impartiality and independence and are supposed to be protected under international law, <a href="https://theconversation.com/ukraine-aid-workers-were-forced-out-of-syria-the-same-thing-could-happen-in-this-war-179781">writes William Plowright</a>, an expert in humanitarian operations in conflict zones.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/ukraine-aid-workers-were-forced-out-of-syria-the-same-thing-could-happen-in-this-war-179781">Ukraine: aid workers were forced out of Syria – the same thing could happen in this war</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>War’s other victims</h2>
<p>While human lives are clearly the most important currency being expended in this illegal war, spare a thought for the animals in Ukraine’s zoos, whose terror at the constant bombardment would be made far worse by their lack of understanding. Samantha Ward has researched the fate of animals in other conflicts and <a href="https://theconversation.com/ukraines-zoos-what-is-happening-to-all-the-animals-179147">tells us</a> that while London zoo survived two world wars, the trauma being suffered by Ukraine’s zoo animals must be enormous.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/ukraines-zoos-what-is-happening-to-all-the-animals-179147">Ukraine's zoos: what is happening to all the animals</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Zoos aside, Putin’s war machine is destroying much of Ukraine’s cultural heritage – an unimaginable tragedy for posterity. One safe haven so far has been the city of Lviv in the far west of the country. But the war steadily approaches and there are fears that soon the bombs will rain down on this beautiful city, which historian <a href="https://theconversation.com/a-central-european-miracle-why-the-city-of-lviv-is-so-important-for-ukraine-179332">Christopher Mick describes</a> as an ethnic and cultural melting pot and looked on as the “soul of Ukraine”.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/a-central-european-miracle-why-the-city-of-lviv-is-so-important-for-ukraine-179332">'A central European miracle': why the city of Lviv is so important for Ukraine</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Ukraine Recap is available as a weekly email newsletter. <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/newsletters/ukraine-recap-114?utm_source=TCUK&utm_medium=linkback&utm_campaign=UK+Newsletter+Ukraine+Recap+2022+Mar&utm_content=WeeklyRecapBottom">Click here to get our recaps directly in your inbox.</a></em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/179990/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
The best of the past week’s coverage of the war in Ukraine.Jonathan Este, Senior International Affairs Editor, Associate EditorLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1792562022-03-17T17:16:29Z2022-03-17T17:16:29ZPutin’s not a fascist, totalitarian or revolutionary – he’s a reactionary tyrant<p>Talk of a “new cold war” in this century began in the time between the war in Iraq and the global recession of 2008. It roughly coincided with the attention focused on <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/new-cold-war-9781408859285/">the murder of Alexander Litvinenko</a> by polonium-210 poisoning at the hands of Russians in London. </p>
<p>Such talk was quietly forgotten while the consequences of global recession played out. Europe and the United States were distracted by dealing with their own – self-imposed – problems: Trump, Brexit and a general upturn in support for anti-system political movements. But with the invasion of Ukraine, the topic has returned glaringly.</p>
<p>What language is helpful for shaping the crucial judgements now necessary? Much damage has been done to common political vocabulary in recent years. “Enemies of the people” is a Stalinist phrase, but was used to push through Britain’s extrication from the European Union. The frequently relied-on “populism” is a vague, all-too-muted descriptor. “Imperialism” has been stretched thin by over-censure of humanitarian liberals.</p>
<p>Today we see similar harm being done. A Guardian editorial recently described a “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/02/the-guardian-view-on-russian-dissent-a-slide-to-totalitarianism">slide into totalitarianism</a>” in Russia. Likewise, The Daily Telegraph published a comment piece: “<a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2022/03/05/russias-war-journalism-another-step-towards-totalitarian/">Russia’s war on journalism is another step towards the totalitarian</a>”. But Vladimir Putin’s Russia is not totalitarian. Neither accurate political understanding, nor suitably directed moral criticism, is best served by this framing. </p>
<p>Ideologically, <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Modernism-Totalitarianism-Rethinking-Intellectual-Stalinism/dp/0230252079">totalitarianism has three markers</a>: utopia, exaggerated trust in science, and revolutionary violence. What Putin retains from the Soviet era is not its utopianism but its late-period security obsession, via his personal background in the KGB. </p>
<p>He does not carry his belief in science into dogma. He is not – like Marx and Lenin were – interested in science as a grand legitimiser of historical vision: he is only interested in technologies of communication for the purposes of control. And his belief in violence is utilitarian and calculating (even if miscalculated in practice), rather than revolutionary and geared towards social renewal.</p>
<p>Totalitarianism today in Russia would need to be a “post-totalitarian totalitarianism”. The legacy of the original totalitarianism – thanks to inherited trauma of the Soviet era – is a population not enthused into grand, confident collectivism but far more cowed into suspicion, <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/318687/the-future-is-history-by-masha-gessen/">“self-isolation” and “state paternalism”</a>. Repression, <a href="https://theconversation.com/putins-russia-how-the-ex-kgb-strongman-has-gradually-turned-the-clock-back-to-soviet-repression-179127">which has increased</a>, is not actually a very specific marker of totalitarianism. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/putins-russia-how-the-ex-kgb-strongman-has-gradually-turned-the-clock-back-to-soviet-repression-179127">Putin's Russia: how the ex-KGB strongman has gradually turned the clock back to Soviet repression</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Using clear terminology to represent the experience of people living under toxic regimes is important for thinking about the possibilities of dissent balanced by the pressures to conformism. But this must be done accurately.</p>
<h2>Not fascism</h2>
<p>Neither is Putin’s regime “fascist” by ideology. The appearance since the start of the invasion of the <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/z-is-the-symbol-of-the-new-russian-politics-of-aggression">swastika-looking “Z” symbol</a> on posters and people’s clothing (but to begin with on Russian tanks) has been widely reported. <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/570367/the-road-to-unfreedom-by-timothy-snyder/">Historians</a> have noted the revival of previously overlooked Russian-born fascist thinkers, such as <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/03/16/ivan-ilyin-putins-philosopher-of-russian-fascism/">Ivan Ilyin</a>, whose remains Putin repatriated and reburied in 2008.</p>
<p>The reason the issue is on the table is Putin’s own claim to <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/ukraine/2022/03/the-truth-about-putins-denazification-fantasy">freeing Ukraine by “denazification”</a>. This is laughable in itself, but richly relevant to this question of what kind of past political language will prosper in the present. Putin meets only one of the <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13569317.2017.1306959">three criteria for ideological fascism</a>: strong, ethnic nationalism, which is the basis for the solidarity of self-styled white nationalists abroad when they promote the “Z”.</p>
<p>Two other criteria for fascism are absent entirely. Putin’s policies do not glorify the state over the individual. And, as opposed to compelling public participation, Putin cautions people to stay out of public life – even, as a rule, the oligarchs his rule has indulged. Neither do his policies express “transcendence” (or going beyond present limits) – whereas recognisably fascist movements aim at <a href="https://brill.com/view/journals/fasc/5/2/article-p130_3.xml?language=en">creating “new men”</a>. Re-embracing <a href="https://www.economist.com/europe/2018/02/03/vladimir-putin-embraces-the-russian-church">Russian Orthodox Christianity</a> is one ideological sign to the contrary, since it looks back not forwards.</p>
<h2>Putin’s reactionary regime</h2>
<p>Putin is really a “reactionary tyrant”. This reflects the structure of rule he has evolved, and also the main lines of his legitimising discourse. This discourse may not have taken root deeply, but is nonetheless present in the regime’s rhetoric. Like totalitarianism, like fascism, <a href="https://www.routledge.com/The-Ideology-of-Political-Reactionaries/Shorten/p/book/9781032122700">reactionism has three main ideological themes</a>.</p>
<p>The first is decrying decadence – evident in Putin’s explicit anti-westernism. So Ukraine’s west-oriented leadership are portrayed as “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/25/its-not-rational-putins-bizarre-speech-wrecks-his-once-pragmatic-image">drug addicts</a>”, or the west is described as weak because it is <a href="https://krytyka.com/sites/krytyka/files/sperling_0.pdf">effeminate</a>.</p>
<p>The second feature is inventing conspiracy theories. Among others targets, Putin fulminates at a homosexual lobby, which is accused – by conflation with paedophiles – of conspiring to steal children. This has been brilliantly highlighted by the <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/12/07/masha-gessen-russia-gay-demons/">journalist and activist Masha Gessen</a>. </p>
<p>Such stances explain why Putin has been appealing, not just for extreme “<a href="https://www.simonandschuster.co.uk/books/Men-Who-Hate-Women/Laura-Bates/9781398504653">manosphere</a>” white supremacists, but also for more “mainstream” western reactionaries attracted by an unapologetic social conservatism. Hence, in France, the praise for Putin from two hard-right presidential contenders, Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour, each of whom now has hastily tried to <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-05/ukraine-war-dominates-french-election-that-helps-macron-s-chances">retract previous positions</a>.</p>
<p>The third feature is the hardest to spot. This feature is the indignation of a population group: its righteous anger, hitherto suppressed, but now liberated – and politically tapped. In western countries, indignation has had a common, anti-immigrant wellspring. And politicians have prospered by alleging the unacceptability of expressing <a href="https://hbr.org/2016/11/what-so-many-people-dont-get-about-the-u-s-working-class">white working-class anger</a> in a “politically correct” time. </p>
<p>Putin also understands that he can win a significant number of people’s loyalty by recognising and stressing shared humiliations. His message is that – unlike citizens of other countries – his fellow Russian nationals have been denied access to an acceptable historical memory. Thanks to Stalinism, cold war defeat and Soviet Russia’s chequered record of anti-fascism (the minimising of Jewish suffering in preference for a broader tale of Soviet sacrifice), many Russians are unable to look back in pride. </p>
<p>Anti-fascism is a record Putin’s leadership continues to blot, even against the background of this complaint about burdensome memories. Witness the <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-60588885">destruction of the Holocaust monument at Babyn Yar</a> in Ukraine.</p>
<p>Putin is a reactionary tyrant. The tyranny language is important. Inside Russia, the vocalisation of conscience against him has been brave and points to the noblest traditions of resisting tyrants. Any meaningful ideas lack root. So, like Caesar to the gladiators entering the arena, Putin is what people on both sides of the war are being asked to die for.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/179256/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Richard Shorten does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>In ideological terms, Putin’s regime is neither totalitarian nor fascist. But it is reactionary, and in a way that begs questions about the recent maltreatment of language in Western politicsRichard Shorten, Senior Lecturer in Political Theory, University of BirminghamLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1788652022-03-14T19:10:26Z2022-03-14T19:10:26ZPutin’s brazen manipulation of language is a perfect example of Orwellian doublespeak<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/451646/original/file-20220311-19-l9l85z.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=9%2C29%2C6562%2C4177&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Russian President Vladimir Putin uses words to mean the opposite of what they really mean.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/russian-president-vladimir-putin-visits-the-national-space-news-photo/1238803793?adppopup=true">Sergei Guneyev/SPUTNIK/AFP via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>If you’ve been paying attention to how Russian President Vladimir Putin talks about the war in Ukraine, you may have noticed a pattern. Putin often uses words to mean exactly the opposite of what they normally do.</p>
<p>He labels acts of war “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/21/ukraine-putin-decide-recognition-breakaway-states-today">peacekeeping duties</a>.” </p>
<p>He claims to be engaging in “<a href="https://theconversation.com/putins-claim-to-rid-ukraine-of-nazis-is-especially-absurd-given-its-history-177959">denazification</a>” of Ukraine while seeking to overthrow or even kill Ukraine’s Jewish president, who is the grandson of a Holocaust survivor. </p>
<p>He <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/23/us/politics/putin-ukraine-nuclear-weapons.html">claims</a> that Ukraine is plotting to create nuclear weapons, while the greatest current threat of nuclear war <a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/03/01/1083696555/russia-ukraine-war-putin-nuclear-escalation-risk">appears to be Putin himself</a>.</p>
<p>Putin’s brazen manipulation of language is drawing attention. Kira Rudik, a member of the Ukrainian Parliament, recently <a href="https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2022/03/01/kira-rudik-intv-ukraine-parliament-putin-negotiations-tsr-vpx.cnn">said</a> of Putin in a CNN interview:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“When he says, ‘I want peace,’ this means, ‘I’m gathering my troops to kill you.’ If he says, ‘It’s not my troops,’ he means ‘It’s my troops and I’m gathering them.’ And if he says, ‘OK, I’m retreating,’ this means ‘I’m regrouping and gathering more troops to kill you.’”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As a <a href="https://clasprofiles.wayne.edu/profile/hf1190">philosophy professor who studies the British author George Orwell</a>, I am reminded by Rudik’s comments about Putin of another set of claims: “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1984/01/18/arts/ministry-truth-had-three-slogans-war-peace-freedom-slavery-ignorance-strength.html">War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength</a>.” These are the words etched onto the side of the building for the government agency called the “Ministry of Truth” in Orwell’s dystopian novel “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/326569/1984-by-george-orwell-with-a-foreword-by-thomas-pynchon/">1984</a>,” published in 1949.</p>
<p>Orwell uses this feature of the novel to draw attention to how totalitarian regimes – like the book’s <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Nineteen-Eighty-four#:%7E:text=The%20book%20is%20set%20in,to%20its%20leader%2C%20Big%20Brother.">fictional state of Oceania</a> – perversely warp language to gain and retain political power. Orwell’s keen understanding of this phenomenon was the result of having witnessed it himself.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/451647/original/file-20220311-21-1v20fio.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A destroyed multistory building, hit by bombs, with debris spread around it." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/451647/original/file-20220311-21-1v20fio.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/451647/original/file-20220311-21-1v20fio.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=387&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/451647/original/file-20220311-21-1v20fio.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=387&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/451647/original/file-20220311-21-1v20fio.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=387&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/451647/original/file-20220311-21-1v20fio.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/451647/original/file-20220311-21-1v20fio.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/451647/original/file-20220311-21-1v20fio.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">This bombed school building in Vasylkiv, Ukraine, is the result of what Putin has called a ‘special military operation,’ not a ‘war.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/secondary-school-building-seen-destroyed-by-russian-news-photo/1239017115?adppopup=true">Mykhaylo Palinchak/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Lies more frightening than bombs</h2>
<p>In grappling with Putin’s lies and spin, it’s helpful to look at what previous thinkers and writers, like Orwell, have said about the relationship between language and political power. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/biography/">Orwell</a>, an Englishman who lived from 1903 to 1950, experienced war, imperialism and poverty during the first half of his life. These experiences led Orwell to identify as a socialist and member of the British political left. </p>
<p>It might seem inevitable, then, that Orwell would have favorably viewed <a href="https://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/document.php?id=cqresrre1967101800">Soviet Communism</a>, a leading force on the political left in Europe at the time. But this was not so.</p>
<p>Instead, Orwell believed that Soviet Communism <a href="https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/notes-on-nationalism/">shared the same defects</a> as Nazi Germany. <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674332607">Both were totalitarian states</a> where the desire for total power and control crowded out any room for truth, individuality or freedom. Orwell did not think Soviet Communism was truly socialist, but rather that it only had a socialist façade. </p>
<p>At age 33, Orwell served <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/133146/spain-orwell-never-saw">as a volunteer soldier in the Spanish Civil War</a>. He fought with a small militia as part of a larger left-leaning coalition that was trying to stop an insurrection from Spain’s Nationalist right. This left-leaning coalition was receiving military support from the Soviet Union. </p>
<p>But the small militia Orwell was fighting with ultimately became a target of Soviet propagandists, who leveled <a href="https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/looking-back-on-the-spanish-war/">a range of accusations against the militia</a>, including that its members were spies for the other side. This was a byproduct of the Soviet Union’s attempts to use its involvement in Spain as a way of gaining political power.</p>
<p>Orwell observed how the militia he had fought with was maligned in the European press as part of this Soviet smear campaign. He explained in his book “<a href="https://www.hmhbooks.com/shop/books/homage-to-catalonia/9780547416175">Homage to Catalonia</a>” that this smear campaign included telling demonstrable lies about concrete facts. This experience deeply troubled Orwell. </p>
<p>He <a href="https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/looking-back-on-the-spanish-war/">later reflected on this experience</a>, writing that he was frightened by the “feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world.” That prospect, he claimed, frightened him “much more than bombs.”</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/451650/original/file-20220311-28-le8110.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A middle-aged man with dark hair and wearing a tweed jacket, vest and tie, sits before a microphone that says BBC on it." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/451650/original/file-20220311-28-le8110.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/451650/original/file-20220311-28-le8110.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=835&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/451650/original/file-20220311-28-le8110.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=835&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/451650/original/file-20220311-28-le8110.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=835&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/451650/original/file-20220311-28-le8110.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1049&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/451650/original/file-20220311-28-le8110.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1049&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/451650/original/file-20220311-28-le8110.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1049&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">George Orwell, who said he was frightened that ‘the very concept of objective truth’ was ‘fading out of the world.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/eric-arthur-blair-better-known-by-his-pen-name-george-news-photo/1354450505?adppopup=true">Pictures From History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Language shapes politics – and vice versa</h2>
<p>Such fears influenced much of Orwell’s most influential writing, including his novel “<a href="https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/books-by-orwell/nineteen-eighty-four/">1984</a>” and his essay “<a href="https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language//">Politics and the English Language</a>.” </p>
<p>In that essay, Orwell reflects on the <a href="https://1000wordphilosophy.com/2021/12/17/george-orwell/">relationship between language, thought and politics</a>. For Orwell, language influences thought, which in turn influences politics. But politics also influences thought, which in turn influences language. Thus, Orwell – like Putin – saw how language shapes politics and vice versa. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/">Orwell argues in the essay</a> that if one writes well, “one can think more clearly,” and in turn that “to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration,” which I believe meant to him that a political order could recover from destructive political influences like totalitarianism. This makes good writing a political task. </p>
<p>Orwell’s desire to avoid bad writing is not the desire to defend rigid rules of grammar. Rather, Orwell’s goal is for language users “to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about.” Communicating clearly and precisely requires conscious thought. It takes work.</p>
<p>But just as language can illuminate thought and regenerate politics, so too language can be used to obscure thought and degenerate politics. </p>
<p>Putin sees this clearly and seeks to use this to his advantage. </p>
<h2>‘Doublethink,’ ‘doublespeak’</h2>
<p>Orwell warned against the kind of abuses of language Putin commits, writing that “<a href="https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/">if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought</a>.”</p>
<p>Orwell explored what mutual corruption of language and politics <a href="https://theconversation.com/orwells-ideas-remain-relevant-75-years-after-animal-farm-was-published-165431">in a totalitarian regime</a> looks like in his dystopian “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/326569/1984-by-george-orwell-with-a-foreword-by-thomas-pynchon/">1984</a>.” In the world of “1984,” the only crime is “thoughtcrime.” The ruling class seeks to eliminate the possibility of thoughtcrime by eliminating the language needed to have the thoughts they had criminalized – which included any thought that would undermine the party’s totalitarian control. Limit language and you limit thought, or so the theory goes. Thus, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/04/world/europe/russia-censorship-media-crackdown.html">the Russian Parliament passed, and Putin has signed</a>, a law that could result in criminal charges for using the Russian word for “war” to describe the Ukraine war. </p>
<p>Orwell also uses “1984” to explore what happens when communication conforms to the desires of political power instead of demonstrable fact. </p>
<p>[<em>Over 150,000 readers rely on The Conversation’s newsletters to understand the world.</em> <a href="https://memberservices.theconversation.com/newsletters/?source=inline-150ksignup">Sign up today</a>.]</p>
<p>The result is “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/326569/1984-by-george-orwell-with-a-foreword-by-thomas-pynchon/">doublethink,” which occurs when a fractured mind simultaneously accepts two contradictory beliefs as true</a>. The slogans “War is peace,” “Freedom is slavery” and “Ignorance is strength” are paradigmatic examples. This Orwellian idea has given rise to the concept of <a href="https://canadafreepress.com/article/orwells-doublespeak-the-language-of-the-left">doublespeak</a>, which occurs when one uses language to obscure meaning to manipulate others.</p>
<p>Doublespeak is a tool in the arsenal of tyranny. It is one of Putin’s weapons of choice, as it is for many authoritarians and would-be authoritarians around the world. As Orwell warned: “Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/178865/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Mark Satta does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Putin often uses words to mean exactly the opposite of what they normally do – a practice diagnosed by political author George Orwell as ‘doublespeak,’ or the language of totalitarians.Mark Satta, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Wayne State UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1770482022-02-18T14:27:40Z2022-02-18T14:27:40ZStatephobia on display at the ‘freedom convoy’<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/446598/original/file-20220215-23-1ag0wz6.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C3900%2C2598&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">People rally against provincial and federal COVID-19 vaccine mandates and in support of Ottawa protestors outside the Manitoba Legislature in Winnipeg on Feb. 4.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/John Woods</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><a href="https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/trucker-convoy-traffic-disruption-continue-downtown-as-mayor-urges-protesters-to-leave">The “freedom convoy”</a> demands COVID-19 mandates must end to restore the right of the Canadian citizen to make their own decisions free from control and influence. </p>
<p>The belief that people are free to make their own decisions, so long as they are outside of government control, serves a specific purpose: it emphasizes the amount of power exercised by the government, while obscuring other forms of power that influence and shape their behaviour and choices.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.thestar.com/opinion/star-columnists/2022/02/12/convoy-shows-how-far-right-has-co-opted-concept-of-freedom.html">The so-called “freedom fighters”</a> who reject COVID-19 mandates <a href="https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0245900">are not any more free or autonomous</a> than the person who follows mandates. Rather, they are governed through different relations of power and knowledge. </p>
<p>Investigating how power is highlighted and obscured in particular moments can help people think critically about resistance, freedom and the post-pandemic future Canada wants to build. </p>
<h2>Freedom per the convoy</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/02/07/freedom-convoy-ottawa-canada-vaccine/">Convoy participants</a> have waved signs that read “Mandate Freedom,” “End the Mandates” and “No More Restrictions,” among others. </p>
<p>Many signs are infused with anti-government sentiments, including the “<a href="https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/local/convoy-protesters-embrace-us-revolutionary-symbols-576201392.html">Don’t Tread On Me</a>” flag associated with the American Revolution — it is important to note that the protest has been condemned for including symbols of <a href="https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2022/02/07/nazi-flag-at-freedom-convoy-sparks-bill-to-ban-hateful-symbols-but-enforcement-is-seen-as-tricky.html">white supremacy and violence</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A crowd of people holding signs. One visible sign says 'MANDATE FREEDOM' and another says 'God Bless Our Truckers.'" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/446595/original/file-20220215-19-17mtjic.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/446595/original/file-20220215-19-17mtjic.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=389&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/446595/original/file-20220215-19-17mtjic.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=389&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/446595/original/file-20220215-19-17mtjic.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=389&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/446595/original/file-20220215-19-17mtjic.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/446595/original/file-20220215-19-17mtjic.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/446595/original/file-20220215-19-17mtjic.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Blue coloured smoke forms a haze as demonstrators gather at Queen’s Park in Toronto on Feb. 5.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>According to the mission statement from the <a href="https://www.fc2022.ca/the-mission">convoy website</a>, the goals of the protest are to:
1) End vaccine mandates that are “in violation of our human rights.”
2) End “totalitarian” measures that cause “economical and mental damage.”
3) Reopen businesses.
4) Free children from school closures.
5) Ensure freedom from the current administration.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.fc2022.ca/">The statement also argues</a> that continuing the mandates despite the ongoing spread of COVID-19 demonstrates that the Canadian government has been using mandates for their own purposes. They argue that along with <a href="https://www.fc2022.ca/">the media and scientific community</a>, the government is using the mandates to exercise control over the population and normalize overreach.</p>
<h2>Statephobia</h2>
<p>This resistance to, and fear of, the government is not unique to COVID-19. French philosopher Michel Foucault argued in the 1970s that “<a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780312203412">statephobia</a>,” or fear of the state, became prominent through the 20th century due to the rise and fall of communism, Nazism and post-war planning, leading to economic recession. </p>
<p>These crises led to a strong shift towards limiting the role of government, out of concern that too much government intervention into the economy and civil society would lead to social and economic problems.</p>
<p>Statephobia has the tendency to lump multiple and distinct forms of government together into a single, monstrous state with significant power. This belief is on display at the “freedom convoy,” where they see government mandates, closures and lock downs <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/truck-convoy-protest-some-key-players-1.6332312">as proof</a> of the spread of communism, Nazism and an infringement on the rights of the individual. </p>
<p>The convoy’s comparison of Canada’s current government to <a href="https://www.vancouverisawesome.com/local-news/this-is-why-we-shouldnt-ban-books-trevor-noah-weighs-in-on-canadas-freedom-convoy-5056297">Nazi Germany</a> draws on previously existing statephobia from these historical events, and falsely conflates today’s Canadian state with prior state forms.</p>
<h2>Crises of government</h2>
<p>Foucault argued that the rise of statephobia led to a “crisis of government” in which citizens lost faith in their heads of state. <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780312203412">To maintain their legitimacy</a>, governments needed to balance their desire to manage individuals so that they become more efficient, healthier, and hardworking, without noticeably infringing on individual human rights.</p>
<p>To address this crisis, the management of the population shifted away from the realm of government towards nonpolitical entities like healthcare, therapy, religion, education and social services. People are not only governed through the state, but also nonpolitical entities that provide support for people.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A truck is covered in signs saying 'freedom' 'communism has no home here' and 'lest we forget'" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/446620/original/file-20220215-27-5hbp3d.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/446620/original/file-20220215-27-5hbp3d.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/446620/original/file-20220215-27-5hbp3d.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/446620/original/file-20220215-27-5hbp3d.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/446620/original/file-20220215-27-5hbp3d.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/446620/original/file-20220215-27-5hbp3d.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/446620/original/file-20220215-27-5hbp3d.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A ‘freedom convoy’ supporter is shown near the Ambassador Bridge in Windsor, Ont. on Feb. 14 after protesters blocked the major border crossing for nearly a week.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nicole Osborne</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This crisis of government has been at the forefront of COVID-19. Subtle methods of regulation have been <a href="https://antipodeonline.org/2020/05/05/thinking-through-covid-19-responses-with-foucault/">overtaken by overt methods</a>, like restrictions on public space. </p>
<p>The government now faces a crisis of legitimacy, as there are measures in place that act against the autonomy of the individual. </p>
<h2>Other forms of power</h2>
<p>Convoy participants are questioning the legitimacy of the government. Recent attempts to <a href="https://globalnews.ca/news/8617879/ontario-covid-restrictions-masks-vaccine-passports-announcement-ford/">remove mandates</a> might be evidence of public officials scrambling to regain lost legitimacy. </p>
<p>The idea that resisting and removing these mandates will lead to a freer state obscures the fact that people were governed before COVID-19 mandates, and will continue to be governed after they are gone. </p>
<p>Resisting the state out of fear of previous — often unrelated — crises can cause people to reject measures that help them, and ignore other non-governmental forms of power that harm us. </p>
<p>Rather than resisting orders simply because they come from the government, Canadians should reflect on the multiple forms of power that influence them and to what extent. The scepticism that is applied to mandates simply because they come from the government might be wrongfully placed. </p>
<p>Instead of succumbing to statephobia and rejecting public health measures altogether for the sake of assumed freedom, people should think critically about how these measures can be mobilized in service of the population to move towards a post-COVID-19 future.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/177048/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sydney Chapados does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The convoy’s comparison of Canada’s current government to Nazi Germany draws on previously existing statephobia.Sydney Chapados, Doctoral Fellow, Sociology, Carleton UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1654312021-08-12T12:26:36Z2021-08-12T12:26:36ZOrwell’s ideas remain relevant 75 years after ‘Animal Farm’ was published<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/415532/original/file-20210810-27-1ph6862.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=65%2C28%2C2617%2C1920&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">George Orwell's writings have left a lasting imprint on American thought and culture.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/schriftsteller-grossbritannienan-seiner-schreibmaschine-news-photo/541450111?adppopup=true">ullstein bild/ullstein bild via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Seventy-five years ago, in August 1946, George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” was published in the United States. It was a huge success, <a href="https://www.inquirer.com/philly/opinion/currents/20150824_70-year-old__Animal_Farm__is_still_worth_a_read.html">with over a half-million copies sold in its first year</a>. “Animal Farm” was followed three years later by an even bigger success: Orwell’s dystopian novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” </p>
<p>In the years since, Orwell’s writing has left an indelible mark on American thought and culture. Sales of “<a href="https://money.cnn.com/2013/06/12/news/1984-nsa-snowden/">Animal Farm” and “Nineteen Eighty-Four” jumped</a> in 2013 after the whistleblower Edward Snowden <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/09/edward-snowden-nsa-whistleblower-surveillance">leaked confidential National Security Agency</a> documents. And “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/25/books/1984-george-orwell-donald-trump.html">Nineteen Eighty-Four” rose to the top of Amazon’s best-sellers list</a> after Donald Trump’s Presidential Inauguration in 2017.</p>
<p>As a <a href="https://clasprofiles.wayne.edu/profile/hf1190">philosophy professor</a>, I’m interested in the continuing relevance of Orwell’s ideas, including those on totalitarianism and socialism.</p>
<h2>Early career</h2>
<p><a href="https://sutherlandhousebooks.square.site/product/george-orwell-a-life/4">George Orwell</a> was the pen name of Eric Blair. Born in 1903 in colonial India, Blair later moved to England, where he attended elite schools on scholarships. After finishing school, he joined the British civil service, working in Burma, now Myanmar. At age 24, Orwell returned to England to become a writer.</p>
<p>During the 1930s, Orwell had modest success as an essayist, journalist and novelist. He also <a href="https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/books-by-orwell/homage-to-catalonia/">served as a volunteer soldier</a> with a left-wing militia group that fought on behalf of the Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War. During the conflict, Orwell experienced how propaganda could shape political narratives through observing inaccurate reporting of events he experienced firsthand.</p>
<p>Orwell <a href="https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/why-i-write/">later summarized</a> the purpose of his writing from roughly the Spanish Civil War onward: “Every line of serious work I have written since 1936 has been, directly or indirectly, <em>against</em> totalitarianism and <em>for</em> democratic Socialism.” </p>
<p>Orwell did not specify in that passage what he meant by either totalitarianism or democratic socialism, but some of his other works clarify how he understood those terms.</p>
<h2>What is totalitarianism?</h2>
<p>For Orwell, totalitarianism was a political order focused on power and control. The totalitarian attitude is exemplified by the antagonist, O'Brien, in “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” The fictional O'Brien is a powerful government official who uses torture and manipulation to gain power over the thoughts and actions of the protagonist, Winston Smith. Significantly, O'Brien treats his desire for power as an end in itself. O'Brien represents power for power’s sake.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/415534/original/file-20210810-23-s4p5q4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A copy of George Orwell's novel '1984' is displayed at The Last Bookstore on January 25, 2017, in Los Angeles." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/415534/original/file-20210810-23-s4p5q4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/415534/original/file-20210810-23-s4p5q4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/415534/original/file-20210810-23-s4p5q4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/415534/original/file-20210810-23-s4p5q4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/415534/original/file-20210810-23-s4p5q4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/415534/original/file-20210810-23-s4p5q4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/415534/original/file-20210810-23-s4p5q4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">George Orwell’s dystopian novel ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ (‘1984’) surged to the top of Amazon.com’s best-sellers list after Donald Trump’s Presidential Inauguration in 2017.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/copy-of-george-orwells-novel-1984-is-displayed-at-the-last-news-photo/632692742?adppopup=true">Justin Sullivan/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Much of Orwell’s keenest insights concern what totalitarianism is incompatible with. In his 1941 essay “<a href="https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/the-lion-and-the-unicorn-socialism-and-the-english-genius/">The Lion and the Unicorn</a>,” Orwell writes of “The totalitarian idea that there is no such thing as law, there is only power … .” In other words, laws can limit a ruler’s power. Totalitarianism seeks to obliterate the limits of law through the uninhibited exercise of power. </p>
<p>Similarly, in his 1942 essay “<a href="https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/looking-back-on-the-spanish-war/">Looking Back on the Spanish War</a>,” Orwell argues that totalitarianism must deny that there are neutral facts and objective truth. Orwell identifies liberty and truth as “safeguards” against totalitarianism. The exercise of liberty and the recognition of truth are actions incompatible with the total centralized control that totalitarianism requires.</p>
<p>Orwell understood that totalitarianism could be found on the political right and left. For Orwell, both Nazism and Communism were totalitarian.</p>
<p>Orwell’s work, in my view, challenges us to resist permitting leaders to engage in totalitarian behavior, regardless of political affiliation. It also reminds us that some of our best tools for resisting totalitarianism are to tell truths and to preserve liberty. </p>
<h2>What is democratic socialism?</h2>
<p>In his 1937 book “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/feb/20/orwell-wigan-pier-75-years">The Road to Wigan Pier</a>,” Orwell writes that socialism means “justice and liberty.” The justice he refers to goes beyond mere economic justice. It also includes social and political justice. </p>
<p>Orwell elaborates on what he means by socialism in “<a href="https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/the-lion-and-the-unicorn-socialism-and-the-english-genius/">The Lion and the Unicorn</a>.” According to him, socialism requires “approximate equality of incomes (it need be no more than approximate), political democracy, and abolition of all hereditary privileges, especially in education.”</p>
<p>In fleshing out what he means by “approximate equality of incomes,” Orwell later says in the same essay that income equality shouldn’t be greater than a ratio of about 10 to 1. In its modern-day interpretation, this suggests Orwell could find it ethical for a CEO to make 10 times more than their employees, but not to make 300 times more, <a href="https://aflcio.org/press/releases/average-sp-500-company-ceo-worker-pay-ratio-rises-299-1-2020">as the average CEO in the United States does today</a>.</p>
<p>But in describing socialism, Orwell discusses more than economic inequality. Orwell’s writings indicate that his preferred conception of socialism also requires “political democracy.” As <a href="https://www.english.ox.ac.uk/people/dr-david-dwan#/">scholar David Dwan</a> has noted, Orwell distinguished “<a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/liberty-equality-and-humbug-9780198738527?cc=us&lang=en&">two concepts of democracy</a>.” The first concept refers to political power resting with the common people. The second is about having classical liberal freedoms, like freedom of thought. Both notions of democracy seem relevant to what Orwell means by democratic socialism. For Orwell, democratic socialism is a political order that provides social and economic equality while also preserving robust personal freedom. </p>
<p>I believe Orwell’s description of democratic socialism and his recognition that there are various forms socialism can take remain important today given that American political dialogue about socialism often overlooks much of the nuance Orwell brings to the subject. For example, Americans <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/do-you-know-difference-between-communist-and-socialist-a6708086.html">often confuse socialism with communism</a>. Orwell helps clarify the difference between these terms.</p>
<p>With <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/02/07/6-facts-about-economic-inequality-in-the-u-s/">high levels of economic inequality</a>, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/new-study-says-trump-has-dangerously-undermined-truth-with-attacks-on-news-media/2020/04/15/4152f81c-7f2d-11ea-9040-68981f488eed_story.html">political assaults on truth</a> and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/totalitarian-ideologies-never-die-not-even-in-america/2017/11/03/3d39648e-c09c-11e7-959c-fe2b598d8c00_story.html">renewed concerns about totalitarianism</a>, Orwell’s ideas remain as relevant now as they were 75 years ago.</p>
<p>[<em>Explore the intersection of faith, politics, arts and culture.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/this-week-in-religion-76/?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=religion-explore">Sign up for This Week in Religion.</a>]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/165431/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Mark Satta does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” was an instant success when it was first published. His writings on totalitarianism and socialism continue to be relevant today.Mark Satta, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Wayne State UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1437222020-08-12T12:32:49Z2020-08-12T12:32:49ZArtificial intelligence is a totalitarian’s dream – here’s how to take power back<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/352472/original/file-20200812-16-1c8ekde.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">shutterstock</span> </figcaption></figure><p>Individualistic western societies are built on the idea that no one knows our thoughts, desires or joys better than we do. And so we put ourselves, rather than the government, in charge of our lives. We tend to agree with the philosopher <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/24562123#metadata_info_tab_contents">Immanuel Kant’s claim</a> that no one has the right to force their idea of the good life on us. </p>
<p>Artificial intelligence (AI) will change this. It will know us better than we know ourselves. A government armed with AI could claim to know what its people truly want and what will really make them happy. At best it will use this to justify paternalism, at worst, totalitarianism.</p>
<p>Every hell starts with a promise of heaven. AI-led totalitarianism will be no different. Freedom will become obedience to the state. Only the irrational, spiteful or subversive could wish to chose their own path.</p>
<p>To prevent such a dystopia, we must not allow others to know more about ourselves than we do. We cannot allow a self-knowledge gap.</p>
<h2>The All-Seeing AI</h2>
<p>In 2019, the billionaire investor Peter Thiel claimed that AI was “<a href="https://www.manhattan-institute.org/events/2019-wriston-lecture-end-computer-age-thiel#transcript">literally communist</a>”. He pointed out that AI allows a centralising power to monitor citizens and know more about them than they know about themselves. China, Thiel noted, <a href="https://flia.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/A-New-Generation-of-Artificial-Intelligence-Development-Plan-1.pdf">has eagerly embraced AI</a>.</p>
<p>We already know AI’s potential to <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-technology-puts-human-rights-at-risk-92087">support totalitarianism</a> by providing an Orwellian system of surveillance and control. But AI also gives totalitarians a philosophical weapon. As long as we knew ourselves better than the government did, liberalism could keep aspiring totalitarians at bay. </p>
<p>But AI has changed the game. Big tech companies collect vast amounts of data on our behaviour. Machine-learning algorithms use this data to calculate not just what we will do, but who we are. </p>
<p>Today, <a href="https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319296579">AI can predict</a> what films we will like, what news we will want to read, and who we will want to friend on Facebook. It can predict whether <a href="https://theconversation.com/ai-can-predict-whether-your-relationship-will-last-based-on-how-you-speak-to-your-partner-81420">couples will stay together</a> and if we will <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/2167702617691560">attempt suicide</a>. From our Facebook likes, <a href="https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/110/15/5802.full.pdf?3=">AI can predict</a> our religious and political views, personality, intelligence, drug use and happiness.</p>
<p>The accuracy of AI’s predictions will only improve. In the not-too-distant future, as the writer <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/111/1111302/homo-deus/9781784703936.html">Yuval Noah Harari</a> has suggested, AI may tell us who we are before we ourselves know.</p>
<p>These developments have seismic political implications. If governments can know us better than we can, a new justification opens up for intervening in our lives. They will tyrannise us in the name of our own good. </p>
<h2>Freedom through tyranny</h2>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="Old man wearing tuxedo." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/352481/original/file-20200812-24-110g2x2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/352481/original/file-20200812-24-110g2x2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/352481/original/file-20200812-24-110g2x2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/352481/original/file-20200812-24-110g2x2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/352481/original/file-20200812-24-110g2x2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/352481/original/file-20200812-24-110g2x2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/352481/original/file-20200812-24-110g2x2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Isaiah Berlin.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a8/IsaiahBerlin1983.jpg">GaHetNa (Nationaal Archief NL)</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The philosopher Isaiah Berlin foresaw this in 1958. He <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/liberty-9780199249893?cc=us&lang=en&">identified two types of freedom</a>. One type, he warned, would lead to tyranny. </p>
<p>Negative freedom is “freedom from”. It is freedom from the interference of other people or government in your affairs. Negative freedom is no one else being able to restrain you, as long as you aren’t violating anyone else’s rights.</p>
<p>In contrast, positive freedom is “freedom to”. It is the freedom to be master of yourself, freedom to fulfil your true desires, freedom to live a rational life. Who wouldn’t want this?</p>
<p>But what if someone else says you aren’t acting in your “true interest”, although they know how you could. If you won’t listen, they may <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/46333/46333-h/46333-h.htm">force you to be free</a> – coercing you for your “own good”. This is one of the most dangerous ideas ever conceived. It killed tens of millions of people in <a href="https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/timothy-snyder/bloodlands/9780465032976/">Stalin’s Soviet Union</a> and <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/maos-great-famine-9780802779281/">Mao’s China</a>.</p>
<p>The Russian Communist leader, Lenin, is reported to have said that the capitalists would sell him the rope he would hang them with. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/01/opinion/peter-thiel-google.html">Peter Thiel has argued</a> that, in AI, capitalist tech firms of Silicon Valley have sold communism a tool that threatens to undermine democratic capitalist society. AI is Lenin’s rope. </p>
<h2>Fighting for ourselves</h2>
<p>We can only prevent such a dystopia if no one is allowed to know us better than we know ourselves. We must never sentimentalise anyone who seeks such power over us as well-intentioned. Historically, this has only ever ended in calamity. </p>
<p>One way to prevent a self-knowledge gap is to raise our privacy shields. Thiel, who labelled AI as communistic, has argued that “<a href="https://www.manhattan-institute.org/events/2019-wriston-lecture-end-computer-age-thiel#transcript">crypto is libertarian</a>”. Cryptocurrencies can be “<a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fbloc.2019.00004/full">privacy-enabling</a>”. Privacy reduces the ability of others to know us and then use this knowledge to <a href="https://www.pnas.org/content/114/48/12714">manipulate us for their own profit</a>.</p>
<p>Yet knowing ourselves better through AI offers powerful benefits. We may be able to use it to better understand what will make us happy, healthy and wealthy. It may help <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-45814-4_29">guide our career choices</a>. More generally, AI <a href="https://www.nber.org/books/agra-1">promises to create the economic growth</a> that <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2011/10/end-future-peter-thiel/">keeps us from each other’s throats</a>.</p>
<p>The problem is not AI improving our self-knowledge. The problem is a <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frai.2019.00019/full">power disparity in what is known about us</a>. Knowledge about us exclusively in someone else’s hands is power over us. But knowledge about us in our own hands is power for us.</p>
<p>Anyone who <a href="https://gdpr-info.eu/chapter-1/">processes our data</a> to create knowledge about us should be legally obliged to give us back that knowledge. We need to update the idea of “<a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/0-306-48043-3_10">nothing about us without us</a>” for the AI-age. </p>
<p>What AI tells us about ourselves is for us to consider using, not for others to profit from abusing. There should only ever be one hand on the tiller of our soul. And it should be ours.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/143722/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Simon McCarthy-Jones receives funding from the US-based Brain and Behavior Research Foundation.</span></em></p>What are the political implications of AI knowing us better than we know ourselves?Simon McCarthy-Jones, Associate Professor in Clinical Psychology and Neuropsychology, Trinity College DublinLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1060492018-11-19T11:38:05Z2018-11-19T11:38:05ZLies, damn lies and post-truth<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/245549/original/file-20181114-194500-15qdygi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">President Donald Trump speaks to the media outside of the White House.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Trump/a685593769a14d5084fbe96c2ffd0db8/305/0">AP/Evan Vucci</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Most <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/13/opinion/campaign-stops/all-politicians-lie-some-lie-more-than-others.html">politicians lie</a>.</p>
<p>Or do they? </p>
<p>Even if we could find some isolated example of a politician who was scrupulously honest – <a href="https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/403945-former-president-jimmy-carter-trump-is">former President Jimmy Carter</a>, perhaps – the question is how to think about the rest of them. </p>
<p>And if most politicians lie, then why are some Americans so hard on President Donald Trump? </p>
<p>According to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/11/02/president-trump-has-made-false-or-misleading-claims-over-days/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.df1dbfb544fb">The Washington Post</a>, Trump has told 6,420 lies so far in his presidency. In the seven weeks leading up to the midterms, his rate increased to 30 per day. </p>
<p>That’s a lot, but isn’t this a difference in degree and not a difference in kind with other politicians?</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/245620/original/file-20181114-194494-araab3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/245620/original/file-20181114-194494-araab3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/245620/original/file-20181114-194494-araab3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=896&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/245620/original/file-20181114-194494-araab3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=896&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/245620/original/file-20181114-194494-araab3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=896&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/245620/original/file-20181114-194494-araab3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1126&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/245620/original/file-20181114-194494-araab3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1126&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/245620/original/file-20181114-194494-araab3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1126&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Women’s March in Toronto, Canada, January 2018.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/toronto-ontario-canada-january-20-2018-1005749914?src=hgt8fR9jX9ZR-icYo4iQFQ-1-2">Shutterstock/Louis.Roth</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>From my perspective <a href="http://www.leemcintyrebooks.com/">as a philosopher who studies truth and belief</a>, it doesn’t seem so. And even if most politicians lie, that doesn’t make all lying equal. </p>
<p>Yet the difference in Trump’s prevarication seems to be found not in the quantity or enormity of his lies, but in the way that <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/05/opinion/beyond-lying-donald-trumps-authoritarian-reality.html">Trump uses his lies in service</a> to a proto-authoritarian political ideology. </p>
<p>I recently wrote a book, titled “<a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/post-truth">"Post-Truth,”</a> about what happens when “alternative facts” replace actual facts, and feelings have more weight than evidence. Looked at from this perspective, calling Trump a liar fails to capture his key strategic purpose.</p>
<p>Any amateur politician can engage in lying. Trump is engaging in “post-truth.”</p>
<h2>Beyond word of the year</h2>
<p>The <a href="https://www.oxforddictionaries.com/press/news/2016/12/11/WOTY-16">Oxford English Dictionaries named “post-truth”</a> its word of the year in November 2016, right before the U.S. election. </p>
<p>Citing a 2,000 percent spike in usage – due to Brexit and the American presidential campaign – <a href="https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/post-truth">they defined post-truth</a> as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” </p>
<p>Ideology, in other words, takes precedence over reality.</p>
<p>When an individual believes their thoughts can influence reality, we call it “<a href="https://www.britannica.com/science/magical-thinking">magical thinking</a>” and might worry about their mental health. When a government official uses ideology to trump reality, it’s more like propaganda, and it puts us on the road to fascism. </p>
<p>As Yale philosopher <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/9/19/17847110/how-fascism-works-donald-trump-jason-stanley">Jason Stanley argues</a>, “The key thing is that fascist politics is about identifying enemies, appealing to the in-group (usually the majority group), and smashing truth and replacing it with power.”</p>
<p>Consider the example of Trump’s recent decision not to cancel two political rallies on the same day as the Pittsburgh massacre. <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/413644-trump-incorrectly-cites-stock-market-opening-day-after-9-11-to">He said that this was based on the fact</a> that the New York Stock Exchange was open the day after 9/11. </p>
<p>This isn’t true. The stock exchange stayed closed for six days after 9/11. </p>
<p>So was this a mistake? A lie? Trump didn’t seem to treat it so. In fact, he repeated the falsehood later in the same day. </p>
<p>When a politician gets caught in a lie, there’s usually a bit of sweat, perhaps some shame and the expectation of consequences. </p>
<p>Not for Trump. After many commentators pointed out to him that the stock exchange was in fact closed for several days after 9/11, he merely shrugged it off, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/10/28/no-president-trump-nyse-did-not-open-day-after-sept-attacks/?utm_term=.f648cb2beef1">never bothering to acknowledge – let alone correct – his error</a>. </p>
<p>Why would he do this?</p>
<h2>Ideology, post-truth and power</h2>
<p>The point of a lie is to convince someone that a falsehood is true. But the point of post-truth is domination. In my analysis, post-truth is an assertion of power. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/world/2018/01/why-donald-trump-and-vladimir-putin-lie-and-why-they-are-so-good-it">As journalist Masha Gessen</a> and others have argued, when Trump lies he does so not to get someone to accept what he’s saying as true, but to show that he is powerful enough to say it. </p>
<p>He has asserted, <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/10/14/trump-60-minutes-cbs-takeaways/1645388002/">“I’m the President and you’re not,”</a> as if such high political office comes with the prerogative of creating his own reality. This would explain why Trump doesn’t seem to care much if there is videotape or other evidence that contradicts him. When you’re the boss, what does that matter? </p>
<p>Should we be worried about this flight from mere lying to post-truth? </p>
<p>Even if all politicians lie, I believe that post-truth foreshadows something more sinister. In his powerful book <a href="http://timothysnyder.org/books/on-tyranny-tr">“On Tyranny,”</a> <a href="http://timothysnyder.org/">historian Timothy Snyder</a> writes that “post-truth is pre-fascism.” It is a tactic seen in “electoral dictatorships” – where a society retains the facade of voting without the institutions or trust to ensure that it is an actual democracy, like those in Putin’s Russia or Erdogan’s Turkey.</p>
<p>In this, Trump is following the authoritarian playbook, characterized by leaders lying, the erosion of public institutions and the consolidation of power. You do not need to convince someone that you are telling the truth when you can simply assert your will over them and dominate their reality. </p>
<p>
<section class="inline-content">
<img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/248895/original/file-20181204-133100-t34yqm.png?w=128&h=128">
<div>
<header>Lee McIntyre is the author of:</header>
<p><a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/post-truth">Post-Truth</a></p>
<footer>MIT Press provides funding as a member of The Conversation US.</footer>
</div>
</section>
</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/106049/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>MIT Press provides funding as a member of The Conversation US.</span></em></p>Any amateur politician can engage in lying. President Donald Trump is going further than that. He’s engaging in ‘post-truth’.Lee McIntyre, Research Fellow Center for Philosophy and History of Science, Boston UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/959982018-05-31T10:44:06Z2018-05-31T10:44:06ZIn praise of doing nothing<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/220829/original/file-20180529-80633-1gvg6vs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Modern life seems to encourage acceleration for the sake of acceleration – to what end?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/moving-traffic-light-trails-night-487507315">JoeyCheung/Shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In the 1950s, <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Take_Back_Your_Time.html?id=_UmpZOlnvU0C&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button#v=onepage&q&f=false">scholars worried that</a>, thanks to technological innovations, Americans wouldn’t know what to do with all of their leisure time.</p>
<p>Yet today, as sociologist Juliet Schor <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=KjZ54lNDE2EC&dq=overworked+american&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y">notes</a>, Americans are overworked, putting in more hours than at any time since the Depression and more than in any other in Western society. </p>
<p>It’s probably not unrelated to the fact that instant and constant access has become de rigueur, and our devices constantly expose us to a barrage of colliding and clamoring messages: “Urgent,” “Breaking News,” “For immediate release,” “Answer needed ASAP.” </p>
<p>It disturbs our leisure time, our family time – even our consciousness. </p>
<p>Over the past decade, I’ve tried to understand the social and psychological effects of our growing interactions with new information and communication technologies, a topic I examine in my book “<a href="https://www.routledge.com/The-Terminal-Self-Everyday-Life-in-Hypermodern-Times/Gottschalk/p/book/9781472437082">The Terminal Self: Everyday Life in Hypermodern Times</a>.”</p>
<p>In this 24/7, “always on” age, the prospect of doing nothing might sound unrealistic and unreasonable. </p>
<p>But it’s never been more important. </p>
<h2>Acceleration for the sake of acceleration</h2>
<p>In an age of incredible advancements that can enhance our human potential and planetary health, why does daily life seem so overwhelming and anxiety-inducing?</p>
<p>Why aren’t things easier?</p>
<p>It’s a complex question, but one way to explain this irrational state of affairs is something called the force of acceleration. </p>
<p><a href="https://cup.columbia.edu/book/social-acceleration/9780231148351">According to German critical theorist Hartmut Rosa</a>, accelerated technological developments have driven the acceleration in the pace of change in social institutions. </p>
<p>We see this on factory floors, where “<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=bdBTAAAAMAAJ&q=inauthor:%22Edward+J.+Hay%22&dq=inauthor:%22Edward+J.+Hay%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjs5vHLm6vbAhUjLn0KHaRSAqcQ6AEILjAB">just-in-time</a>” manufacturing demands maximum efficiency and the ability to nimbly respond to market forces, and in university classrooms, where computer software instructs teachers how to “move students quickly” through the material. Whether it’s in the grocery store or in the airport, procedures are implemented, for better or for worse, with one goal in mind: speed.</p>
<p>Noticeable acceleration began more than two centuries ago, during the Industrial Revolution. But this acceleration has itself … accelerated. Guided by neither logical objectives nor agreed-upon rationale, propelled by its own momentum, and encountering little resistance, acceleration seems to have begotten more acceleration, for the sake of acceleration. </p>
<p>To Rosa, this acceleration <a href="http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/hartmut-rosa-essay-acceleration-plagues-modern-society-a-909465.html">eerily mimics</a> the criteria of a totalitarian power: 1) it exerts pressure on the wills and actions of subjects; 2) it is inescapable; 3) it is all-pervasive; and 4) it is hard or almost impossible to criticize and fight. </p>
<h2>The oppression of speed</h2>
<p>Unchecked acceleration has consequences.</p>
<p>At the environmental level, it extracts resources from nature faster than they can replenish themselves and produces waste faster than it can be processed. </p>
<p>At the personal level, it distorts how we experience time and space. It deteriorates how we approach our everyday activities, deforms how we relate to each other and erodes a stable sense of self. It leads to burnout at one end of the continuum and to depression at the other. Cognitively, it inhibits sustained focus and critical evaluation. Physiologically, it can stress our bodies and disrupt vital functions.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"860938163526799362"}"></div></p>
<p>For example, <a href="https://www.bookdepository.com/Gender-Divisions-Working-Time-New-Economy-Diane-Perrons/9781847204974">research finds</a>
two to three times more self-reported health problems, from anxiety to sleeping issues, among workers who frequently work in high-speed environments compared with those who do not.</p>
<p>When our environment accelerates, we must pedal faster in order to keep up with the pace. Workers receive more emails than ever before – <a href="https://globalnews.ca/news/3395457/this-is-how-much-time-you-spend-on-work-emails-every-day-according-to-a-canadian-survey/">a number that’s only expected to grow</a>. The more emails you receive, the more time you need to process them. It requires that you either accomplish this or another task in less time, that you perform several tasks at once, or that you take less time in between reading and responding to emails.</p>
<p>American workers’ productivity <a href="https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/">has increased dramatically since 1973</a>. What has also increased sharply during that same period is the pay gap between productivity and pay. While productivity between 1973 and 2016 has increased by 73.7 percent, hourly pay has increased by only 12.5 percent. In other words, productivity has increased at about six times the rate of hourly pay.</p>
<p>Clearly, acceleration demands more work – and to what end? There are only so many hours in a day, and this additional expenditure of energy reduces individuals’ ability to engage in life’s essential activities: family, leisure, community, citizenship, spiritual yearnings and self-development.</p>
<p>It’s a vicious loop: Acceleration imposes more stress on individuals and curtails their ability to manage its effects, thereby worsening it.</p>
<h2>Doing nothing and ‘being’</h2>
<p>In a hypermodern society propelled by the twin engines of acceleration and excess, doing nothing is equated with waste, laziness, lack of ambition, boredom or “down” time.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/220008/original/file-20180522-51091-3h8byt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/220008/original/file-20180522-51091-3h8byt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/220008/original/file-20180522-51091-3h8byt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=976&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/220008/original/file-20180522-51091-3h8byt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=976&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/220008/original/file-20180522-51091-3h8byt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=976&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/220008/original/file-20180522-51091-3h8byt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1226&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/220008/original/file-20180522-51091-3h8byt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1226&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/220008/original/file-20180522-51091-3h8byt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1226&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">An ad for Microsoft Office stresses the importance of being able to always work.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/migrated-images/62/1440.MODHarrisSurveyInfographic_110613-FinalHighRes.png">Microsoft</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But this betrays a rather instrumental grasp of human existence.</p>
<p><a href="https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/1809754">Much research</a> – and many spiritual and philosophical systems – suggest that detaching from daily concerns and spending time in simple reflection and contemplation are essential to health, sanity and personal growth.</p>
<p>Similarly, to equate “doing nothing” with nonproductivity betrays a shortsighted understanding of productivity. In fact, psychological <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2432964">research suggests</a> that doing nothing is essential for creativity and innovation, and a person’s seeming inactivity might actually cultivate new insights, inventions or melodies. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.harpercollins.com/9780060750510/in-praise-of-slowness">As legends go</a>, Isaac Newton grasped the law of gravity sitting under an apple tree. Archimedes discovered the law of buoyancy relaxing in his bathtub, while Albert Einstein was well-known for staring for hours into space in his office.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/40222893?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">The academic sabbatical</a> is centered on the understanding that the mind needs to rest and be allowed to explore in order to germinate new ideas. </p>
<p>Doing nothing – or just being – is as important to human well-being as doing something. </p>
<p>The key is to balance the two.</p>
<h2>Taking your foot off the pedal</h2>
<p>Since it will probably be difficult to go cold turkey from an accelerated pace of existence to doing nothing, one first step consists in decelerating. One relatively easy way to do so is to simply turn off all the technological devices that connect us to the internet – at least for a while – and assess what happens to us when we do.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/cyber.2016.0259">Danish researchers found</a> that students who disconnected from Facebook for just one week reported notable increases in life satisfaction and positive emotions. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/16/technology/16brain.html">In another experiment</a>, neuroscientists who went on a nature trip reported enhanced cognitive performance.</p>
<p>Different social movements are addressing the problem of acceleration. The <a href="https://www.slowfoodusa.org/about-us">Slow Food</a> movement, for example, is a grassroots campaign that advocates a form of deceleration by rejecting fast food and factory farming. </p>
<p>As we race along, it seems as though we’re not taking the time to seriously examine the rationale behind our frenetic lives – and mistakenly assume that <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/being-busy-is-nothing-to-brag-about_us_5a4b9a6de4b0d86c803c7971">those who are very busy</a> must be involved in important projects. </p>
<p>Touted by the <a href="https://twitter.com/nbcnews/status/898748875225260032?lang=en">mass media</a> and <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2013/11/06/microsoft-office-declares-get-it-done-day/">corporate culture</a>, this credo of busyness contradicts both how most people in our society define “<a href="https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-the-good-life-4038226">the good life</a>” and the tenets of many Eastern philosophies that extol the virtue and power of stillness. </p>
<p>French philosopher Albert Camus perhaps <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/20617-idleness-is-fatal-only-to-the-mediocre">put it best</a> when he wrote, “Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/95998/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Simon Gottschalk does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Technology has made many aspects of daily life much easier. So why do we still feel so overwhelmed?Simon Gottschalk, Professor of Sociology, University of Nevada, Las VegasLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/805032017-09-21T09:05:21Z2017-09-21T09:05:21ZA visit to Pyongyang: the Kim dynasty’s homage to Stalinism<p>Most of the chaperoned tours to North Korea each year include a walk through some well-tended gardens in Pyongyang, where Korean men in nondescript uniforms tend flower beds and manicure lawns without even briefly acknowledging a rare group of foreigners. As my group walked around, we approached a man just as he started to crouch over a flower bed – revealing the Adidas logo on the waistband of his boxer shorts.</p>
<p>As “builder’s bum” moments go, this was as surprising as they come. It was the only time during my five days in the North Korean capital when I saw any kind of corporate branding. Of course, it’s entirely possible that we just happened to walk past at the exact moment he bent over, and that he just happened to be wearing his contraband underwear that day. But perhaps it was something more: a rare effort by an individual to communicate that the scene in the gardens was staged by the state, part of its efforts to propagate a positive image of North Korea to even the smallest of foreign audiences.</p>
<p>The more I reflect on the tour, the more I realise that everything and everyone we saw was part of a managed performance: the people walking on the streets, <a href="https://www.wired.com/2013/12/inside-north-koreas-underground-metro-system/">commuting</a>, shopping, picnicking, even the children playing football and the other diners in the restaurants. More than that, we spent the whole tour surrounded by images of the Kim family and immersed in the narrative of their achievements. </p>
<hr>
<p><em><strong>Listen to an <a href="https://theconversation.com/a-visit-to-pyongyang-the-kim-dynastys-homage-to-stalinism-podcast-87301">audio version</a> of this article on The Conversation’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/in-depth-out-loud-podcast-46082">In Depth Out Loud</a> podcast.</strong></em> </p>
<iframe src="https://player.acast.com/5e29c8205aa745a456af58c8/episodes/5e29c8365aa745a456af58d7?theme=default&cover=1&latest=1" frameborder="0" width="100%" height="110px" allow="autoplay"></iframe>
<hr>
<p>These are the hallmarks of an autocratic personality cult, the sort of hyperreal quasi-religion cultivated by any number of history’s despots. The most notorious dictator-cultist is of course Adolf Hitler, who elevated himself to demigod status with incendiary rhetoric, vivid architectural and visual spectacle, and even an eponymous salute. But throughout the Cold War, various of North Korea’s Asian neighbours were host to cult-like leaders.</p>
<p>China’s Mao Zedong developed a <a href="https://chineseposters.net/themes/mao-cult.php">personal image</a> that legitimised his rule even as his party’s policies caused <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/maos-great-leap-forward-killed-45-million-in-four-years-2081630.html">millions of deaths</a>; on the island of Taiwan, <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/china-quarterly/article/production-of-the-chiang-kaishek-personality-cult-19291975/C2B7C6EB8E92D65F52794DF997887720">Chiang Kai-shek</a> attempted to solidify the position of his Kuomintang political party with public images of himself following their <a href="http://www.economist.com/node/13606318">arrival from the Chinese mainland</a> in 1949. In his 21 years in office, the Philippines’ <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/555789.stm">Ferdinand Marcos</a> spent huge sums of public money on <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/2612709.stm">gigantic edifices of himself</a>. </p>
<p>Post-Soviet Central Asia, too, had a <a href="https://theconversation.com/after-25-years-of-independence-tajikistan-is-a-bastion-of-torture-and-repression-64945">number</a> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/01/turkmenistans-singing-dictator-gurbanguly-berdymukhamedov-heralds-upcoming-elections">of</a> <a href="https://theconversation.com/with-uzbekistans-dictator-dead-russia-seeks-to-extend-its-influence-64991">despots</a>, who have presided over extravagant cults of charisma – not least Turkmenistan’s Saparmurat Niyazov, who <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/apr/25/1">renamed the months of the year</a> after himself and his family members.</p>
<p>But there’s one particularly close parallel for the style and strategy of the Kim cult: Stalinism. The Kims have not only learned from his example, but have taken it to a gold-plated extreme.</p>
<h2>Man of steel</h2>
<p>Around the same time that Hitler was finessing his image, Josef Stalin was also developing a cult of personality around his leadership, both in the Soviet Union proper and in its wider geopolitical sphere of influence. </p>
<p>Stalinism constituted rapid industrialisation, some of which included assistance from the US, collective agriculture, the centralisation of government decision-making, and a cult of personality around Stalin himself. Furthermore, Stalin’s administration consolidated the notion of the Soviet Union as leader of the Communist world. </p>
<p>Stalin commissioned statues of himself to be placed in towns and villages across the country. Various locations around the Soviet Union were renamed to include Stalin’s name, for example “Stalingrad” (now Volgograd), the site of one of World War II’s most pivotal battles. He changed the Soviet national anthem to include his name, and pushed for literature, poetry, music, paintings and film to depict him as a strong, charismatic and devoted leader. </p>
<p>These cultural installations were complemented by swingeing political purges, incarcerations and executions, and the development of a public radio network across the Soviet Union that used loudspeakers to propogate pro-Communist and pro-Stalin narratives.</p>
<p>When puppet states in the Soviet sphere sporadically rebelled during the Cold War, the destruction of solid effigies of Stalin became a set piece of anti-Soviet actions. Perhaps the most renowned is the photograph of the decapitated head of a massive Stalin statue lying on the ground in Budapest during the Hungarian Uprising of 1956. (The spectacle was echoed in April 2003 when a statue of Saddam Hussein was <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/01/10/the-toppling">toppled in Baghdad</a>.)</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178246/original/file-20170714-14296-1uu3ntf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178246/original/file-20170714-14296-1uu3ntf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=418&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178246/original/file-20170714-14296-1uu3ntf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=418&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178246/original/file-20170714-14296-1uu3ntf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=418&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178246/original/file-20170714-14296-1uu3ntf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=525&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178246/original/file-20170714-14296-1uu3ntf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=525&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178246/original/file-20170714-14296-1uu3ntf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=525&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Stalin brought low in Budapest, 1956.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3A1956_Gabor_B._Racz_(red_circle)_Hungarian_Revolution.jpg">Gabor B. Rac via Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Three years after Stalin’s death, his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Khrushchevs-secret-speech">criticised him</a> in what became known as the “Secret Speech”. Khrushchev <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/khrushchev/1956/02/24.htm">argued</a> that Stalin had violated the Marxist values of the 1917 revolution by using political purges and detention camps to remove those who opposed his policies, and by abandoning principles of collective leadership to privilege himself and the Communist party elite.</p>
<p>The parallels with North Korea are clear – but the Kims have taken it further. The result, a complex system of intense control over all aspects of North Korean life, could be called “hyper-Stalinism”.</p>
<h2>In his image</h2>
<p>North Korea is free from advertising; indeed, there are very few signs of any kind. The only things to punctuate the drab monotony of public life are ominpresent statues, mosaics, and portraits of the Kims themselves.</p>
<p>Referred to as the <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/389598.stm">Eternal President</a>, Kim Il-sung (ruling from 1948-94) was the founding father of North Korea; his son Kim Jong-il diligently shored up and modernised his father’s demigod status, and grandson Kim Jong-un continues the work today. </p>
<p>Kim Il-sung built his status on his role in the liberation from <a href="http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/main_pop/kpct/kp_koreaimperialism.htm">Japanese colonial rule</a> and the Korean War during the early 1950s. That conflict ended with an <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/10165796">armistice</a> between the two Koreas, but was <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/05/24/armstrong.north.korea/index.html">never formally concluded</a> with a peace treaty. The elder Kim’s legacy was arguably enhanced, not diminished, by the <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/12/how-kim-jong-il-starved-north-korea/250244/">famine</a> that gripped North Korea in the years after his death in 1994: as their demigod leader died and his “golden age” ended, the North Korean people were plunged into disaster. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/NTFreay3bOA?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>His son Kim Jong-il, who became <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPBX47zSktc">something of a laughing stock in the West</a>, took the helm in a fast-transforming world. For decades, North Korea had relied on the Soviet Union for aid and as a crucial export market. But by the early 1990s, that hegemony had collapsed, and most of Moscow’s puppet administrations had become either pro-Western democracies or rebranded oligarchies. Along with Fidel Castro’s Cuba, North Korea was left to stand as a lonely vestige of the old bloc.</p>
<p>And so, as the north’s former allies turned to foes, hyper-Stalinism became entrenched. Stalin at least permitted the display of other images, and had a team of prominent politicians around him who enjoyed some independence of action. The incumbent Kim appears to be the only decision-maker, and images of him and his forefathers are almost the only public images. And whereas Stalin commissioned statues of himself in iron, concrete and bronze, many of the statues of the Kims are gold. </p>
<p>The Kim imagery seeps through into every area of life, and if you look hard enough, its positioning can tell you a lot. </p>
<p>On the face of it, our tour group’s trip to Pyongyang’s Stamp Museum was a rather unremarkable affair. Most of the group seemed more interested in buying postcards than in looking at the stamps themselves – but the artwork on the stamps revealed a lot about the regime’s thinking since 1945. </p>
<p>My hypothesis before entering the museum was that the Kims would dominate stamps from times when the government felt more vulnerable, with the imagery relaxing into diversity in more secure years. This was proved accurate. For example, starting in 1965, as the US ramped up its presence in Indochina, Kim imagery steadily starts to dominate the stamps, peaking after the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam. After the US began withdrawing from Vietnam in 1973, the stamps still contained some Kim imagery, but through 1974 and 1975, a range of other images from traditional Korean culture were rotated back in.</p>
<h2>Propaganda</h2>
<p>The North Korean military standoff still has traditional Cold War-esque elements – a huge standing army, abundant conventional weaponry, a nuclear deterrent – but since at least the mid-1990s, it has also been fought on other fronts that receive little media attention. Kim Jong-il’s tenure coincided with both the apotheosis of globalised trade and a global revolution in communications technology. As a result, North Korea’s drastic isolation is more at odds than ever with the rest of the world where, for better or worse, people have become accustomed to a deluge of goods and information from around the globe.</p>
<p>Communications technology seriously challenges the regime’s main means of political control. If the North Korean regime and the Kims’ personality cult are to survive, they must deny all but the most trusted of senior party members access to modern communications. If North Koreans enjoyed widespread access to international radio, television, mobile phones and the internet, they would encounter a torrent of critical messages regarding North Korea and the Kims. They would hear just how extreme the hardship many of them endure is – especially compared to the lives of their counterparts in South Korea or the lavishes of the Kim family themselves. </p>
<p>The Kim government’s attitude to improved transport and communications infrastructure is similar to that of British government policy in imperial India during the late 1920s and 1930s, when a public radio service was under development. The Indian Civil Service was deeply suspicious of what would become the All India Radio, anticipating that it would further facilitate popular challenges to colonial rule unless strictly controlled by the British state.</p>
<p>This suspicion stemmed from their experience of the 1857 Indian Mutiny, which was arguably only possible as a result of the construction of the railways and the creation of a telegraphic communications network across the Indian subcontinent over the preceding decades. With the infrastructure in place to quickly spread word far and wide, what began as an initially small rebellion of <a href="https://www.bl.uk/world-war-one/articles/the-indian-sepoy-in-the-first-world-war">sepoys</a> in the town of Meerut soon became a nationwide revolt against British rule.</p>
<p>Ultimately, the development of radio services in colonial India became mixed up in the strong likelihood of a second world war and Britain’s rearmament policy from 1935 onwards, where there would be considerable reliance on India and Indians for resources and manpower for the duration of the conflict, and therefore the requirement for propaganda to induce public consent.</p>
<p>But at least the imperial British were able to hold a relatively open debate among colonial stakeholders; voices from the civil service, the government and opposition, the military, other public bodies and civil society were able to voice their opinions on the matter without fear of redundancy or death. In North Korea, Kim’s decision is final. And as far as the government’s image is concerned, it is the only decision that matters.</p>
<p>It is remarkable to behold North Korea’s sheer obstinacy in the face of post-Cold War global change and pressure, its decades of refusal to open up to international capitalism and Western economic and cultural hegemony. After all, as the story of highly authoritarian China makes clear, a slow relaxation would not necessarily mean regime change and revolution but would mean the dilution of traditional Korean culture.</p>
<p>But then again, are the Kims and their cronies any less a part of the world system they claim to so belligerently disdain? After all, so long as they maintain their iron grip on the country, the status quo suits them rather well. A lot of international politics is little more than mediated soap opera. Governments and non-governmental actors showboat for the cameras, feign independence in their decision-making, and make a pretence of deferring to the public’s best interests. Are the Kims really so different? Yes, they manufacture the consent of their public in an autocratic and bizarre way, but that does not mean that their people are brainwashed robots. Indeed, after a trip to North Korea, one is often left questioning the validity of our own social, economic and political values.</p>
<p>Ultimately, Josef Stalin met a fateful end, most likely poisoned by unhappy members of his own team, and it is unclear where the current nuclear crisis involving North Korea will lead in the coming weeks, months and years. But history tells us that regimes that rely on cults of personality are doomed to eventually fall. While they may claim demigod status, their cult figures are very much human – and after all, one of life’s few certainties is death.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/80503/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Colin Alexander does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>As despotic personality cults go, Stalin’s example still leads the pack. But North Korea’s ruling family have taken it to a new extreme.Colin Alexander, Lecturer in Political Communications, Nottingham Trent UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/784772017-06-01T14:03:14Z2017-06-01T14:03:14ZIt will take critical, thorough scrutiny to truly decolonise knowledge<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/171333/original/file-20170529-25219-1vyl779.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">There are many different ways to approach the thorny issue of decolonising knowledge.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>It has become unfashionable to admit that one doesn’t really understand what phrases like “decolonising knowledge” or “a decolonised curriculum” mean. This is unfortunate. The process of coming to understand what decolonisation of knowledge might be is essential to achieving it – and that process is definitely not yet complete.</p>
<p>Decolonisation is not always a welcome concept in some quarters of academia. If curricula and ideas and knowledge are colonised, that means they have been shaped in part by considerations that are political, economic, social, cultural or otherwise tangential to the ideals of academic inquiry. </p>
<p>Admitting a need to decolonise any part of one’s discipline means admitting that it was formerly colonised to some degree. This in turn means admitting that what one previously touted as objective and untainted by the fleeting considerations of worldly affairs was, in fact, mired in them. Academics are much happier asserting that knowledge is power than they are conceding that power is knowledge.</p>
<p>Seen in this light, the decolonisation of knowledge is primarily an intellectual rather than a political project. It attempts to “disinfect” academic activities: to rid teaching, research, and institutional behaviour of influences that have little to do with the fair-minded pursuit of knowledge and truth. </p>
<p>But this is not the only approach. Decolonisation of knowledge is a contested concept. This “disinfecting” or <em>critical</em> model of decolonisation stands in contrast to a line of thought that sees knowledge as relative to a perspective, a cultural context, or something else again.</p>
<h2>Decolonisation as cultural relativism</h2>
<p>Decolonisation is sometimes presented, not as an attempt to resurrect the dispassionate search for knowledge, but as a rejection of the idea of objectivity, which is seen as a sort of heritage of colonial thinking.</p>
<p>Sometimes the idea is that notions like truth, fact or what “works” are fundamentally western and are imposed on other cultures. At other times, the idea seems to me that facts and truths are local. So what is discovered or expressed in one time or place will necessarily be inapplicable in another.</p>
<p>This line of thinking takes its cue from the fact that if you have sufficient power over someone you can enforce your views on them – or simply kill them if they disagree. Totalitarian states typically adopt policies that involve both silencing and killing dissenters. </p>
<p>Karl Marx famously <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01b.htm">maintained</a> that</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Michel Foucault thought that power and truth are closely related, or even the same thing, which he <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/foucault/#4.4">sometimes called “power/knowledge”</a>. </p>
<p>On this line of thought, the attempt to critically evaluate the opinion of another person or group looks like an exercise in power politics. It’s a short step from there to the idea that, in order to rid ourselves of the effects of a colonial past, we must all desist from asserting our beliefs over others’ beliefs. There is African belief, and European belief, and your belief, and mine – but none of us have the right to assert that something is true, is a fact, or works, contrary to anyone else’s belief.</p>
<p>On this view, to decolonise knowledge is to understand this and so to adopt a certain very broad kind of relativism.</p>
<h2>Critical decolonisation</h2>
<p>I prefer the first understanding of decolonisation over the second: critical decolonisation over relativistic decolonisation.</p>
<p>One very simple reason is that the kind of relativism I have described is associated with traditions of thought that are European in origin: Marxism and postmodernism. I am sceptical of assertions that these views are of universal application. I worry that some of these assertions may themselves express a colonial heritage.</p>
<p>But I have more substantive concerns, too. One of these is a point made by Ghanaian-British author and philosopher <a href="http://appiah.net/">Kwame Anthony Appiah</a> in his book <a href="http://appiah.net/books/cosmopolitanism/">Cosmopolitanism</a>. Appiah values conversation very highly and rejects relativism in part because it doesn’t motivate conversation. As he puts it: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>If we cannot learn from one another what is right to think and feel and do, then conversation between us will be pointless. Relativism of that sort isn’t a way to encourage conversation; it’s just a reason to fall silent.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The great attraction of uncritical decolonisation is that it appears to prevent us coming into conflict with each other. We simply accept that everyone is entitled to their views. But a moment’s thought shows there’s no protection against possible conflict. I might believe I can do things you don’t want me to do. I might even have views about your views.</p>
<p>The trouble is that ideas can conflict by themselves. They can logically contradict each other. They can mandate actions that are mutually exclusive. We might think very differently – but we share the same world.</p>
<h2>The risk of being wrong</h2>
<p>Critical decolonisation means accepting risk of error. It means considering whether indigenous knowledge systems might contain truths that western science has not accessed. But it also means accepting that in some cases indigenous knowledge systems might be wrong. </p>
<p>Critical decolonisation also means considering whether what we find in the canon of an academic discipline whose history has been dominated by Europe and America is really up to much. This is a very scary and painful question for academics who have devoted their lives to the study of what they have been told are works of genius.</p>
<p>Critical decolonisation leaves room for <em>local</em> knowledge. A policy to improve infant nutrition may <a href="https://philosophy.ucsd.edu/_files/ncartwright/phil152/PSA-2-Nov-0900.pdf">work in Tamil Nadu and fail in Bangladesh</a>. The relativist stance says that whether it works depends on your point of view. But this is a poor analysis of this case: it works in one and not the other, whichever place you are looking from.</p>
<p>The better approach is to seek an explanation for the difference: in this case, that the role of mothers in buying and distributing food differs between the two places. One can reject universal truths without endorsing relativism.</p>
<p>If done properly and critically a lot of what we count as great will fall in the process of decolonising knowledge. A lot of formerly unvoiced and unheard ideas will come to light. The process of critical scrutiny is essential to the success of this project – and nobody gets a free pass.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/78477/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alex Broadbent does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Critical decolonisation means accepting risk of error. It means considering whether indigenous knowledge systems might contain truths that western science hasn’t accessed.Alex Broadbent, Co-Director, African Centre for Epistemology and Philosophy of Science, and Executive Dean, Faculty of Humanities, University of JohannesburgLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/753562017-05-03T14:11:50Z2017-05-03T14:11:50ZWhat eastern bloc dissidents can teach us about ‘living in truth’<p>“Fake news” may be getting lots of <a href="https://theconversation.com/fake-news-why-people-believe-it-and-what-can-be-done-to-counter-it-70013">headlines</a>, but it is as old as the hills. Propagandists have relied on false evidence for centuries. Of course, not all propaganda campaigns are dishonest; indeed many efforts at persuading people of things are laudable. But the phenomenon of fake news and the “post-truth” culture in which it thrives are clearly a threat to democracy, and to the public sphere that democracy depends on to survive.</p>
<p>Everyone has a part to play in pushing back. Most of us probably assume that only other people fall prey to false or exaggerated news stories. This is complacent. Media historians emphasise that propaganda often exploits <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=pEsXBAAAQBAJ&pg=PT54&lpg=PT54&dq=propaganda+builds+on+things+that+already+exist&source=bl&ots=yirPSQwlSd&sig=KB_72F0eQGl43nHJ5guMQf7lpEU&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjM26C5wNHTAhWDzxQKHWSEAV0Q6AEIJzAA#v=onepage&q=propaganda%20builds%20on%20things%20that%20already%20exist&f=false">already-existing trends</a> rather than creating new ones, making subtle use of half-truths as well as outright falsehoods – and it can be much harder to unpick half-truths than to demolish lies. </p>
<p>Fortunately, a few decades ago, matters of truth-telling and lying were a major concern for Soviet and Eastern European dissidents living under communism, where propaganda was all-pervasive. Their ideas have long outlasted their times, and today they should interest anyone seeking to challenge dishonesty or speak truth to power, or even simply to live truthfully. </p>
<p>They are all the more relevant because the propaganda techniques currently used by Moscow have roots in the Soviet era, and it is valuable to know how people sought to respond to them then. But their ideas have a relevance well beyond Russia; after all, no country, group or person is immune to half-truths or disinformation.</p>
<h2>Reality itself</h2>
<p>On these issues, the thinking of Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn, one of Soviet communism’s most trenchant critics, deserves special attention. When Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, he built his <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1970/solzhenitsyn-lecture.html">Nobel lecture</a> around a Russian proverb: “One word of truth outweighs the whole world”. Simple truths, he argued, are always a threat to totalitarianism.</p>
<p>In his 1974 essay, <a href="http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles/SolhenitsynLies.php">Live Not by Lies</a>, Solzhenitsyn suggested that to end repression, people needed to resist lies and learn to live “by truth”. “Never knowingly support lies,” he declared. While he acknowledged that that could be risky, to put it mildly, he saw it as a kind of minimalist strategy, one within everyone’s reach.</p>
<p>Dissidents and reformers alike read Live Not by Lies as a vision for a different kind of society. One man impressed with Solzhenitsyn’s thinking was the Czech dramatist and future president, Václav Havel. In his 1978 essay, <a href="https://chnm.gmu.edu/1989/items/show/700">The Power of the Powerless</a>, Havel suggested that people “need not accept the lie”. He imagines a greengrocer who stops putting up slogans he disagrees with and voting in fake elections, and starts to say what he really thinks at political meetings – breaking the “rules of the game” that underpin the system. In finding the strength to follow his conscience, Havel suggests, the man makes an attempt to live “within the truth”.</p>
<p>The notion of “living in truth” points to the idea that being truthful isn’t just a matter of uttering true statements, but also about becoming a truthful person in the fullest sense. Truthfulness and integrity are entwined; <a href="http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/audiences/2013/documents/papa-francesco_20130515_udienza-generale.html">religious thinkers</a> sometimes talk of the “spirit of truth” at work within people. The Russian philosopher Semyon Frank, writing from a Christian humanist perspective, once wrote that truth is ‘not a judgement about reality, but the living presence of the reality itself".</p>
<p>Another relevant text is <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1988/06/02/books/books-of-the-times-an-individual-s-triumph-over-soviet-state-power.html">Fear No Evil</a>, a 1986 memoir by Jewish refusnik Nathan Sharansky. Sharansky was imprisoned for his involvement in the <a href="http://www.osce.org/secretariat/73223?download=true">Moscow Helsinki Group</a>, set up in 1976 to monitor human rights abuses. He used to prepare for interrogation by reflecting on the Psalms of David and having imaginary conversations with characters from literature. He was conscious that if he did not develop a rich inner life, he could easily be drawn into compromises he would later regret. </p>
<p>Again, this speaks to our own time, where it is so easy for people to get caught up in the latest news story or media-driven discussion. When we lose our “inner freedom” – another term popular in dissident circles – we become open to manipulation by political, commercial and cultural agendas of all kinds.</p>
<h2>Truth for its own sake</h2>
<p>Truth-telling is not easy in times when the very concept of truth has been brought into disrepute. Lenin named the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda, which is Russian for truth. In practice, this meant the politicisation of truth – identifying as true whatever policy or idea the Communist Party chose to promote. Unsurprisingly, there was widespread disillusionment when the Soviet regime failed to deliver on its promises.</p>
<p>It is hard not to be cynical about people who loudly claim to speak the truth, and understandings of what truth even is have certainly changed over time. But to move from that insight to saying that everyone has their own truth is a step too far. No university would survive on a principle like that, even if the “post-truth” culture, with its implicit connections to postmodernism, has some of its roots <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-surprising-origins-of-post-truth-and-how-it-was-spawned-by-the-liberal-left-68929">in the academy</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167559/original/file-20170502-17263-gno5tl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167559/original/file-20170502-17263-gno5tl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=145&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167559/original/file-20170502-17263-gno5tl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=145&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167559/original/file-20170502-17263-gno5tl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=145&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167559/original/file-20170502-17263-gno5tl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=182&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167559/original/file-20170502-17263-gno5tl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=182&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167559/original/file-20170502-17263-gno5tl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=182&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Truth: Pravda’s masthead.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pravda_logo.png#/media/File:Pravda_logo.png">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Truth is more than a means to an end. There are times when truths need to be expressed, whether or not a positive outcome will be the result. As Anatoly Yakobson, editor of Soviet human rights journal The Chronicle of Current Events, once <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=pIPMFvJW5AgC&pg=PA136&lpg=PA136&dq=%22One+must+begin+by+postulating+that+truth+is+needed+for+its+own+sake+and+for+no+other+reason%22&source=bl&ots=2lq8jUTkqO&sig=TWMLyIFCme4PfI8QTsORNz4Ayro&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiI5LDHtdHTAhXKvBQKHVNZCIMQ6AEIKjAB#v=onepage&q=%22One%20must%20begin%20by%20postulating%20that%20truth%20is%20needed%20for%20its%20own%20sake%20and%20for%20no%20other%20reason%22&f=false">declared</a>: “One must begin by postulating that truth is needed for its own sake and for no other reason.” Or in the words of famous physicist and dissident <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=17seBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA91&lpg=PA91&dq=%22may+hope+for+nothing,+but+nevertheless+speak+because+he+cannot,+simply+cannot+remain+silent%22&source=bl&ots=z7EoXEAERE&sig=tDW0GBSglvAGtQCGI0T6oFwhHnQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiNouCHttHTAhUE6xQKHXtuDrEQ6AEIJzAA#v=onepage&q=%22may%20hope%20for%20nothing%2C%20but%20nevertheless%20speak%20because%20he%20cannot%2C%20simply%20cannot%20remain%20silent%22&f=false">Andrei Sakharov</a>: “[A man] may hope for nothing, but nevertheless speak because he cannot, simply cannot remain silent.”</p>
<p>Living in truth doesn’t mean speaking out unthinkingly on every issue. It matters not just what we say, but how we say it. It’s all too easy to become strident or pedantic, forgetting that truths expressed well have the power to unlock hearts and open up conversation. Besides, truth and untruth are often mixed up, and it can take time and care to separate the two.</p>
<p>In these times as much as ever, we must live in truth, and learn to tell the truth in constructive ways. This may seem obvious, but in practice it’s no small task – and democracy depends on it.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/75356/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Philip Boobbyer does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>As Solzhenitsyn saw it, simple truths are always a threat to totalitarianism.Philip Boobbyer, Reader in History, University of KentLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/718542017-01-30T16:08:02Z2017-01-30T16:08:02ZIt’s dangerous to flatter Trump’s narcissism with too much attention<p>Almost three decades ago, in his book <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/books/review/Siegel-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0">The Culture of Narcissism</a>, the iconoclastic American thinker Christopher Lasch wrote that in postwar America emerged a certain type of being, which in <a href="https://qz.com/852187/coping-with-chaos-in-the-white-house/">clinical terms</a> falls under the category of “narcissistic personality disorder”, a pathology characterised by carelessness and an excessive need for admiration and attention. </p>
<p>Lasch identified manifestations of this disorder in various aspects of social life, and especially in the world of celebrity. Now celebrities have <a href="https://theconversation.com/rock-star-tv-icon-president-but-what-is-donald-trump-67978">invaded the political sphere</a>, the entire political world is becoming dominated by people who lack “common decency”, who resort to a faux populism in order to serve their thirst for publicity. Donald Trump is one of the saddest reflections of this corrosive culture. </p>
<p>From the day he joined the race for the Republican nomination, Trump used the same modus operandi: attracting public attention. Just as Lasch wrote, the narcissistic logic Trump applies to politics is embedded in the same “enterprise culture” with which he is so closely identified. As a successful entrepreneur, Trump not only acquired the skill of promoting his brand but turned himself into a commodity, using all available techniques to put himself at the centre of as many endless discussions as possible. </p>
<p>Trump has been constantly violating the taboos of political correctness, in particular those around sexism and racism. This is a winning strategy on two fronts: not only has he seized the spotlight, he has simultaneously made himself the <em>bête noire</em> of the left, the centre, and the moderate right. Combined with a constant barrage of attacks from the mainstream press, this formed the image of a grand liberal-centrist anti-Trump alliance. Their outrage, only amplified by the reaction to the <a href="https://theconversation.com/trumps-order-barring-refugees-flies-in-the-face-of-logic-and-humanity-72061">executive order on refugees</a>, allows Trump to present himself as his supporters’ only hope against the establishment.</p>
<p>This is a truly disturbing phenomenon. But if we’re to break out of the narcissistic cycle and solve the problems of which Trump is a symptom, we need to talk and think about it in the right way.</p>
<h2>Think bigger</h2>
<p>There is more than one wrong way. Many <a href="https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1032-reflections-on-trump">thinkers</a> and <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2015/12/09/opinions/bergen-is-trump-fascist/">commentators</a> often talk about Trump in terms of “<a href="https://theconversation.com/no-this-isnt-the-1930s-but-yes-this-is-fascism-68867">fascism</a>”, or identify “proto-fascist” phenomena in his attitude. This is an appealing analysis, but that doesn’t mean it’s an astute one – or particularly original. </p>
<p>Ever since France’s Charles de Gaulle declared a state of emergency in the first days of the Algerian War, the Euro-American left has been on alert for any such move, which its leading voices almost invariably consider a sign of a shift towards fascist totalitarianism. As <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1991/01/27/books/where-has-progress-got-us.html?pagewanted=all">Lasch</a> put it: “Liberals’ obsession with fascism … leads them to see ‘fascist tendencies’ or ‘proto-fascism’ in all opinions unsympathetic to liberalism, just as the far-right detects ‘creeping socialism’ in liberalism itself.”</p>
<p>Yes, many of Trump’s policies are utterly inhumane, but that in itself doesn’t imply a “fascist shift”. True fascist totalitarianism is a very specific
state of affairs; as the political theorist Hannah Arendt <a href="https://qz.com/897517/the-origins-of-totalitarianism-hannah-arendts-defining-work-on-tyranny-is-out-of-stock-on-amazon/">described it</a>, it requires the total destruction of any barrier between the public and the private realms. As things stand, this is not yet afoot in the Western world. </p>
<p>The sight of people amassing at airports to protest the executive order, many waving placards bearing Trump’s name, is paradoxically exactly what a narcissist craves. Worse still, the dissent emanating from <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/01/28/warren-lewis-other-congressional-members-attend-trump-immigration-ban-protests/97207200/">leading Democrats</a> and <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-38793960">celebrities</a> robs these protests of some of their grassroots edge, turning them into what Lasch presciently called the “<a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=HG6xWenYZXwC&redir_esc=y">revolt of the elites</a>”. </p>
<p>It all flatters Trump’s message that the protesters care not a bit for the hardships of ordinary Americans. It also makes him a model for thousands of his fans; as he himself chases the spotlight, they compete with each other for public attention. His extreme egocentricity poisons the public sphere; norms of common decency and sense are replaced by a mob mentality of mutual recriminations and insults. This atmosphere not only safeguards Trump’s power, but more importantly, may contribute to the emergence of a similarly toxic demagogue in the future.</p>
<p>So the narcissist’s trap is set, and those campaigning against Trump need to get out of it. So long as they make their ultimate goal the downfall of Trump’s presidency, they will never break his hold on the public imagination. What the US and the rest of the world need is an open public dialogue aimed at solving any number of critical problems, such as migration, unemployment, and mass “uprootedness” – the sense of disconnection that writer Simone Weil <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/18/need-roots-disconnection-past-community">identified</a> as an incubator of authoritarianism and demagoguery. </p>
<p>Without facing these problems head on for what they are, critics will end up trapped in a close orbit around Trump himself – mired in toxic discussions that feed political phobias and cultural antipathies.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/71854/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michail Theodosiadis does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Donald Trump embodies the corrosive culture of narcissism at its worst. It’s a trap.Michail Theodosiadis, PhD Candidate and Academic Mentor, Goldsmiths, University of LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.